The father’s desire to have God make him, in some mysterious way a Methodist minister continued and, as he grew older, the son had difficulty keeping back certain sharp comments upon life in the house, that wanted to be expressed. “What was a Methodist minister after all?” The son was filled with the intolerance of youth. His father was a laborer, a man who had never been to school. Did he think that God could suddenly make him something else and that without effort on his own part, by this interminable praying? If he had really wanted to be a minister why had he not prepared himself? He had chased off and got married and when his first wife died he could hardly wait until she was buried before making another marriage. And what a poor stick of a woman he had got. The son looked across the table at his step-mother who was afraid of him. Their eyes met and the woman’s hands began to tremble. “Do you want anything?” she asked anxiously. “No,” he replied and began eating in silence. One day in the spring, when he was working in the field with his father, he decided to start out into the world. He and his father were planting corn. They had no corn-planter and the father had marked out the rows with a home-made marker and now he was going along in his bare feet, dropping the grains of corn and the son, with a hoe in his hand, was following. The son drew earth over the corn and then patted the spot with the back of the hoe. That was to make the ground solid above so that the crows would not come down and find the corn before it had time to take root. All morning the two worked in silence, and then at noon and when they came to the end of a row, they stopped to rest. The father went into a fence corner. The son was nervous. He sat down and then got up and walked about. He did not want to look into the fence corner, where his father was no doubt kneeling and praying—he was always doing that at odd moments—but presently he did. Dread crept over him. His father was kneeling and praying in silence and the son could see again the bottoms of his two bare feet, sticking out from among low-growing bushes. Tom shuddered. Again he saw the heels and the cushions of the feet, the two ball-like cushions below the toes. They were black but the instep of each foot was white with an odd whiteness—not unlike the whiteness of the belly of a fish. The reader will understand what was in Tom’s mind—a memory.