The man lives at the place outside Mottson where the Bundren’s stop to mix cement for Cash's leg in As I Lay Dying. He loans them a bucket, but after smelling the corpse they are carrying retreats to watch them from his porch.
The drugstore in Jefferson appears in many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but it is not identified with an owner with any consistency. So in As I Lay Dying the pharmacist who is at lunch when Dewey Dell walks into the drugstore, the employer whom MacGowan refers to as "the old man" and "the old bastard," has to remain unnamed (242, 247). He clearly does not know about MacGowan's unethical behavior.
The "mammy" that Vernon Tull speaks of in As I Lay Dying is his biological mother - not a black caregiver or wet nurse, as would be the case with a 'mammy' in an upper class white Yoknapatawpha family. Vernon thinks of her in reference to the hard lot women have in life: she "lived to be seventy and more" having worked everyday of her life and never having been sick (30). At the end of that life she puts on "that lace-trimmed night gown she had had for forty-five years and never wore," lays down, and tells her family "I'm tired" (30).
In As I Lay Dying, Vernon Tull mentions the "last chap" his mother had as he recounts his mother's long life and death (30). That wording implies he had more than one sibling, but there is no way to say how many more.
In As I Lay Dying, both Cash and Darl believe that sex is the reason Jewel sneaks out every night, and each tries to imagine whom he is "rutting" with (131). Cash believes she must be "a married woman somewhere," because of the sexual "daring and staying power" she seems capable of (132). (It turns out, as Cash says later, that "it aint a woman" at all, 133.)
In As I Lay Dying, both Darl and Cash believe that sex is the reason their brother Jewel sneaks out every night, and each tries to imagine whom he is "rutting" with (131). Darl thinks she is a "girl" he probably knows, but can't "say for sure" which one (132). (It turns out, as Cash says later, that "it aint a woman" at all, 133.)
"Them" - this is one of the more ambiguous elements in As I Lay Dying. "Them," "they" - these are the only terms that that Anse uses to describe the people who come to his house and use "the law" to "talk me out of" Darl (37, 36). The most likely explanation of this event is the Selective Service Act of 1917, which required men between the ages of 21 and 31 to register for the draft (in 1918, it was expanded to include men between 18 and 21). That would mean Darl has been drafted and "they" are agents of the federal government.
