John falls back asleep with his thoughts and awakens again after his father, Gabriel, has left for work. He goes to the kitchen to join his family and sees, as though for the first time, what the room really looks like: immured in dirt and poverty. His entrance interrupts an argument his mother and Roy, his brother, are having, and he is intensely disappointed to see that no special breakfast has been prepared to celebrate his birthday. The argument, about Gabriel and what kind of father and man he is, continues, and we see that it is one that Roy and Elizabeth have had before. Elizabeth defends her husband on the grounds that he is a good provider, while Roy derides him for beating his children. Despite the serious subject, the argument ends on a light note, and Elizabeth sends her sons off to do their weekly cleaning chores.
John's duty is to clean the front room, mainly to sweep the decaying rug in the front parlor — a Sisyphean task that John detests, because all his labor brings such a small reward and no personal satisfaction of accomplishment for him. The rug is perpetually dirty. When he has finished with the rug, John starts wiping dust from the mirror. In the midst of cleaning, he sees his own face and is shocked to see that he has not changed. He tries to see himself as his father does. He tries to find the features of the devil on his own face, those that his father has told him time and time again are there.
Giving up on trying to discover himself in his features, John reviews the family's possessions on the mantel. A malevolent green metal serpent sits in the midst of family photos and greeting cards. A photo of his father taken long ago in the South where Gabriel and his sister grew up reminds John that this is not his father's first marriage and makes him realize that, if Gabriel's first wife had lived, it would have negated John's entire existence. John wishes that he could ask this long dead woman, whom he believes Gabriel had loved, how he, John, could win his father's love.
