On the last night of his flight Joe sleeps under "a tree beside a spring" somewhere in the county (335). At dawn he uses his reflection in the spring to shave by.
At some point on his flight across Yoknapatawpha, Joe spends the night "lying in a haystack" beside a "farm house" (332). After watching the men of the farm eat breakfast and depart for the fields, Joe goes to "the kitchen door" to ask the woman there what day it is. She does not tell him, telling him instead to "get away from here!" (332). The "shallow ditch at the edge of a plowed field" where Joe falls asleep is presumably part of this farm, or at least very near it (333).
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions Faulkner seldom uses the road that runs west out of Jefferson, but in Light in August it is along this road that Joe initially travels after killing Joanna. Its shape is described when the car that carries him "sways on the curves and up the hills and fleeing down again" (284). There is a smaller road that turns off from it, where Joe gets out of the car; when the sheriff's posse returns to this place we learn that nearby are "a small creek and a ridge" (298).
The narrative account of Joe's flight across the landscape of Yoknapatawpha is alternately vivid and vague, making his route impossible to establish with any certainty. This cabin, for example, only exists in a memory Joe has sometime after he stopped there: "house or cabin, white or black: he could not remember which" until the "smell" of "negro" and "negro food" brings it back to him (334-35). In this memory it consists of people who flee "suddenly and in fear," a "table" and "food before him, appearing suddenly between long, limber black hands" (335).
This one cabin represents "several negro cabins" (257), though it's not certain how many. Joanna Burden's house stands in what is called "a region of negro cabins and gutted and outworn fields" (287). Before the Burden family moved into the house it was a plantation, and some of these may be former slave cabins like the one Joe Christmas moves into. But as a group the cabins can be found on both sides "up and down the road" past the big house and along the paths "which radiate from [her] house like wheelspokes" (257).
Sometime between 1863 and 1866 Calvin Burden decides to move his family "a hundred miles further west" than the place they moved to when they left St. Louis (245). It seems that they go back to Kansas, where Burden had fought as an abolitionist in the 1850s and which was admitted to the U.S. as a non-slave state in 1861. Calvin's son Nathaniel "rides back and forth across Kansas and Missouri" for two months (245) before he "finally caught up" with them in what Joanna refers to as "that time back in Kansas" (250).
A "short distance" from the spring where Joe spends the last night of his flight in Light in August but "eight miles" from the larger road to Mottstown is a "quiet" dirt road, "appearing and vanishing quietly, the pale dust marked only by narrow in infrequent wheels and by the hooves of horses and mules and now and then by the print of human feet" (336, 338). It is bordered by bushes and woods, and curves sharply enough for Joe to hear wagons before he can see them.
On the last night of his flight in Light in August Joe sleeps under "a tree beside a spring" somewhere in the county (335). At dawn he uses his reflection in the spring to shave by.
At some point on his flight across Yoknapatawpha in Light in August, Joe spends the night "lying in a haystack" beside a "farm house" (332). After watching the men of the farm eat breakfast and depart for the fields, Joe goes to "the kitchen door" to ask the woman there what day it is. She does not tell him, telling him instead to "get away from here!" (332). The "shallow ditch at the edge of a plowed field" where Joe falls asleep is presumably part of this farm, or at least very near it (333).
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions Faulkner seldom uses the road that runs west out of Jefferson, but in Light in August it is along this road that Joe initially travels after killing Joanna. Its shape is described when the car that carries him "sways on the curves and up the hills and fleeing down again" (284). There is a smaller road that turns off from it, where Joe gets out of the car; when the sheriff's posse returns to this place we learn that nearby are "a small creek and a ridge" (298).
