Mr. Rouncewell is an agent for a company that "supplies all the stores in Yoknapatawpha County" with oil (48). Either he or the oil company is also far-sighted enough recently to have added "a special tank of gasoline" to the tanks holding oil (48). His name suggests a connection to "Mrs. Rouncewell's boarding house" (26), where Boon lives, and there are men named Rouncewell in both The Town and The Mansion he could be, or be related to, but the novel does not make any of those connections explicit.
This icon refers to the group of men that Lucius refers to, ironically, as "our Jefferson leisure class": the "friends or acquaintances of Father's or maybe just friends of horses" who congregate in the livery stable to pass the time (38). They expect neither "any business" nor "any mail" to come their way (38). In other Yoknapatawpha novels such men typically sit in the barbershop or the park around the courthouse.
Besides the immediate Priest family, Aunt Callie, Delphine and "our various connections and neighbors and Grandmother's close friends" and "one or two neighbor children" all take turns riding in the car whenever Boon takes it out (37, 41).
These two "ladies," "neighbors, still in their boudoir caps," are part of the group that gathers in front of the shed to see Boon drive Grandfather's car (35). Presumably they are also among the people who go for rides in it later.
"Aunt" Callie's title is the culture's label for a black woman of her age and in her role as a 'mammy' to Lucius and his brothers. She was "born in the country and still preferred it" (49), although she lives in town with the family she works for. While black and a servant, she does not hesitate to berate white males in the line of her duty to her charges - although her frequent "yelling" has no effect on any of them (54).
"Grandfather's mother" is mentioned twice: when Lucius assumes that she taught her son to "make his manners" to a woman in the same way that the males in the family always do (200); and when Lucius notes that his Grandfather, "an only child," stayed with his mother in Carolina while his father was away fighting during the Civil War (285). She died in 1864.
In his role as narrator, Lucius refers briefly to a "present Cousin Carothers," who still owns the property first acquired by Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (61). This is probably Roth Edmonds, who would be about 60 years old in the 'present' of the novel. The "cattle guard" he has installed at the gate indicates that the property is still being farmed in 1961 (61), making the McCaslin-Edmonds family, and the estate that sustains their status, the one part of Yoknapatawpha's original aristocracy that shows no signs of decaying over time.
Lucius' paternal Grandmother is an Edmonds by birth, which accounts for the fact that the Priests belong to the "cadet branch" of the McCaslin-Edmonds family (17). Married at fifteen, she is now "just past fifty" (41). While afraid at first of the family's new car, she soon learns to enjoy riding in it - until the first (and last) time the wind blows her husband's expectorated tobacco juice into her face.
Like William Faulkner's father Murry, Lucius' father Maury owns a livery stable. Maury Priest displays considerable force of character in the novel's first chapter, when he handles the trouble caused by Boon's rash anger. And the "gentlemanly" way he treats even his black employees is worth noting (8). But after that he becomes almost invisible, even before departing with the rest of the adults in the family for Bay St. Louis.
The clearest detail Lucius Priest provides about his mother, Alison, is that she loves going for rides in her father-in-law's automobile: she sits in the back seat with her children, her "face flushed and bright and eager, like a girl's" (41). She is resourceful enough to "invent a kind of shield" to keep them all safe whenever Grandfather discharges the tobacco he chews (41).
