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. When the light from the window fell upon them the man stopped and turned, leaning, peering. “Fighting,” he said. “What was it about?”
The boy did not answer. His face was quite still, composed. After a while he answered. His voice was quiet, cold. “Nothing.”
They stood there. “You mean, you can’t tell or you won’t tell?” The boy did not answer. He was not looking down. He was not looking at anything. “Then, if you don’t know you are a fool. And if you won’t tell you have been a knave. Have you been to a woman?”
“No,” the boy said. The man looked at him. When he spoke his tone was musing.
“You have never lied to me. That I know of, that is.” He looked at the boy, at the still profile. “Who were you fighting with?”
“There was more than one.”
“Ah,” the man said. “You left marks on them, I trust?”
“I don’t know. I reckon so.”
“Ah,” the man said. “Go and wash. Supper is ready.”
When he went to bed that night his mind was made up to run away. He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.
McEachern did not actually miss the heifer for two days. Then he found the new suit where it was hidden in the barn; on examining it he knew that it had never been worn. He found the suit in the forenoon. But he said nothing about it. That evening he entered the barn where Joe was milking. Sitting on the low stool, his head bent against the cow’s flanks, the boy’s body was now by height at least the body of a man. But McEachern did not see that. If he saw anything at all, it was the child, the orphan of five years who had sat with the still and alert and unrecking passiveness of an animal on the seat of his buggy on that December evening twelve years ago. “I don’t see your heifer,” McEachern said. Joe didn’t answer. He bent above the bucket, above the steady hissing of milk. McEachern stood behind and above him, looking down at him. “I said, your heifer has not come up.”
“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?”