Tietam Brown Read Online Free Page B

as she cradled her ladles, spoons, and spices with one hand and took turns cradling me and her one-year-old son Johnny with the other.
    A year later, little Rachel was born, and Maria DelGratto took turns handing out generous portions of love, attention, and her patented big-boob hugs. When she pulled me close, I would close my eyes and nestle in real deep, and there was not a place in the world that I would rather be. Come on now, don’t read too much into it, I was just a baby. I didn’t equate those boobs with sex, but with warmth, comfort, and most of all safety. And safety, unfortunately, was often a scarce commodity in the DelGratto house once Big Vinnie came home.
    I’m not sure what Vinnie did for a living, but he was out the door every morning at eight with a cheery “Better have supper waiting!” and back every evening at six with an equally chipper “Get me my dinner.” No, I’m not sure what he did to put that food he was so concerned about on the table, but if he could have thrown a baseball half as well as he threw plates and glasses around the house, he would have been a twenty-game winner for the Yankees for sure.
    Any little thing seemed to set him off. A toy in the kitchen? Yeah, that was reason enough. The monthly mortgage? Like clockwork. Even the faintest smell of poop drifting from one of our little baby butts could set off an eruption of rage that included not only the throwing of objects but the whipping of those little baby butts, extreme verbal abuse directed at anyone in his path, and the occasional stinging backhand that left Auntie M bruised and bleeding at intervals that became more frequent as time marched on.
    And always, she’d hold us. Against those breasts. Those warm, soft, safe breasts. Hold us until the fear was gone, until the anger was gone. Until it was just Big Vinnie sitting in front of the TV, a ball game on, wondering where the hell his beer was.
    I cried a lot back in those days, especially between the ages of two and three, when I realized there really were monsters in the world, the worst of which slept in the bedroom down the hall. God, I shed a lot of tears back then. Tears in the form of loud screams when he was hitting any one of us. Tears in the form of silent sobs when I’d hear his loud and drunken sexual escapades down the hall. Escapades that, by the sound of things, my Auntie M neither wanted nor enjoyed.
    And always, always, always, my tears were met with a big hug, even those silent sobs were soothed by a visit to the tiny bedroom that housed all three of us kids, where one by one she’d hold us close and kiss our tears away. “Andy, Andy, it’ll be okay,” she’d whisper as she rocked me in her bosom. “Don’t cry now, Andy, I’ll make everything okay.”
    It was Auntie M who took to calling me Andy, derived, I guess from my full name, Antietam Brown V, in honor of my great-great-great -grandfather Sean Brown, who died defending the Union on the battlefield of Antietam, in Sharpsburg, Maryland, in 1862. The battle, I was told, was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, with the number of dead bodies far outpacing the army’s ability to bury them. So Sean Brown, nineteen, only a year off the boat from his native County Clare in Ireland, was rewarded for his heroic efforts by being torn to pieces by the wild boars who ravaged the blood-soaked fields that ran along each side of Antietam Creek. I would later find out that the wild boar incident was one that my father had never forgiven, a character trait of his that had already altered the course of my life and would continue to as well.
    Not to be outdone, Big Vinnie had his own nickname for me— little bastard. The name seemed to bring him joy, and as a result he used it often, to the point where for a while I thought it really was my name. It was a name for all seasons, a multipurpose phrase, I guess you could say, kind of like