Another character created in Chick's imagination (though clearly based on an actual public official), this "sheriff's officer" opens the hypothetical trial of Beat Four's character with the customary "Oyez Oyez This honorable court . . ." (134).
Mondays through Fridays these "owner-contractor-operators" drive the buses that carry the children of the county to school in town, but on Saturdays and holidays they turn the buses into "pay-passenger transport," charging the country people a fare to bring them to Jefferson (132).
This "groom" delivers Chick's horse Highboy to the Mallison house (123). This is the kind of job that is often performed by blacks in Faulkner's fiction, but in this case there is no hint of an African American dialect in his voice.
Like the other black inhabitants of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha, the "street department crews" are no where to be seen on the Monday after Lucas is arrested, though this doesn't prevent the narrator from describing their usual employment: "flushing the pavement with hoses and sweeping up the discarded Sunday papers and empty cigarette packs" (119). One irony of Intruder in the Dust is that the absence of the black population results in the narrative describing them in more detail than any other Yoknapatawpha fiction provides.
Old houses like Miss Habersham's "still seem to be spellbound by the shades of women, old women still spinsters and widows waiting . . . waiting for the slow telegraph to bring them news of Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania battles" (117).
For most of Intruder in the Dust the town streets are thronged with people, mostly men, who anticipate the lynching as a kind of drama. It's not clear how many of the men in this mob are residents of Jefferson, rather than country people who've driven into town. In the description of the neighborhood where Eunice Habersham lives, however, the narrator describes the newer residents of Jefferson as a group.
When Chick sees a truck parked outside his house, he assumes it belongs to someone like "a farmer whose stray cow or mule or hog had been impounded by a neighbor" (72). He even imagines what this hypothetical person looks like: "a man with a shaved sun-burned neck in neat tieless Sunday shirt and pants" (73).
