He had had no breakfast yet; neither of them had eaten breakfast yet.
Then the boy staggered and would have fallen if the man had not caught his arm, holding him up.
“Come,” McEachern said, trying to lead him to the feed box. “Sit down here.”
“No,” the boy said.
His arm began to jerk in the man’s grasp. McEachern released him.
“Are you all right?
Are you sick?”
“No,” the boy said. His voice was faint, his face was quite white.
“Take the book,” McEachern said, putting it into the boy’s hand.
Through the crib window Mrs. McEachern came into view, emerging from the house.
She now wore a faded Mother Hubbard and a sunbonnet, and she carried a cedar bucket.
She crossed the window without looking toward the crib, and vanished.
After a time the slow creak of a well pulley reached them, coming with a peaceful, startling quality upon the Sabbath air.
Then she appeared again in the window, her body balanced now to the bucket’s weight in her hand, and reentered the house without looking toward the stable.
Again on the dot of the hour McEachern looked up from the watch.
“Have you learned it?” he said.
The boy did not answer, did not move.
When McEachern approached he saw that the boy was not looking at the page at all, that his eyes were quite fixed and quite blank.
When he put his hand on the book he found that the boy was clinging to it as if it were a rope or a post.
When McEachern took the book forcibly from his hands, the boy fell at full length to the floor and did not move again.
When he came to it was late afternoon.
He was in his own bed in the attic room with its lowpitched roof.
The room was quiet, already filling with twilight.
He felt quite well, and he lay for some time, looking peacefully up at the slanted ceiling overhead, before he became aware that there was someone sitting beside the bed.
It was McEachern.
He now wore his everyday clothes also—not the overalls in which he went to the field, but a faded dean shirt without a collar, and faded, clean khaki trousers.
“You are awake,” he said.
His hand came forth and turned back the cover.
“Come,” he said.
The boy did not move.
“Are you going to whip me again?”
“Come,” McEachern said. “Get up.”
The boy rose from the bed and stood, thin, in clumsy cotton underclothes. McEachern was moving also, thickly, with clumsy, musclebound movements, as if at the expenditure of tremendous effort; the boy, watching with the amazeless interest of a child, saw the man kneel slowly and heavily beside the bed.
“Kneel down,” McEachern said.
The boy knelt; the two of them knelt in the close, twilit room: the small figure in cutdown underwear, the ruthless man who had never known either pity or doubt. McEachern began to pray.
He prayed for a long time, his voice droning, soporific, monotonous.
He asked that he be forgiven for trespass against the Sabbath and for lifting his hand against a child, an orphan, who was dear to God.
He asked that the child’s stubborn heart be softened and that the sin of disobedience be forgiven him also, through the advocacy of the man whom he had flouted and disobeyed, requesting that Almighty be as magnanimous as himself, and by and through and because of conscious grace.
He finished and rose, heaving to his feet.
The boy still knelt.
He did not move at all.
But his eyes were open (his face had never been hidden or even lowered) and his face was quite calm; calm, peaceful, quite inscrutable.
He heard the man fumble at the table on which the lamp sat.
A match scraped, spurted; the flame steadied upon the wick, beneath the globe upon which the man’s hand appeared now as if it had been dipped in blood.
The shadows whirled and steadied. McEachern lifted something from the table beside the lamp: the catechism.
He looked down at the boy: a nose, a cheek jutting, granitelike, bearded to the caverned and spectacled eyesocket.
“Take the book,” he said.
It had begun that Sunday morning before breakfast.
He had had no breakfast; likely neither he nor the man had once thought of that.
The man himself had eaten no breakfast, though he had gone to the table and demanded absolution for the food and for the necessity of eating it.