Unnamed Boys in Jefferson 1

Although the narrator of "Uncle Willy" has a particularly close relationship with Willy, he is also one of the group of twelve- to fourteen-year-old "boys" who "see a lot" of Willy, in two very different contexts (226). They stop by his drugstore after their baseball games, where he feeds them ice cream while listening to their accounts of the games, and they watch him inject morphine; he joins them in church as a member of Mr. Barbour's Sunday School class for boys. As boys, they simply accept his unusual behavior, even helping him shoot up on one occasion, and on another helping him break into his own store to steal alcohol.