Angie patted her son’s back.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Brick said, his face a map of contempt. Bull lunged and Brick tumbled backward onto the floor. “You just remember who’s boss, mama’s boy,” Bull said, pinning Brick’s shoulders to the floor as he spit on Brick’s face. “You just remember who’s the man in this house.”
Bull swatted Angie’s grip off of his shirt. “You, too,” he said, snapping his ball cap on and pulling open the door.
The door slammed, and Bull was gone.
Angie grabbed the wet dishrag hanging on the cold-water faucet and held on to the oven door handle as she eased herself down onto her knees next to Brick. “Let me get a look at that,” she said, reaching for the cut over his eye.
“No, Ma,” Brick said, rising to his feet. He held out his hand and pulled his mother up. She handed him the rag and he wiped the spittle from his face, rinsed the rag out, and dabbed at his eye.
“Brick, you need to put ice on that. It’s already starting to swell.”
“I don’t want any ice,” he said. He looked at the bloody rag and threw it into the sink. Several drops of blood drew a scarlet line down the side of his freckled face. How many times? Angela McGinty wondered. How many times would this happen to her boy before he left for good?
Brick was her second son, her only living boy, the youngest of twelve. She’d almost died after the birth of her tenth child, Margaret. “This has to be your last, Angie,” Dr. Stevens told her before he discharged her from the hospital. “Your next child won’t have a mother to hold on to.”
Having no more children meant saying no to Bull McGinty, and nobody did that in his house, especially when he came home drunk. She had Louise at age thirty-six, and got pregnant again before the baby was six months old. Brick was born on Thanksgiving Day in 1938, all ten pounds, seven ounces of him.
Brick was all hers, from the day he was born. Bull had insisted on naming the boy Richard, for a drinking buddy from his jazz band days, but Bull was nowhere to be found when it was time to sign the birth certificate. She wrote in Paull for his middle name, after her only brother, who had died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen.
By the time he was three, everyone called him Brick because of his red hair and tank of a build. He was seventeen now and still called Brick, but for different reasons. Brick was six feet two, a towering brawn of a man, and a relentless target of her husband’s rage ever since their oldest son, Harry, was killed in World War II.
She kept the Navy’s telegram informing her of Harry’s death wrapped in a hankie in the top drawer of her dresser. The Western Union had spelled his name wrong—MacGinty, instead of McGinty—but she couldn’t part with the letter because it was the last time she ever opened an envelope thinking her beautiful Harry was still alive.
Almost overnight, Bull turned on Brick. Angie always thought it was because his face looked so much like Harry’s. Same red hair and freckles, same ice-blue eyes, but Brick was different from Harry. Bigger boned, and less easygoing. By the time he was fourteen, Brick was two inches taller than Bull. At fifteen, he took his first swing to defend himself. Bull backed off for a while after that, but lately he’d begun picking fights with Brick again, and threatened to start hitting Angie again, too. Brick towered over his father now, and he was protective of his mother. Angie knew that no good could come of that. There’d be no peace as long as Bull and Brick McGinty lived in the same house.
She pulled a clean rag out of the drawer and ran it under cold water. “Let me just clean you up,” she said, reaching up to dab Brick’s eye. “You don’t want Ellie seeing you with blood on your face.” At the sound of Ellie’s name, Brick surrendered. He slouched into a chair at the table and raised his face toward his mother. “Her grandparents don’t think I’m good enough for her, Ma. They want me to stay away from her.”
Angie dabbed at the cut, then leaned in and kissed him between the eyes.
“That’s all Wayne, I’ll bet,” she said. “He doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for his little girl.” She sat opposite her son and grabbed an apple out of the bowl on the table. She rolled it toward him. “Stick that in your pocket.”
“Why don’t they like me, Ma?” Brick said.
“The Fetters? Oh, honey, they’re just trying to protect Ellie from more hurt. She was a child when her parents abandoned her. Their own son treated her like trash for the dump.”
“Don’t talk about Ellie like that, Ma.”
Only at the mention of Ellie did her son’s eyes start to tear up. How he loved that girl. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I know you love her, and this is hard.”
“There have to be some good fathers out there,” he said. He jabbed his finger toward the door. “They can’t all be like that. Like him. And like Ellie’s dad. Like your father, too.”
What could she have been thinking, confessing such hard secrets to her child? He was barely ten at the time, and Bull had just whipped him so hard he’d wet his pants in front of the Matthews boys. He was so humiliated he ran into the field and didn’t come home until after supper.
She had been desperate to ease his shame, to make him see that she really did understand how he felt, and that God would help him through it. “I know what this feels like,” she had told him that night. “I know how you feel.” She’d described how her own father used to beat her till she peed, and left her covered in bruises. “For nothing,” she’d whispered to him that night as Brick softly wept. “For no reason at all.”
Angie would never forget the look of betrayal on her little boy’s face. “And you went and married someone just like him, Ma?” he’d said, tears running down his face. “Why’d you go and do that? Why didn’t God stop you?” Angie had no answer for him.
“Ma?”
Angie startled now. “I’m sorry, honey. What?”
“I said I’ve got to get to school.”
Angie grabbed the edge of the table and rose to her feet. Every inch of her ached all the time now. “Press the rag to your cut while you drive,” she said. “The longer you keep it there, the less likely people will notice it when you get to school.”
“Ellie will notice,” Brick said, standing up. “Ellie notices everything.” He grabbed his jacket off the hook, pulled it on, and stuck the apple in his pocket. “Seeya, Ma.”
Angie stood at the door and watched Brick climb into his truck and pull away. A cloud of gravel dust rose and scattered over the snow. Angie clutched the small gold cross dangling on the chain around her neck. “And wherever they do not receive you,” she whispered, “when you leave that town, shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.”