Weston, clean-shaven and neatly dressed in a clean shirt, new pants, and shined shoes, folds freshly laundered clothes in the kitchen, now cleared of wood, tools, and scattered artichokes. For the first time in the play, he seems sober, even cheerful. As he folds laundry, he talks at length to the lamb, still in its fence enclosure. He tells the lamb that its maggot infestation will soon be a thing of the past, now that it has proper care, a warm home, and a “new door” to keep drafts out. He segues into a “true story” from years ago, when he castrated lambs in the field as part of his farm duties. Noticing a big, “cold” shadow looming overhead, he looked up and saw a “giant eagle,” who was making sharp, aborted dives, presumably attracted by the lamb testes at his feet. To “oblige” him, Weston threw a few of these “remnants of manlihood” (183) onto the roof of a nearby shed. Soon, like a “thunder clap,” the eagle came tearing down, shredding up the shed’s tarpaper roof as it snatched up the testes. His heart leaping with strange excitement, Weston began shouting his “fool head” off, cheering for the eagle. He says it was like going up in a B-49 bomber for the first time. As he continued his work, he kept throwing lamb testicles onto the shed and getting that same, thrilling feeling each time the eagle came roaring down like the “Cannonball Express.”

Wesley enters, his face and hands covered with blood, and asks his father to continue his story. Startled, Weston says he wasn’t talking to him and asks how Wesley got injured. Wesley says he was trying to get their money back from Ellis, who now owns their house and has run off with the $1,500 too. Blithely, Weston assures him that the house is his, because he has decided to stay. He boasts proudly that he finished the new door and plans to fix the whole place up. To Wesley’s skepticism, Weston says it could be a “great place” if someone just gave it some attention.

Weston then describes a pivotal experience he had earlier that morning, when, for the first time in years, he walked around the yard and felt eerily like an intruder on his own property. Finally, it “struck” him that he was actually the owner, which gave him a “great feeling.” Going back inside, he stripped off his clothing, which gave him a wondrous feeling of renewal, like “peeling off a whole person” (185). He then took a scalding hot bath, followed by a cold one, and put on new clothes. Finding the refrigerator mysteriously full of food, he took it as a sign of his own rebirth, like a “Christmas” miracle, and made a big breakfast of ham and eggs. Going about the house, doing the little chores he “used” to do, made him feel like he was “coming back” after a long time away.

Doing the family’s dirty laundry, Weston says, made him feel connected to them all in an “animal,” flesh-and-blood way, as if the clothes were the people themselves. Feeling linked to them, forever, through blood, he unexpectedly felt no desire to “escape.” This connection was a “good thing”: His family, he realized, naturally belonged together under one roof, and this revelation gave him great hope. Wesley interrupts to say he’s “starving,” and his father tells him to take a bath, to wash the blood off. As Wesley exits the room, Weston yells to him that he’s thinking of taking his advice and joining the California Avocado Association. Their farm, with a little work, could be a profitable venture again; and that piece of desert he bought could be resold for a bundle, since it’s only a “three-mile drive” from Palm Springs.

Ella, looking “haggard,” returns from visiting her daughter in jail, and asks Weston why the lamb is still in the kitchen. He replies that he has mostly cured its maggots. Confused by his new optimism and energy, she asks him if he’s having a “nervous breakdown.” Finally, he asks her why she was at the jailhouse, and she tells him about Emma’s shooting spree. Weston responds that “she always was a fireball” (188), thanks to “inheritance,” and he salutes this “courage,” especially in one so young. Ella derides him for being proud of his daughter’s violent rampage. Weston notes that Ella is the only family member who lacks the “self-destructive” gene, as she comes from a different bloodline.

Ella begins to lose patience with Weston’s Jeckyl-Hyde transformation, saying she’s not buying his “crap.” Rejecting his offer of coffee, she screams at him to get the sheep out of her kitchen. Weston coolly accuses her of pretending she’s a hothead just like the rest of them. Sympathetically, he suggests that she use the kitchen table as a bed, as he did earlier, saying that it will “deliver” her; Ella takes his advice, pushing the clean laundry onto the floor. After she lies down, Wesley enters, completely naked, looking “dazed.” Both his mother and father see him but show no reaction. Finally, he picks up the lamb and carries it off stage right.

Weston rambles to Ella about how too much soft living can numb one into a “trance” and that one needs something tough, like a good “hard table,” to return to life; Ella sarcastically says he should have been a preacher. Irritably, Weston shouts to Wesley (who is offstage) that his breakfast is ready, but he has disappeared with the lamb. As Ella falls asleep and Weston starts to eat his son’s breakfast, Wesley reenters wearing his father’s cast-off clothes: baggy pants, tennis shoes, and baseball cap. Shocked, Weston asks him why he’s wearing the filthy “old bum’s” clothes that he threw away, and Wesley says simply, “They fit me” (191). He announces that he butchered the lamb, shocking his father, who points out that the refrigerator is “crammed” with food. As Weston looks on, Wesley takes an assortment of food from the refrigerator and eats it ravenously.

With increasing unease, Weston apologizes to his son for not helping more with “chores” in the past but suggests that the supply of artichokes he brought partly atones for that. Nervously, he says that Wesley can’t have been “starving”: Many people, he says, would envy his childhood, so his attempts to make his father feel “guilty” are misguided. Wildly, he shouts at Ella to wake up, to no effect; then he tells Wesley that he doesn’t have to “pay” for his past anymore, because as of this morning he’s a “whole new person”: “IT’S ALL OVER WITH BECAUSE I’VE BEEN REBORN!” (192). Pausing his eating, Wesley tells his father coldly that the loan sharks will kill him. He was unable to get the money back from Ellis and explains, “Maybe you’ve changed, but you still owe them” (192). Taylor, Wesley tells him, has run off to Mexico, and the strip of desert he sold Weston is “fake land” that no one will buy. Weston claims to have no memory of those dealings and says it isn’t fair: He just built a new door and got a brand-new lease on life. Nevertheless, he rejects his son’s advice to save himself by running away, because this house is where the “line ended” for him. He has “settled down” here and has nowhere else to go.

As his memories return, Weston tells his son how he sank so deeply into debt. Convinced that his finances couldn’t get any worse, so they must get better, he decided to “bank’’ on the future through increased borrowing. The lenders, he thought, wouldn’t be so “generous” if he wasn’t a good risk. Therefore, he decided to “play ball” and become a full-fledged consumer, buying refrigerators, cars, land, etc., all on credit. It was easy, he says, because these days no actual money changes hands; it’s all “invisible.” Wesley reproaches his father for leaving Ella and the family for long periods of time, and Weston says he couldn’t stand the feeling of everything staying the same, forever: “I kept looking for it out there somewhere. And all the time it was right inside this house” (194). However, Wesley reminds him that the loan sharks know where he lives and will come for him. Weston ponders running off to Mexico, maybe tracking down Taylor while he’s at it. He still seems hurt that Ella had an affair with Taylor, the man who cheated him on the desert land. Weston exits stage right, and Wesley, looking dazed, picks food off the floor and starts eating again.

Emma enters, wearing jodhpurs and swinging a riding crop. She overheard Weston’s “stupid” plans of running off to Mexico and thinks he’ll quickly be caught. She derides Wesley for eating off the floor and for wearing his father’s clothes; explaining the latter, Wesley says he was trying his father’s “remedy,” but it didn’t work for him. He says he took hot and cold baths and then walked around the house naked, like Weston. However, he didn’t feel any different, other than getting a chill. Discovering his father’s old clothes in the trash, he put them on, with uncanny results: Each piece of clothing seemed to grow on him like flesh until, little by little, he felt his father taking him over. It was, he says, like the “change of the guards” (196). Emma asks Wesley for money, and as he digs in his pocket, he asks how she got out of jail. She used her inborn “criminal intelligence,” she says, making “sexual overtures” to the police sergeant. She tells Wesley that she’s about to run off to begin a life of crime, which is the only thing, she says, that yields “straight profit.” Wesley, she adds, has a lot to learn, like how to look behind people’s eyes and see what they’re hiding. She says, “Everybody’s hiding,” and exits, planning to steal her mother’s car and never return.

Ella wakes up on the kitchen table. Mistaking Wesley for his father, she shouts at him to stop Emma from leaving, adding, “I’m responsible!” Immediately, a “huge explosion” erupts off stage, with a great flash of light. Wesley and Ella stare at it in silence. A small, well-dressed man (Emerson) enters, giggling, followed by his partner, Slater, who carries the skinned carcass of Wesley’s lamb. The two make coarse remarks about the lamb, laughing “hysterically,” and then tell Ella and Wesley that the explosion they just heard was a “little reminder.” Wesley intuits that the two men put a bomb in the family car, intending to blow up Weston, but killed Emma instead. Emerson says that’s what happens when you don’t pay your bills, and Slater specifies that he used a gelignite-nitro mixture, “beautiful stuff.” After making a few more threats, the two men leave, still laughing.

Wesley and Ella stand back-to-back in the kitchen. Wesley gazes out at the burning car, while Ella stares fixedly at the lamb carcass lying in the pen. Not realizing that her daughter is dead, Ella says she simply can’t believe Emma left on her horse, just as she threatened; she regrets having slept through Emma’s last visit to the house. She then tells Wesley that the lamb carcass reminds her of Weston’s story about the eagle. Taking turns, the two of them piece together the ending of the story, which Weston left out when he told it earlier. As the eagle made its dives to snatch up the lamb testes, a big tomcat, looking for food, came along and jumped onto the roof. The eagle, in its next plunge, grabbed the cat up in its talons. Savagely, the two of them fought in midair, tearing each other apart. Finally, Ella says, the two of them came “crashing down. Like one whole thing” (200). Wesley and Ella become quiet, their backs to each other, as the stage fades to black.