The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  “I never touched anything but your face and your hands before we were married,” he said. “Maybe once or twice I wrapped my arm around your shoulder, but I knew what was expected of me. I’m not saying that was easy. You walk the fields alone till midnight, if you have to. Go swim in the ice pond. Drive your gas tank empty.” He winked at her. “Whittle a whole set of dolls for your girlfriend’s sister.”

  Ada smiled. “Nessa still has those dolls, you know. Keeps ’em in her breakfront in the dining room.”

  Wayne shook his head, but he was smiling now, too. “Women. You girls are all crazy.”

  “Times are changing, Wayne. You see how the kids are dressing these days. How they dance when we chaperone. But not our Ellie. She’s still a good girl. Her skirts are the longest in the class.”

  “Not that cheerleading thing she wears,” Wayne said. “That’s why I don’t go to her games. Can’t stand the way boys look at her.”

  “Oh, Wayne. She’s got no control over that. She still goes to church on Sundays, and in the summer she still likes to walk to the church with me every Thursday for quilting bee.”

  Wayne looked up at her. “Quilting bee. She goes for the gossip, just like her grandma.”

  “She’s a good girl, Wayne. And she’d give anything to make you proud. She’d do anything just to make you like her.”

  “Dammit, stop that, Ada. I love that child. I love her as much as I’ve loved anyone but you.”

  Ada grabbed his hand and pressed it against her heart. “Then you have to stop hiding it. You have to stop being afraid she’ll hurt you.”

  “Hurt me? I’m not afraid of anyone or anything.”

  Ada patted his hand. “Of course not, honey. Please, Wayne. You have to let her know you trust her. That she matters to you. It breaks my heart to say this: She’s Larry’s daughter, but you’re the only father she’ll ever have.”

  Wayne studied his wife for a moment. She was not one to show physical affection outside the bedroom, certainly not in front of their living room window. But there she was, holding his hand against her bosom. Overhead, he could still hear his granddaughter’s sobs. Under his hand, he felt his wife’s heartbeat. “I’m seventy, Ada. I’m an old man. I can’t change my ways now.”

  Ada patted his hand again before releasing it. “I’m not asking you to change. I’m just asking you not to hide the best parts of you.” She looked up at the ceiling. Ellie’s cries had softened to whimpers. “She’s exhausted. She needs to eat something.” Ada shook her head. “Isn’t it time you two stopped being so afraid of each other?”

  Wayne sat in silence as Ada stood up and walked into the kitchen. Then he joined her. She pulled out of the icebox the bowl of leftover wilted lettuce with bacon, his favorite, and set it on the counter. She walked to the stove, and he took the box of matches from her. “I got this,” he said, striking a match to light the burner under the pot of beef stew. Ada lifted the lid and started stirring with the wooden spoon Wayne had made for her ten Christmases ago. He stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her, breathing in the scent of lilac powder, her one indulgence. “This will be warm in a few minutes,” she said. “How about you go fetch our Ellie?”

  He kissed the top of her head. “You’re a good woman, Ada.” She leaned into him ever so slightly and closed her eyes, the thickness of his chest warming her back. “Go talk to her, honey,” she said.

  Wayne headed for the stairs. He could hear the sound of Ellie’s whimpers. “Goddammit,” he whispered, and plodded up the steps. Sheba was lying in the hallway, wedged against Ellie’s door.

  Wayne touched the cross of Irish peat hanging on the wall next to the doorframe. His mother had mailed it to him from Ireland after his first son was born. For more than forty years it had rested against the framed picture of his mother on top of his chest of drawers. Ellie had loved the cross from the first time she saw it. “Tell me about them, Grandpa,” she said, caressing the cross in her hands. “Why did your parents stay in Ireland but send you away?”

  Ellie was the first person besides Ada to show an interest in his parents. They were too Irish, they’d told him, too set in their ways. But they wanted a better life, an American life, for their children. “I was twelve, the oldest,” Wayne told Ellie, “so I was the first to go. I lived with my uncle, who had already settled in Ohio.”

  “They loved you that much,” Ellie said, oblivious to the fear he’d felt when he turned around at the dock that day and his mother was already gone. He looked at his granddaughter’s wide, imploring eyes, and it hit him. Ellie wanted a different version of her parents’ abandonment. Time and again, she had reached for the cross and asked for another story about his long-ago life in Ireland. “Your mother loved you so much, Grandpa,” she often said. “She loved you enough to give you away.”

  One evening, after one of their talks, Wayne had decided to hang the cross on the wall next to Ellie’s bedroom door. She had noticed it right away the following morning, and raced to hug him in the kitchen without saying a word. Every night before bed, she touched the cross and he could hear her whisper his mother’s name. “Good night, Evelyn Joy.” The first time he saw her do that he had to walk away.

  Ada was wrong about one thing: He had always loved Ellie.

  He touched the cross again, and this time Sheba whimpered and slowly rose to her feet. He tapped on the door and heard the springs of Ellie’s bed creak. She cracked open the door, and the sight of her red, puffy face weakened his knees. Sheba stuck her nose through the doorway and thumped her tail against his calves.

  “Can I come in?”

  Ellie nodded and walked across the room, facing him with her back pressed against the window. Wayne sat on her bed and patted the spot next to him. “I won’t bite.”

  She pulled her cardigan tight around her. “I know, Grandpa,” she said, sniffling. She walked over to him and sat down. He glanced at the two feet of distance between them and smiled. Ellie crossed her arms and stared straight ahead.

  “Your grandmother’s worried about you, you know that. She’s worried that you’re going to run off with that McGinty boy.”

  “I’m not running anywhere, Grandpa. I’m still in high school. I’m going to graduate.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said. “We want you to graduate. We want you to have a better life.”

  “Brick wants to graduate, too, Grandpa. And he wants to go to college.”

  Steady, Wayne warned himself. Don’t get too excited.

  “Brick’s going to college?”

  She looked at him with a patient smile. “Everybody says he’s going to be Jefferson High’s first basketball star to go to college.”

  “Is that what Brick wants?”

  Ellie nodded and started picking at threads on her quilt. “He talks about it all the time.”

  “College. Well, how ’bout that. Any other secrets you want to share with me?”

  “I’d like to go, too, Grandpa,” Ellie said, slowly. “I’d like to go to college and become a nurse.”

  “What do you need that for? Grandma has always said you were a born mother. It’s only a matter of time before you’re married and giving us great-grandchildren to spoil.”

  “Lots of women go to school and become nurses. Mrs. Lammer, for example. She works with Dr. Lammer.”

  Wayne nodded. “It’s the family business for them.”

  Ellie pulled her sweater tighter. “You don’t have to be married to a doctor to work with one.”

  Wayne stood up. “Well, Brick going to college solves our immediate problem, doesn’t it?”

  “Your problem, you mean,” Ellie said, looking up at him. “He’s coming back for me, Grandpa. We’re going to build a life together, Brick and me.”

  Wayne held out his hand and pulled her to her feet. “Of course he will, Ellie,” he said. “Only a foo
l would let a girl like you get away.”

  Brick took a long drag on his cigarette and lifted his face, blowing smoke at the moon. It was early March, still the dead of winter in snowbelt Clayton Valley, but spring was flirting. For two days now, the mercury in the thermometer outside the kitchen window had crawled into the mid-sixties by afternoon. Happened every winter. You started the day stomping ice off your boots and by midafternoon you were counting crocuses peeking out of the snow. The warmth hovered just long enough to get everybody’s hopes up before another snowstorm buried them.

  We never learn. Brick took another drag on his cigarette. Town full of suckers.

  The sun had gone down more than two hours ago, taking the tease of warmth with it. He’d been sitting for more than an hour on his cold patch of ground that offered no mercy, leaning against the shed as the wind played with his hair.

  He squinted into the moonlight. Who up there might be watching him? An alien on the moon seemed more likely to be real than any God he could imagine. His mother had believed in God all her life. Look what that got her.

  Brick looked down at the envelope in his lap. He ran his fingers again over the embossed return address:

  Carl R. Swartz

  Kent State University

  Varsity Athletic

  Kent, Ohio

  He touched his name: Mr. Richard P. McGinty.

  Mister. That was a first.

  He stared at the envelope until the cigarette singed his fingers. “Shit,” he said, throwing the butt. He watched the ember as it hissed in the wet grass and died. His dog, Patch, wedged against his thigh, groaned from the interruption and snuggled closer, burrowing his head into Brick’s lap. The feathers of his thick brown fur fanned across the envelope, hiding it from view.

  “Not you, too, Patch,” Brick said. “Don’t tell me you don’t want me to leave, either.”

  What would happen to Patch if he went away to college? He scratched the dog’s head before tracing with his finger the thin, furless scar where Patch’s left eye used to be. Another victim of Bull McGinty. Brick’s throat tightened at the memory.

  Brick had been twelve years old, on an errand for his mother, when he found the abandoned puppy in the parking lot of Thompson’s Dry Goods. He had scooped him up and named him Lucky by the time he’d carried him home. “No, no, no,” Angie said when he walked into the kitchen, but her resistance was no match for the look on her son’s face. “Well, every boy needs a best friend,” she said, scratching Lucky’s head. “But he’s your responsibility.”

  About a month later, Lucky mangled a tin of Bull’s chewing tobacco that he’d left on the back stoop. Brick saw it all happen. Lucky dropping the tin, the outline of his mouth speckled with bits of tobacco. His father, red with rage, screaming at the dog. Lucky cowering as Bull picked up a fist-size rock and threw it straight at the puppy’s head.

  Lucky yelped and started running in circles as the blood seeped into the sandy colored fur on his face. Brick dove for the puppy and pulled him into a huddle. His shirt was covered in blood by the time his father walked away, vowing to kill the dog. Brick held Lucky to his chest as he ran nearly two miles down the road to Doc Waverly.

  “His eye’s mush, son,” the veterinarian said, “and he’s lost a lot of blood. Best chance for survival is to clean out the socket and stitch it shut.” Brick never forgot how it felt to have a man’s gentle hand on his shoulder, and his shock when Doc Waverly refused to let Brick work off the money he owed him.

  “Just remember this moment, Brick,” Doc said as he washed his hands after stitching up Lucky. “Remember the harm we can do in this world when we lose our temper.” It was the first time an adult outside the family had been willing to say to Brick what he already knew about his father.

  Brick pointed to the large swath of gauze taped over the dog’s missing eye. “Guess I’ll change his name, Doc,” he said. “Think I’ll call him Patch now.”

  “I think that’s just right, Son,” Doc said.

  Two weeks later, Brick was on his knees in the backyard brushing Patch with his mother’s old hairbrush when his father came out of the barn carrying his shotgun. Brick lunged for the dog and enveloped him with his arms and legs. “No!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot him!”

  “The dog’s blind,” Bull said. “He’s worthless.”

  Brick pulled the trembling dog closer against his chest. “He can still see. He can see out of the other eye.”

  “We ain’t running a home for cripples,” Bull said as he cocked the gun and aimed at the dog’s head. “Get outta the way.”

  Brick started to sob, burying his head in the dog’s neck. If Patch had to die, Brick was going with him. “No! No, please! Please don’t shoot him!” He closed his eyes tight and whispered into the dog’s ear, “I love you, Patch. I’m so sorry, boy.”

  He heard the kitchen door slam.

  “Bull.”

  It was his mother’s voice.

  “Bull, put the gun down.”

  Brick peered over the top of Patch’s fur and saw his mother standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. Bull widened his stance and aimed again at the dog. Angie fled down the steps and stood in front of him.

  “No, Bull,” she said, low and slow. “Not this dog. Not this boy.”

  Brick held his breath, afraid to make the slightest sound.

  Bull could have taken one look at this wife, this woman who dared to defy him, and decided to teach her another lesson. Brick had seen him do that plenty of times in the past, hurling his mother across the room and laughing as she stumbled to get up. But on that day, on that dusty afternoon with the sun beating down on them as Brick whimpered in the dirt, Bull looked up at his wife towering over him and backed down. He lowered his gun and bent over Brick.

  “Look at you, like a little girl,” he said, spitting on the boy. “Just like a goddamn little pussy.” Brick held the dog tight, afraid to move as the spittle slid down his cheek. He buried his face deeper into the dog’s neck. Patch wriggled and turned his head, and started licking Brick’s face with his wet, warm tongue.

  Bull kicked dirt on the huddling pair and then turned to face his wife. “You are one sorry, dried-up, useless bitch.” She didn’t say a word. Didn’t budge or blink. She just kept standing with her hands on her hips, glaring at her husband as small beads of sweat streaked down the sides of her face. Bull spit in the dirt and walked away.

  Brick heard his father’s truck peel out of the driveway, but he didn’t move until he felt his mother’s hand on his head. “You can get up now, Son. He’s gone.”

  Brick would always remember that day as the time Angie McGinty took on the monster in their lives, and she won. He saw his mother differently after that. She’d always seemed so beaten down, so defeated. He had never seen her hit back when Bull punched her, or even raise her voice. She just took the abuse, over and over. Until that day when Bull McGinty aimed a gun at her son’s dog.

  Five years later, Brick could still see his mother standing between him and his father, her voice low and strong as she told her husband, “Not this dog. Not this boy.” He could tell by the look on Bull’s face, by the way he crumbled, there was a different reason she had won.

  “Every marriage has its secrets,” she’d told Brick when he asked about it right before dinner later that day.

  “What kind of secrets?”

  “Grown-up secrets, Son,” she’d said, running a towel under the kitchen faucet and wiping it roughly across his dirty face. “Just be glad you’ve still got that one-eyed puppy of yours. He’s your responsibility. Every day, all day, till he dies—of natural causes, if he’s lucky. Don’t you forget it.”

  From then on, after Patch’s dodge-the-bullet day, as Brick always called it, he snuck him into his bed at night, terrified that Bull would finish him off in the dark, out of spite. Bul
l had forbidden the dog to be in the house, but Brick slept in the attic, and his father had never bothered to check on him there. Whenever Angie climbed the stairs to kiss Brick good night, she patted Patch’s head and whispered, “Good boy.”

  Patch was almost six now, and spent most of his waking hours either tagging along with Brick or waiting for him to come home. What was he going to do with Patch if he went to Kent State?

  The wind was picking up. Brick shivered and reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Patch groaned again. “Shh, boy.” He lifted his face to take a long drag and shook his head. He had a lot more than Patch to worry about if he was ever going to leave Clayton Valley.

  “Ellie,” he whispered, pressing his back against the barn.

  He slid the envelope from under Patch’s head and pulled out the letter. He’d read it dozens of times, but it was still pristine. Every time he opened it, he held the envelope with his fingertips and edged the letter out between his fingernails. Slowly, he unfolded it. A postcard slipped out and fluttered to the ground. Brick picked it up, blew on it, and slid it into his shirt pocket.

  Kent State University

  Kent, Ohio

  February 15, 1957

  Mr. Richard P. McGinty

  R.D. #3

  Jefferson, Ohio

  Dear Richard:

  It was a pleasure to receive your card which indicates your interest in Kent State. We have a fine growing school where one may secure a good education. The athletic program is getting better all the time. Playing in the strong Mid-American Conference, whose basketball teams are listed as major college teams by the N.C.A.A., we are building to the point where we can become a definite factor.

  I would like to invite you to visit our campus and examine our facilities and to discuss the possibility of your enrolling. I realize that you are busy now with your own games and with the tournaments coming soon you will be even busier. While I don’t want to interfere with the chances of your team’s success, you may have time to visit in the future.