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.

Joe recalls how he first met the woman in town, accompanying his foster father on a trip to meet with a lawyer. When the consultation runs late, Mr. McEachern takes them to a dingy back-alley restaurant, staffed by a thirty-year-old waitress. After the two gulp down their food, Mr. McEachern tells Joe that the restaurant is the type of place he should always avoid and that he must never enter the establishment again. On the next trip to see the lawyer, Joe’s father gives him a dime. Joe immediately heads to the restaurant and orders pie and coffee from the same waitress. When he realizes he has enough only for the pie, the waitress covers for him when the proprietor’s wife notices.

Joe, unnerved by his sexual attraction to the waitress, avoids town and tries to lose himself in bouts of hard work. His father rewards his efforts by giving Joe a heifer. But Joe suddenly resumes his interest in going to town and accompanies his father on the next trip, carrying a half dollar that his foster mother has secretly given him. When he returns to the restaurant and tries to pay the nickel for the coffee he ordered last time, he is laughed at and quickly leaves, only to bump into Bobbie, the waitress, on the street. Two days later, Joe is early for the nighttime rendezvous that they have planned. Bobbie saunters up and tells him she is menstruating—a process that is not altogether familiar to the sheltered Joe. He strikes her and runs off, only to return a week later to drag her hastily into the bushes, where he has sex for the first time.

Soon, the two are seeing each other regularly, and Joe is stealing more and more money from his foster mother, all the while unaware that Bobbie is a prostitute whom the restaurant’s proprietors, Max and Mame, brought to town with them. Joe visits Bobbie at Max and Mame’s, where he is also given his first taste of alcohol. When he shows up to meet her on the street corner one evening and she does not appear, he goes to her window to discover she is entertaining another man inside. At their next meeting, he strikes her repeatedly before she calms him down and explains to him that she is a prostitute. Before long, Joe has been fully seduced into a life of carousing, and though his mother notices the missing money, his father still has no idea what his adopted son has been up to.