Summary: Chapter 7
The narrative jumps to a Sunday, three years after Mr.
McEachern adopts Joe. In his calm, cold, yet not unkind manner,
the strictly Presbyterian McEachern chides his adopted son for not
learning his catechism by heart. He gives Joe another hour to try
before he begins beating the child in the stable, asking him at
hourly intervals whether he has committed the passages to memory.
When Joe does not respond, McEachern whips him again with the strap.
Eventually, Joe passes out.
Joe wakes several hours later to the sight of his father
seated beside him on the bed. McEachern makes Joe kneel beside the
bed and pray for forgiveness before placing the catechism once again
in the child’s hands. After McEachern leaves to attend a distant
church service, Joe’s adoptive mother brings him a tray of food.
Despite her insistence that Mr. McEachern knows nothing about the
food, Joe takes the tray and angrily dumps it upside down in the
corner. Only later, alone and famished, does he eat the food off
the floor “like a dog.”
Several years later, at the age of fourteen, Joe and the
other farm boys lure a young, willing black woman into a darkened
shed to have sex. When Joe’s turn comes, he begins to beat the woman.
The other boys subdue him, but only after using considerable force. When
they finally release the seething Joe, he returns home to face his
father’s punishment for not completing the evening chores. His father,
knowing his son is growing up quickly, asks Joe whether he has been
with a woman.
At seventeen, Joe sells his calf without his father’s
approval and buys a suit with the money. His father finds the suit
hidden in the hay loft and asks where the calf is. Joe lies. Having
revealed Joe’s blasphemy and false truths, McEachern punches his
son twice in the face. Joe, able to defend himself, advises his
father to stop the beatings. Later, Joe’s foster mother tells her
husband that she purchased the suit herself with her butter money.
Calling her a liar, Mr. McEachern forces his wife to beg God for
forgiveness.
Joe muses that Mrs. McEachern has always tried to be kind
to him, from her first fumbling attempts to be his mother to her
later fumbling attempts to deflect Mr. McEachern’s wrath away from him.
Joe, however, feels that the punishments would be bearable and impersonal
if Mrs. McEachern were not always trying to make them seem personal.
He thus hates Mrs. McEachern bitterly, despite the fact that the
beatings and forced labor come from his father. He believes that
she is always trying to make him cry.
Summary: Chapter 8
His parents finally asleep, seventeen-year-old Joe silently
shimmies down a rope that he has rigged outside his bedroom window.
Scurrying into the barn, he puts on his new suit and consults his
new watch, which he has forgotten to wind. Ready, he heads down
to the road and waits for his date to pick him up in her car and
take them to the dance.
