After selling his store and ferry on the river, Wylie moved four miles south "and became a farmer" (72). Lucius and his father hunt birds there the Christmas after the story takes place.
This Tallahatchie River crossing has four different labels in the 4 texts it appears in. In "My Grandmother Millard," set during the Civil War, the "Crossing" is probably just a ford, a place where the river is shallow enough to get wagons across (689) - which explains why in 1864 it would have enough military importance to be the site of a battle which, unlike the battle at 'Harrykin Creek' in the story's title, actually took place.
Ballenbaugh's, the place where Lucius and Boon spend the first night of their trip, has had a very colorful past. The river crossing it stands at was first settled by a man named Wylie, who was shown the location by the Chickasaw Indians (71). From his "peaceful one-room combined residence and store," he ran a ferry that carried freight across the river; the road north from Jefferson was built "as straight" to Wyott's as it could be made to connect the town to Memphis (72).
"Four miles from town" on the road to Memphis, Hurricane Creek (colloquially known as "Harrykin Creek") is crossed by a "wooden bridge," but the ground around it is low enough to be "a series of mudholes" (68).
The place that Lucius first refers to as "Cousin Zachary Edmonds' farm seventeen miles away" (46) has a long history in Yoknapatawpha and in Faulkner's fictions. Originally an antebellum slave plantation founded by Lucius Quintus McCaslin, it is a major setting in Go Down, Moses and also important in Intruder in the Dust. Lucius refers to the place as "McCaslin" (121), though the last McCaslin to own it (Ike) gave it away to his cousin Carothers Edmonds in the 19th century.
Winbush's place, "a solid eight miles from town," is probably a farm, but it is mentioned in the novel as the place where "Uncle Cal Bookwright's [moonshine] whiskey" can be bought for two dollars a gallon (13). In other Yoknapatawpha fictions there are Bookwrights in Frenchman's Bend, so we are putting this location in that part of the county - but that is simply an assumption.
This is the farm "six miles from town" where the "new girl" that Ludus is courting lives (10). She is the "daughter (or wife)" of a "tenant," which means the land is owned by one of the county's white proprietors and worked by sharecroppers (10).
"The fork" of the road that Lucius mentions is where the road toward the Edmonds' plantation seventeen miles to the northeast leads away from the road north, which is why he says it will take him "in the wrong direction" from Memphis (59). Interestingly, each of those miles is marked by a "milepost" (59). And according to Boon, whose testimony is not necessarily reliable, although the county roads are unpaved, they "are sure fine now, everywhere" (60).
