The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

What Benjy refers to as a "swing" in his section (46) is described by the omniscient narrator of the novel's last section as "a hammock made of barrel staves slatted into woven wires" (314). Presumably this one swing holds both Caddie and Charlie sometime around 1909 and Caddy's daughter Quentin and the man who wears a red tie in 1928. As a location it is explicitly associated with sexuality: Charlie puts his hands on Caddy in a way that causes Benjy to cry (47), and Luster finds an empty condom box by the swing where Miss Quentin meets the men who call on her (50).

Less than "three miles away" from the Bundrens' house is the New Hope Church where the family usually buries its dead (28-29). In this novel, however, the Bundrens never get closer to "New Hope" than three miles, though their journey twice takes them past the "white signboard with faded lettering" that points there (108). Probably this is also the church that Cash fell off of and broke his leg the first time (15).

Reached by a lane that goes past Tull's house and barn, the bridge was built in 1888, and "the first man to cross it was Peabody coming to [Billy Varner's] house when Jody was born" (89). It is at this site that the Bundrens have to reckon with the flood. Despite Whitfield's reports that the the bridge is out they seek to cross there. When they arrive they find, at the end of Tull's lane and between the swollen levees, the bridge is "mid-sunk and logs and such drifted up over it and it swagging and shivering like the whole thing would go any minute" (124).

On the map of the county that Faulkner himself drew in 1936, Tull's farm is located north of the Yoknapatawpha River, and northeast of Frenchman's Bend, but there is no question that for As I Lay Dying he exercised his creator's prerogative to move it to where he wanted it, to serve the needs of this story. It lies along the southern bank of the river, and is connected to Frenchman's Bend by a bridge referred to as "Tull's bridge" - until the bridge was submerged by the flood, so that the Bundrens take their wagon across a ford that is also identified with Tull.

The Bundrens' house is located at the top of a steep bluff, across the road from their cotton field. The house is described as "Tilting a little down the hill . . . a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting" (19). To one side of the hall is the bedroom in which Addie dies. The bedroom window looks out to the yard near the front of the house where Cash builds her coffin. The house has a back porch that looks out over the ridge toward the rest of the farm, but the barn is not visible from it (59).