The hands and feet of this child whom the Judge meets in "Beyond" have been scarred by "the other children . . . one day when they were playing" (794). He likes to play with his toy soldiers, one of which is named Pilate, given to him by "an old gentleman who has lived here a long time" (793). A querulous little boy, he seems at the moment mostly "tired of his toys" (793). Like his mother, he evokes the story of Christ, with which the judge has struggled during his adult life.
This is the child who "ran into the road," forcing the "young man" whom the Judge meets in "Beyond" to swerve his car; as he tells the Judge, he missed the child but died himself (784).
In "Beyond" these two women live with Howard Allison and his mother during Howard's boyhood; they run the house, rigidly control Howard's life, and patronize his mother.
In "Beyond" Allison meets Mothershed: a self-proclaimed nihilist in life, who is in Beyond after committing suicide. Of him the Judge says, "for the last fifteen years my one intellectual companion has been a rabid atheist, almost an illiterate, who not only scorns all logic and science, but who has a distinct body odor as well" (789). The Judge's characterization of Mothershed is odd, since they spent their afternoons discussing thinkers like Ingersoll, Voltaire, and Paine (786, 787).
Historically, Robert Ingersoll was a late 19th-century orator and philosopher nicknamed "The Great Agnostic," whose rejection of Christianity was widely discussed in his day and in Faulkner's. In "Beyond," Faulkner locates Ingersoll in the story's version of heaven, and gives him the role of interlocutor to the protagonist's doubts about God and the afterlife; Ingersoll listens to what Judge Allison says about his life and ideas, but he doesn't offer any solutions or answers.
Chlory cooks and keeps house for Judge Allison in "Beyond"; the keening she does when he dies is described as "slow billows of soprano sound as mellow as high-register organ tones and wall-shattering as a steamer siren" (782).
Judge Allison's father-in-law in "Beyond" was "a Republican" with whose politics the Judge agrees (789). Politically, Allison and his father-in-law are very much in the minority in Yoknapatawpha.
The mother of Judge Allison in "Beyond," Sophia, was a sickly woman and highly overprotective of her son. Howard's aunts ran the house, patronizing Sophia and keeping Howard under control; Sophia herself is also very controlling of her son. On those occasions when she allowed him to go barefoot outside, for example, "I would know that for every grain of dust which pleasured my feet, she would pay with a second of her life" (790).
The wife of Judge Allison in "Beyond" is a rather vague character; the only things we know about her are that the Judge was twenty-eight when they married and she bore a son in 1903.
Judge Allison, the central character of "Beyond," is the child of a sickly woman; he describes his life this way: "She died when I was fourteen; I was twenty-eight before I asserted myself and took the wife of my choice; I was thirty-seven when my son was born" (790). He is a Federal judge, "a Republican office-holder in a Democratic stronghold" who shares the political leanings of his wife's father and a "great reader" whose "life is a solitary one" (789). He is a lifelong religious skeptic whose doubts have only intensified since his son's death eighteen years ago.
