Sawmill where Rider Works (Location Key)

The sawmill where Rider works in "Pantaloon in Black" is one of several sawmills in Yoknapatawpha. During the scene set there in the morning, "the trucks are rolling" and we hear "the whine and clang of the saw," and the "grunting shouts" and "chanted phrases of song" of the Negro workmen (244, 137). During the days these men work hard at this site; at least on some nights, presumably after pay days, some of them shoot craps there, in a game run by the white night watchman. When Rider returns to the mill after dark the narrative notes the "mute soaring of the moon-blond lumber stacks, standing in the middle of the now unimpeded shadow" and "the boiler shed all quiet and blanched in the moon"; he crosses the clearing, "entering the boiler shed and through it, crossing the junctureless trepan of time’s back-loop to the door of the tool-room, the faint glow of the lantern beyond the plank-joins, the surge and fall of a shadow between the light and the wall, the mutter of voices, the mute click and scutter of the dice" (250, 144-45).