Isaac

Isaac is the nine-year-old Seer of Gatlin’s children, and his prophetic dream changes the community’s rules for sacrifice. Speaking in the cornfield after the deaths of two adults, he declares that He Who Walks Behind the Rows has rejected the sacrifice and lowered the Age of Favor from nineteen plantings and harvestings to eighteen. His announcement brings forward the moment when those who have reached the new age must enter the corn.

Identity and Authority

Isaac is only nine, but has held the position of Seer since the corn took David, who was nineteen and entered it on his birthday as dusk fell. The children listen to Isaac as the interpreter of the community’s god: when he speaks, even Malachi turns to him with dread and wonder. His authority rests on a dream he presents as divine revelation, not on age or ordinary civic office.

The Dream and Its Message

Isaac tells the children that the Lord appeared in his dream as a shadow walking behind the rows. The figure spoke in words once used to the community’s older brothers and declared displeasure with the current sacrifice. Isaac’s account distinguishes between the community’s designated place of killing and the act he says the god has completed himself: the sacrifice, he reports, has become a blasphemy. He invokes the Blue Man and a false minister who escaped many years earlier as precedents for divine intervention, though the children repeat those references uneasily rather than explaining them.

Lowering the Age of Favor

Isaac announces that the Age of Favor is lowered from nineteen plantings and harvestings to eighteen. He couples this new threshold with an injunction to be fruitful and multiply, linking the community’s continued favor to both reproduction and the corn’s increase. The change is immediate in its consequences: the children turn their eyes toward Malachi and Joseph, the two eighteen-year-olds among them, while Isaac notes that perhaps twenty more people of that age remain in town.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Malachi says that he obeys the word of God, and the corn seems to approve. In the weeks that follow, the girls make many corn-cob crucifixes to ward off further evil. That night, everyone now above the lowered age silently enters the corn and goes to the clearing to seek the continued favor of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Ruth calls goodbye to Malachi; pregnant with his child, she watches him go without turning back. Isaac’s revelation thus converts a dream into communal law, and the lowered threshold expands the sacrifice beyond the original two victims to an entire group of eighteen-year-olds.