He wore a clean white shirt without a collar. His trousers were dark, harsh, and new.
His shoes had been polished recently and clumsily, as a boy of eight would polish them, with small dull patches here and there, particularly about the heels, where the polish had failed to overlap.
Upon the table, facing him and open, lay a Presbyterian catechism.
McEachern stood beside the table.
He wore a clean, glazed shirt, and the same black trousers in which the boy had first seen him.
His hair, damp, still unsilvered, was combed clean and stiff upon his round skull.
His beard was also combed, also still damp.
“You have not tried to learn it,” he said.
The boy did not look up.
He did not move.
But the face of the man was not more rocklike.
“I did try.”
“Then try again.
I’ll give you another hour.”
From his pocket McEachern took a thick silver watch and laid it face up on the table and drew up a second straight, hard chair to the table and sat down, his clean, scrubbed hands on his knees, his heavy polished shoes set squarely.
On them were no patches where the polish had failed to overlap.
There had been last night at suppertime, though.
And later the boy, undressed for bed and in his shirt, had received a whipping and then polished them again.
The boy sat at the table.
His face was bent, still, expressionless.
Into the bleak, clean room the springfilled air blew in fainting gusts.
That was at nine o’clock.
They had been there since eight.
There were churches nearby, but the Presbyterian church was five miles away; it would take an hour to drive it.
At half past nine Mrs. McEachern came in.
She was dressed, in black, with a bonnet—a small woman, entering timidly, a little hunched, with a beaten face.
She looked fifteen years older than the rugged and vigorous husband.
She did not quite enter the room.
She just came within the door and stood there for a moment, in her bonnet and her dress of rusty yet often brushed black, carrying an umbrella and a palm leaf fan, with something queer about her eyes, as if whatever she saw or heard, she saw or heard through a more immediate manshape or manvoice, as if she were the medium and the vigorous and ruthless husband the control.
He may have heard her.
But he neither looked up nor spoke.
She turned and went away.
Exactly on the dot of the hour McEachern raised his head.
“Do you know it now?” he said.
The boy did not move.
“No,” he said.
McEachern rose, deliberately, without haste.
He took up the watch and closed it and returned it to his pocket, looping the chain again through his suspender.
“Come,” he said.
He did not look back.
The boy followed, down the hall, toward the rear; he too walked erect and in silence, his head up.
There was a very kinship of stubbornness like a transmitted resemblance in their backs.
Mrs. McEachern was in the kitchen. She still wore the hat, still carried the umbrella and the fan.
She was watching the door when they passed it.
“Pa,” she said.
Neither of them so much as looked at her.
They might not have heard, she might not have spoken, at all.
They went on, in steady single file, the two backs in their rigid abnegation of all compromise more alike than actual blood could have made them.
They crossed the back yard and went on toward the stable and entered. McEachern opened the crib door and stood aside.
The boy entered the crib. McEachern took from the wall a harness strap.