The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The bailiff tries to serve Flem his papers for a court appearance and is baffled when Flem refuses to acknowledge the suit against him (355).

She watches as Eck and Wall Street try to catch their horse. Eck and the boy try to stop the horse by tripping it. "She said that when it hit that rope, it looked just like one of these here great big Christmas pinwheels" (365).

As a child, a hulking and "bear-shaped" figure, Saint Elmo eats all of the candy in Varner's case (350). He is a son of I.O. Snopes from his first marriage. (The names of the various Snopeses come from a variety of sources; Saint Elmo's name comes from the title of an 1866 novel by Georgia author Augusta Jane Evans.)

At twelve years of age (347), Henry Armstid's eldest daughter might be old enough to plow, Ratliff suggests. What is clear is that the daughter has already assumed the responsibility of one beyond her age, guarding over the "littlest ones" with an axe through the night (347). In "Spotted Horses," Faulkner provides additional information, including her name, Ina May.

Will Varner mentions that his "mammy" once heard an old woman explain that the way a pregnant woman can make sure she has a girl is to "show her belly to the full moon" (339). "Mammy" often implies a black woman, but in this case it seems more likely that Will is talking about his own mother. (The word occurs in a passage thick with his rural vernacular: "I mind me when" "done married and moved," "passel of boys," etc.; 339.)

Tull has four daughters, two of which appear in As I Lay Dying as Eula and Kate. In The Hamlet, Faulkner provides no names or description beyond identifying the "biggest" of these girls at the Snopes trial (357); rather, the girls function as a individual unit as when they "turn their heads as one head" at the Snopes trial.

A "strong, full-bosomed though slightly dumpy woman," Cora Tull is Vernon Tull's vigorous wife. The accident with the Texan horse apparently alters her appearance so that "an expression of grim and seething outrage" had "set" in her features, "an outrage . . . directed not at any Snopes or at any other man in particular but at all men, all males, and of which Tull himself was not at all the victim but the subject" (357).

With "soap-raw hands" (321), the docile and patient wife of Armstid keeps the family together through hard work and thrift. She repeatedly wears a "shapeless gray garment" with "stained tennis shoes" (348). Her eyes are "a washed gray . . ., as though they had faded like the dress and sunbonnet" she wore (322). And she speaks in a "flat, toneless and hopeless voice" (358). Aside from the domestic tasks which come to include cleaning for Mrs.

With "stained and broken teeth" (322), Armstid is a destitute farmer who stumbles from one ill-conceived scheme to another in order to get out of his poverty. His abusive treatment of his wife is a prominent characteristic of his overall "impotence and fury" (372) at the state of his life. At the end of the novel, Henry, along with Ratliff and Odum Bookwright, is duped by Flem Snopes into believing there is buried Civil War gold on the Old Frenchman's place. He loses his mind pursuing this illusion.

Anse McCallum is only mentioned in the novel, as one of the men who bought the Texas ponies at the auction. "Anse McCallum" is the name that Faulkner gives the head of the MacCallum|McCallum clan beginning in 1940; before that he was named "Virginius MacCallum." This character may also be the McCallum who makes the moonshine whisky that Ratliff carries with him, though it's more likely that that is Henry, Virginius' second son and the MacCallum in Flags in the Dust who is known around Yoknapatawpha for making great moonshine.