The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

A "young, well-made, muscle-bound man" (69), Eck becomes the new apprentice at the blacksmith. Unlike his older cousins Flem and I.O., Eck is good-hearted and gullible, possessing an "open equable face beginning less than an inch below the hairline" (69). He is easily manipulated by I. O., paying twenty dollars for Ike's cow (295) and becoming caught up in the wild pony affair without initially suspecting Flem's invisible hand guiding the ruse. His first wife died after the birth of his first son Wallstreet, and he remarried and had two or three more children with his second wife.

Jack (or "Zack," as his name appears in The Town) is a "childless widower who lives alone with [his] hound and a negro man to cook for them both" (197). In The Hamlet, he is a thirty-three-year-old man (240) who has spent the last four years mourning the loss of his wife, Lucy Pate, with a "black, savage, indomitable fidelity" (227). In the earlier short story "The Hound," Houston is prosperous but, in this novel, his unpaid debt to Will Varner and the resulting foreclosure on his property have diminished his wealth.

Ratliff's widowed sister keeps house for him in Jefferson. Neither her first nor her married name is mentioned. While there is little to define her physical appearance, Faulkner describes her "mute and outraged righteousness" when she is forced to live with Mink Snopes' wife and her two children (286). She is offended that Ratliff permits Mink's wife to do some of the housework (287).

The apprentice helps Trumbull and Varner's blacksmith overhaul the machinery of the cotton gin (65).

This man works at Varner's cotton gin, and helps Trumbull overhaul the machinery. He is the kind of "fireman" who stokes a fire rather than puts one out (65).

Uncle Ben Quick’s son, Lon operates the local sawmill and is described as "a lank man with a bulging dreaming scant-haired head and pale myopic eyes" (63). A local hangabout in front of the Varner store, he bids first on Buck Hipps' wild ponies. In As I Lay Dying and a number of short stories, he has a son of the same name.

A "sturdy short-legged black-browed ready-faced man" (63), Bookwright is one of several characters in Frenchman's Bend who keep Ratliff apprised of the goings on about the hamlet when he is gone. Bookwright has an unnamed wife to whom he refers on one occasion (76). Along with Ratliff and Armstid, he is swindled by Flem Snopes into purchasing the Old Frenchman’s Place.

This distant kinsman's wife's cousin puts Ratliff up for the night and buys a sewing machine from him.

Part of the time Ratliff is away from Yoknapatawpha is spent selling sewing machines in Tennessee; there he spends time with "a distant kinsman" - i.e. someone to whom he is distantly related - who owes him money (61).

This wholesaler provides Ratliff with his sewing machines.