Griers' Farm in "Two Soldiers" (Location)

The narrator refers to the place where he lives with his Maw and Pap and older brother Pete as "this little shirttail of a farm" (84). According to the story "Shall Not Perish," published a year after "Two Soldiers," the Grier family has owned its seventy acres for at least several generations. Pap gave Pete ten of those acres as a high school graduation present, and by early December Pete has his plot properly "busted out and bedded for the winter" with vetch (82). But Pap himself is a particularly shiftless farmer, or as the narrative puts it: "pap was still behind, just like he had been since me and Pete had knowed him" (82). In another seasonal task, the males chop firewood "at the wood tree" on the place (83).