In As I Lay Dying Addie lives somewhere near the schoolhouse while working as a teacher. 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.
This is where the wagon wheel breaks during the trip that Darl and Jewel take to get a load of lumber in As I Lay Dying, 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).
Less than "three miles away" from the Bundrens' house is the New Hope Church where the family usually buries its dead (As I Lay Dying, 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 the first time he broke his leg (15).
In the "secret shade" of these woods at the edge of the Bundrens' cotton field is where Dewey Dell loses her virginity in As I Lay Dying (27). It may also be the location where Addie waits for Whitfield, "coming swift and secret to me in the woods" (175).
In her section of As I Lay Dying Addie refers to the place where Anse is living when she meets him as "a new house" (171), which is one of the reasons, apparently, she decides to marry him. The house is located at the top of a steep bluff, across the road from their cotton field. Darl notes that because it "tilts a little down the hill . . . a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting" (19).
Submitted by scott.t.chancel... on Thu, 2014-07-24 15:18
The Grier boy, the narrator of "Two Soldiers" whose first name is not provided, is the youngest of the two Grier children; he is "going on nine years old" (82), or as he puts it later, "eight and ten months" (98). He is a precocious fellow who is hell-bent on following his older brother to war in the Pacific after the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. As he tells his brother, Pete, "You'll whup the big uns and I'll whup the little uns" (83).
