"You couldn’t do anything to him," he said. He was not shouting. He did not think he had ever spoken more quietly in his life. "You couldn’t touch him. You couldn’t touch any of them. So you came home and you did it to me."
His mother’s hand moved on the counter, just slightly, toward the edge of her Bible.
"And I have been telling myself my whole life that it saved me," Marcus said. "I’ve been telling it like a joke. Best thing that ever happened to me. I believed it. I needed to believe it, because otherwise—" He stopped. He found he could not finish that sentence either. "And tonight I pulled into my own driveway and my son came running out of the house barefoot, begging me not to let his mother take him away, and he was wearing long sleeves, Mama. In September. Buttoned to the neck. Because you told him to hide it. Same as you told me. You put me in my church shirt the next morning, remember? The long-sleeved one. In July."
Loretta was looking at him now as if she had never seen him before. Her mouth had gone slack, just slightly, at one corner, and Marcus saw for the first time how old she was. Not old the way she had been old for years, gray at the temples and slow on the stairs. Old the way his father had been old at the end, when the body begins to give up its secrets.
"Somebody had to be afraid for you," she said. Her voice had gone small. "Somebody in that house had to be afraid. Your daddy wouldn’t. He’d stand there. He’d just stand there in the hall."
"I know," Marcus said. "I know he did."
"He’d hand me the belt. Did you know that? He never once laid a hand on you. He’d go get it and hand it to me and then he’d stand there. Like it was my job."
Marcus had not known that. He stood in the bright kitchen and held it, this new thing, and found that it did not surprise him at all.
"You can’t stay here tonight," he said.