As Quick sits on the gallery of Varner's Store, telling Gavin Stevens about Buck Thorpe's life in Frenchman's Bend, he mentions "about a half a dozen" other young men who both fought with Thorpe and often sat on the same gallery listening to and laughing at his talk (109). The fighting is described as violent - he beats his adversaries "unconscious from time to time by foul means and even by fair on occasion" - and the talking is described as drunken (109).
According to Pruitt, when Stonewall Jackson Fentry left his father's farm to try "to earn a little extra money" working at a sawmill in Frenchman's Bend, he made some kind of arrangement with this unnamed black man to help on the farm in his stead. Pruitt tells Gavin Stevens he often heard the father "cussing" the man "for not moving fast enough" in the field, but when two years later the son brings the baby home, the Fentrys continue to employ him for a season (97).
Reverend Whitfield (as the man Quick refers to as "Preacher Whitfield" is usually called) is Frenchman's Bend's Baptist minister and an important character in two other Yoknapatawpha fictions, As I Lay Dying (1930) and "Shingles for the Lord" (1943). In this story readers learn that he lives "seven miles" from Quick's sawmill, but not in which direction (105). His role in the story is to marry Fentry and the woman who calls herself "Miss Smith," and then, when she dies, to preside over her burial (105).
In her conversation with Gavin Stevens, Pruitt's unnamed mother recalls how poor she and her husband were when they married: "we didn't even own a roof over our heads. We moved into a rented house, on rented land" (96-97). This is all readers hear about Mr. Pruitt, but it suggests that at the time the story takes place the family owns the land they farm.
