The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

No other Yoknapatawpha fiction refers to a place called "Haley bottom." Once the Bundrens cross the flooded river, they should be able to take the road from Frenchman's Bend to Jefferson. But according to Armstid, "the levee through Haley bottom had done gone for two miles and . . . the only way to get to Jefferson would be go around by Mottson" (185). Although this is vague, apparently a levee built between the road and a creek at a particularly low place (a "bottom") has been carried away by the rising water.

On his 1936 map of Yoknapatawpha Faulkner himself locates "Armstid's" in the hills to the northeast of Frenchman's Bend. In this novel, however, Armstid's farm is clearly located south of the Bend, on the north side of and very close to the river - making this place one of the many examples of how Faulkner re-created his mythical world to suit the needs of a particular story. The farm features a house, a barn, and a shed where the Bundren family stays overnight.

The ultimate destination of the Bundren odyssey, it is where the graves of Addie Bundren's relatives are located and where Addie makes Anse promise to bury her after she is dead.

Located on a hill near a spring, the schoolhouse is where Addie Bundren teaches school before she marries Anse. It is also where Addie sees Anse pass by in a courting ritual, and where he first talks with her. According to Addie, driving by the school takes Anse "four miles out of his way" (170), which makes it seem likely that she is teaching at the school in Frenchman's Bend that appears in other Yoknapatawpha fictions. But the text never makes that explicit.

Before she marries Anse Bundren Addie works as a teacher and lives somewhere near the schoolhouse. We speculate that both the school and the place she lived were in Frenchman's Bend, but all the novel makes explicit about the place where she "lies in bed at night" listening to the honking of the wild geese coming "out of the wild darkness" (170) is that it is located on the top of a hill near a spring.

Where the wagon wheel breaks during the trip that Darl and Jewel take to get a load of lumber, delaying the trip to Jefferson by three days: "In the rain the mules smoke a little, splashed yellow with mud, the off one clinging in sliding lunges to the side of the road above the ditch. The tilted lumber gleams dull yellow, water-soaked and heavy as lead, tilted at a steep angle into the ditch about the broken wheel" (49).

The Snopes farm somewhere near Varner's store is where Jewel both acquires his horse (sometime before the novel begins) and loses it, after Anse goes there to swap the horse away as part of his negotiation with Snopes for a new team of mules; if Faulkner is thinking of this Snopes as Flem, he seems more settled and prosperous than in any other text, since he has more than one pair of mules on the farm.

Where Jewel secretly spends five months working by lantern light to clean up "that forty acres of new ground Quick laid out last spring" (135) after sneaking out of the window at night.