Sitting at a crossroads four miles from the Edmunds place is the country store owned by "Squire Adam Fraser" (222). According to Intruder in the Dust, it is a local gathering point: on Saturday afternoons "every tenant and renter and freeholder white or black in the neighborhood would at least pass and usually stop, quite often to buy something" (18). In the novel it is also the place where Lucas has several confrontations with local white men.
In this novel Faulkner's readers learn that Yoknapatawpha is sub-divided into five "beats" that are based on "survey co-ordinates" (35). The novel never makes clear where "Beat One and Two and Three and Five" are (194), noting that only Beat Four is known by this numerical designation. The boundary line for Beat Four is specifically "five miles from town" at the start of the pine hills to the northeast of Jefferson (91).
Like real Mississippi counties, Yoknapatawpha is divided into administrative districts called "beats"; Joel Williamson suggests that that term, with its police background, acknowledges the importance of "the policing of slaves" to the state's antebellum white population (William Faulkner and Southern History, 78). When Lafayette County, the real county on which Faulkner's is based, was created in 1836, it was divided into four beats; later a fifth was formed by sub-dividing Beat 4.
This icon represents the small farms that Chick sees on his trips along "the long road" leading out to the Edmonds place (143). On the cold winter morning when Chick makes his first journey, all the men and women on these farms seem to be doing the same thing: preparing to slaughter a hog. When Chick travels the same road in May four years later, the farm houses are described as "paintless Negro cabins" (143), which suggests that the farmers are all or mostly African American tenant farmers.
Faulkner's imaginative county never responded to a census, so we cannot say for sure, for example, how many of its farmers owned their own land as opposed to the many who worked as tenant farmers on land that was owned by others - nor can we say with any precision how many of Yoknapatawpha's landless farmers and farm workers were black and how many were white, or how many were 'tenants' or 'sharecroppers' or hired field 'hands' who worked for fixed wages.
In Yoknapatawpha "branch" is another name for creek or stream. The rest of the name of the Nine-Mile Branch derives from the distance between Jefferson and the bridge over which the road crosses it. It is "a broad ditch" that is full of rushing water "during the winter and spring rains," but in May "a thin current scarcely an inch deep" (168). Its course is indicated by "the willow-and-cypress bottom" land along it (146). The bushes that also grow there, and the quicksand that lurks under the bridge, make it a wild enough place in which to try to hide two bodies.
The size of the Edmunds' place and the source of its wealth are indicated when, half a mile from the entrance road, Chick and Aleck spot a rabbit disappearing into "a briar patch beside a cottonfield" (17).
The way to the creek Chick falls into while trying to cross on a "footlog" is "through the park across a pasture" beside the Edmunds house (5). The creek is deep enough that he has to "dive" to find the rifle he dropped (5).
Intruder in the Dust gives us a way to appreciate the size of the Edmunds' plantation and the source of its wealth when it says that Chick and Aleck Sander are half a mile from the entrance road when they spot a rabbit disappearing into "a briar patch beside a cottonfield" (17).
In Intruder in the Dust the way to the creek Chick falls into while trying to cross on a "footlog" is "through the park across a pasture" beside the Edmonds house (5). The creek is deep enough that he has to "dive" to find the rifle he dropped (5).
