The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Along with the cashier who works for him, this banker tries to convince Mannie Hait to invest her settlement money in bonds or a savings or a checking account.

The "teller" at the bank hands Mannie Hait her money when she cashes out her settlement (253). (There is also a "cashier" on hand at the time, so we create two characters - though usually the terms "teller" and "cashier" are synonymous.)

On behalf of the railroad company, the claims adjuster pays Mannie Hait the sum of $8500 after her husband gets run over by one of their trains. On this occasion he apparently thwarts Snopes, however, by finally refusing to pay anything for the mules who were killed in the accident.

These mule drovers help I.O. Snopes to drive his newly purchased mules from the railroad station to his pasture.

The narrative singles out from "the town" as a group "a town wag" (252) who sends I.O. Snopes a printed train schedule in response to all the mules that Snopes lost in "accidents" with freight trains on the blind curve.

"Farmers and widows and orphans black and white" (252) bought, in good faith, mules from I.O. Snopes.

The I.O. Snopes who appears in this story is one of Flem Snopes' many cousins, and his mean-spirited efforts to enrich himself at the expense of insurance companies, mules and the husband of Mannie Hait demonstrate why in so many texts 'Snopesism' is Faulkner's quintessential symptom of the decline of Southern civilization. Elsewhere in the canon he appears as a restaurant manager, a blacksmith and a schoolteacher; this is the only text in which he is described as a mule-trader. Here he is out-witted by Mrs. Hait.

As in many other stories, Faulkner uses the people of Jefferson, or "the town," to provide a kind of combined chorus and audience for the events in "Mule in the Yard." These unnamed townspeople are referred to several times. Their (assumed) knowledge about events becomes a point of reference for the narrator to reveal information about the past and about the main characters' motivations. They speculate about Snopes' relations with the Haits, and they rush to the scenes of Mr. Hait's death and the house fire.

Mrs. Hait is one of Faulkner's more memorable women, but her "defunct husband" is harder to get into focus (252). Everyone in town learns that he has been helping I.O. Snopes cheat the insurance companies for a while when his "mangled remains," along with "the mangled mules and savage fragments of new rope," are recovered from the tracks beside his house after a train accident (253).

Since her husband was killed by a train ten years earlier (in the retelling of this story in the novel The Town it is but three years), Mannie Hait has apparently lived on the $8500 she received from the railroad in compensation. She has gotten plenty of exercise, however, chasing I.O. Snopes' rogue mules around her yard several times a year. Miss Mannie shows a distrust in the local bank when she withdraws her settlement despite the pressure of the male bank employees to invest in bonds. Indeed, Miss Mannie does not get intimidated by men (or mules) as I.O.