Lee and Ruby's Son

The narrator tells us that Lee and Ruby's child is "not a year old" the first time he appears in the story - sleeping in a box behind the stove, where "the rats cant get to him" (18). Ruby is carrying him or caring for him throughout the rest of the novel. His appearance is another of the novel's unsettling elements. When Horace looks at him lying on a bed, for example, the child is "flushed and sweating, its curled hands above its head in the attitude of one crucified, breathing in short, whistling gasps" (135). At two other points Horace suggests that maybe Ruby "holds it too much" (117, 133). At another he is seen by a doctor (135). But what is specifically wrong with him, mentally or physically, remains unstated.