Now wait: here he is.
Me and—” Again the mass of them surged, struggled.
They held him ,again. “We got him here.
You all turn loose and get out.
Give us room.”
Two of them rose and backed away, into the door.
Then the other two seemed to explode upward out of the earth, the duskfilled shed, already running.
Joe struck at them as soon as he was free, but they were already clear.
Lying on his back he watched the four of them run on in the dusk, slowing, turning to look back.
He rose and emerged from the shed.
He stood in the door, brushing himself off, this too purely automatic, while a short distance away they huddled quietly and looked back at him.
He did not look at them.
He went on, his overalls duskcolored in the dusk.
It was late now..
The evening star was rich and heavy as a jasmine bloom.
He did not look back once.
He went on, fading, phantomlike; the four boys who watched him huddled quietly, their faces small and pale with dusk.
From the group a voice spoke suddenly, loud:
“Yaaah!”
He did not look back.
A second voice said quietly, carrying quietly, dear:
“See you tomorrow at church, Joe.”
He didn’t answer.
He went on.
Now and then he brushed at his overalls, mechanically, with his hands.
When he came in sight of home all light had departed from the west.
In the pasture behind the barn there was a spring: a clump of willows in the darkness smelt and heard but not seen.
When he approached the fluting of young frogs ceased like so many strings cut with simultaneous scissors.
He knelt; it was too dark to discern even his silhouetted head.
He bathed his face, his swollen eye.
He went on, crossing the pasture toward the kitchen light.
It seemed to watch him, biding and threatful, like an eye.
When he reached the lot fence he stopped, looking at the light in the kitchen window.
He stood there for a while, leaning on the fence.
The grass was aloud, alive with crickets.
Against the dewgray—earth and the dark bands of trees fireflies drifted and faded, erratic and random.
A mockingbird sang in a tree beside the house.
Behind him, in the woods beyond the spring, two whippoorwills whistled.
Beyond them, as though beyond some ultimate horizon of summer, a hound howled.
Then he crossed the fence and saw someone sitting quite motionless in the door to the stable in which waited the two cows which he had not yet milked.
He seemed to recognise McEachern without surprise, as if the whole situation were perfectly logical and reasonable and inescapable.
Perhaps he was thinking then how he and the man could always count upon one another, depend upon one another; that it was the woman alone who was unpredictable.
Perhaps he saw no incongruity at all in the fact that he was about to be punished, who had refrained from what McEachern would consider the cardinal sin which he could commit, exactly the same as if he had committed it. McEachern did not rise.
He still sat, stolid and rocklike, his shirt a white blur in the door’s black yawn.
“I have milked and fed,” he said.
Then he rose, deliberately.
Perhaps the boy knew that he already held the strap in his hand.
It rose and fell, deliberate, numbered, with deliberate, flat reports.
The boy’s body might have been wood or stone; a post or a tower upon which the sentient part of him mused like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and selfcrucifixion.
As they approached the kitchen they walked side by side.