Will Varner

The sixty-year-old chief landowner of Frenchman’s Bend, Will Varner owns "most of the good land in the country and holds mortgages on most of the rest." As such, he is the "chief man of the country" (5), at once the "largest landowner" and "the fountainhead if not of law at least of advice and suggestion" for the people of two counties (5). He is a farmer, usurer, and veterinarian and serves as the "beat supervisor in one county and Justice of the Peace in the next and election commissioner in both" (5). He also owns various businesses: the store in Frenchman’s Bend, the cotton gin and the combined gristmill and blacksmith shop. He presides over his fiefdom from "a home-made chair on the jungle-choked lawn of the Old Frenchman’s home-site" (6). With Mrs. Maggie Varner, he has produced sixteen children though only two of them, Jody and Eula, remain in Frenchman’s Bend. Even while exerting control over the region through his public service positions and his network of businesses and mortgages, he has delegated the day-to-day running of his empire to Jody. Faulkner describes his physical appearance as resembling "a Methodist Sunday School Superintendent" (6). He is "thin as a fence rail" and "long," possessing "reddish-gray hair and moustaches and little hard bright innocently blue eyes" (6). He is wary of the Snopes from the beginning, but he teaches Flem the basics of the local economy, and eventually becomes his father-in-law. (He appears or is mentioned in 9 Yoknapatawpha fictions, in 2 of them as "Uncle Billy," and in 7 as "Will.")