“I know it,” Joe said. “I reckon she is down at the creek. I’ll look after her, being as she belongs to me.”

“Ah,” McEachern said. His voice was not raised. “The creek at night is no place for a fifty dollar cow.”

“It’ll be my loss, then,” Joe said. “It was my cow.”

“Was?” McEachern said. “Did you say was my cow?”

Joe did not look up. Between his fingers the milk hissed steadily into the pail. Behind him he heard McEachern move. But Joe did not look around until the milk no longer responded. Then he turned. McEachern was sitting on a wooden block in the door. “You had better take the milk on to the house first,” he said.

Joe stood, the pail swinging from his hand. His voice was dogged though quiet. “I’ll find her in the morning.”

“Take the milk on to the house,” McEachern said. “I will wait for you here.”

For a moment longer Joe stood there. Then he moved. He emerged and went on to the kitchen. Mrs. McEachern came in as he was setting the pail onto the table. “Supper is ready,” she said. “Has Mr. McEachern come to the house yet?”

Joe was turning away, back toward the door. “He’ll be in soon,” he said. He could feel the woman watching him. She said, in a tone tentative, anxious:

“You’ll have just time to wash.”

“We’ll be in soon.” He returned to the barn. Mrs. McEachern came to the door and looked after him. It was not yet full dark and she could see her husband standing in the barn door. She did not call. She just stood there and watched the two men meet. She could not hear what they said.

“She will be down at the creek, you say?” McEachern said.

“I said she may be. This is a goodsized pasture.”

“Ah,” McEachern said. Both their voices were quiet. “Where do you think she will be?”

“I don’t know. I ain’t no cow. I don’t know where she might be.”

McEachern moved. “We’ll go see,” he said. They entered the pasture in single file. The creek was a quarter of a mile distant. Against the dark band of trees where it flowed fireflies winked and faded. They reached these trees. The trunks of them were choked with marshy undergrowth, hard to penetrate even by day. “Call her,” McEachern said. Joe did not answer. He did not move. They faced one another.

“She’s my cow,” Joe said. “You gave her to me. I raised her from a calf because you gave her to me to be my own.”

“Yes,” McEachern said. “I gave her to you. To teach you the responsibility of possessing, owning, ownership. The responsibility of the owner to that which he owns under God’s sufferance. To teach you foresight and aggrandisement. Call her.”

For a while longer they faced one another. Perhaps they were looking at one another. Then Joe turned and went on along the marsh, McEachern following. “Why don’t you call her?” he said. Joe did not answer. He did not seem to be watching the marsh, the creek, at all. On the contrary he was watching the single light which marked the house, looking back now and then as if he were gauging his distance from it. They did not go fast, yet in time they came to the boundary fence which marked the end of the pasture. It was now full dark. When he reached the fence Joe turned and stopped. Now he looked at the other. Again they stood face to face. Then McEachern said: “What have you done with that heifer?”

“I sold her,” Joe said.

“Ah. You sold her. And what did you get for her, might I ask?”

They could not distinguish one another’s face now. They were just shapes, almost of a height, though McEachern was the thicker. Above the white blur of his shirt McEachern’s head resembled one of the marble cannonballs on Civil War monuments. “It was my cow,” Joe said. “If she wasn’t mine, why did you tell me she was? Why did you give her to me?”

“You are quite right. She was your own. I have not yet chidden you for selling her, provided you got a good price. And even if you were beat in the trade, which with a boy of eighteen is more than like to be so, I will not chide you for that. Though you would better have asked the advice of some one older in the ways of the world. But you must learn, as I did. What I ask is, Where have you put the money for safekeeping?” Joe didn’t answer. They faced one another. “You gave it to your fostermother to keep for you, belike?”

“Yes,” Joe said. His mouth said it, told the lie. He had not intended to answer at all. He heard his mouth say the word with a kind of shocked astonishment. Then it was too late. “I gave it to her to put away,” he said.

“Ah,” McEachern said. He sighed; it was a sound almost luxurious, of satisfaction and victory. “And you will doubtless say also that it was your fostermother who bought the new suit which I found hid in the loft. You have revealed every other sin of which you are capable: sloth, and ingratitude, and irreverence and blasphemy. And now I have taken you in the remaining two: lying and lechery. What else would you want with a new suit if you were not whoring?” And then he acknowledged that the child whom he had adopted twelve years ago was a man. Facing him, the two of them almost toe to toe, he struck at Joe with his fist.

Joe took the first two blows; perhaps from habit, perhaps from surprise. But. he took them, feeling twice the man’s hard fist crash into his face. Then he sprang back, crouched, licking blood, panting. They faced one another. “Don’t you hit me again,” he said.

Later, lying cold and rigid in his bed in the attic, he heard their voices coming up the cramped stairs from the room beneath.

“I bought it for him!” Mrs. McEachern said. “I did! I bought it with my butter money. You said that I could have—could spend—Simon! Simon!”

“You are a clumsier liar than even he,” the man said. His voice came, measured, harsh, without heat, up the cramped stair to where Joe lay in bed. He was not listening to it. “Kneel down. Kneel down. KNEEL DOWN, WOMAN. Ask grace and pardon of God; not of me.”

She had always tried to be kind to him, from that first December evening twelve years ago. She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.

When the buggy stopped she came forward as though she had already planned it, practiced it: how she would lift him down from the seat and carry him into the house. He had never been carried by a woman since he was big enough to walk. He squirmed down and entered the house on his own feet, marched in, small, shapeless in his wrappings. She followed, hovering about him. She made him sit down; it was as though she hovered about with a kind of strained alertness, an air baffled and alert, waiting to spring it again and try to make himself and her act as she had planned for them to act. Kneeling before him she was trying to take off his shoes, until he realised what she wanted. He put her hands away and removed the shoes himself, not setting them onto the floor though. He held to them. She stripped off his stockings and then she fetched a basin of hot water, fetched it so immediately that anyone but a child would have known that she must have had it ready and waiting all day probably. He spoke for the first time, then. “I done washed just yesterday,” he said.

She didn’t answer. She knelt before him while he watched the crown of her head and her hands fumbling a little clumsily about his feet. He didn’t try to help her now. He didn’t know what she was trying to do, not even when he was sitting with his cold feet in the warm water. He didn’t know that that was all, because it felt too good. He was waiting for the rest of it to begin; the part that would not be pleasant, whatever it would be. This had never happened to him before either.