According to the narrator of "A Bear Hunt," Mrs. Luke Provine receives no financial support from her ne'er-do-well husband. It seems that she is the principal breadwinner in the family, with money she "earned by sewing and such" (64).
The woman who is married to Wilbur Provine in The Town is mentioned during her husband's trial for making and selling illegal liquor. Judge Long tells Provine, "I'm going to send you to the penitentiary, not for making whiskey but for letting your wife carry water a mile and a half from that spring" (178).
The two-story Frenchman's Bend boarding house that Mrs. Littlejohn owns appears in five different texts. She herself appears in three of them - "Spotted Horses," The Hamlet and The Town - as a witness to the hapless efforts of "them fool men," as she puts it in the first story, to buy the Texas ponies (174). And she is not simply a spectator: when one of the horses invades her house, she breaks a washboard over its head. She plays her largest role in The Hamlet. Described there as a "man-tall, man-grim woman" wearing a "faded wrapper" (219), Mrs.
Mrs. Killegrew and her husband are neighbors of the Griers in "Two Soldiers" and "Shingles for the Lord." In the second story she is described by the vernacular narrator as "worser deaf than even Killegrew" (28). In the first story that disability explains why the Grier sons can go to the Killegrews' to find out what's going on in the world beyond Frenchman's Bend: because she is "deaf" (that is, presumably, very hard of hearing), her husband "runs the radio as loud as it would run," and so the boys can "hear it plain . . . even standing outside with the window closed" (81).
The name Holston is one of the oldest in Yoknapatawpha, but in both "Skirmish at Sartoris" and the reprinting of the story in The Unvanquished this character appears only as a name in the phrase "Mrs. Holston's porter" (71, 207). He is a hotel porter, and presumably works at the Holston House, one of the oldest buildings in Jefferson. As we know from other fictions, it was established by Alexander Holston; it seems to be owned now by this Mrs. Porter, who may be his daughter.
The only son of Kentucky aristocrats, Gerald Bland is a Harvard University classmate of Quentin Compson. In The Sound and the Fury they come to blows, violently but anti-climatically, when Quentin projects his rage against Caddy's suitors onto him. In many ways Bland is Quentin's polar opposite, the Fortinbras to Quentin Compson's Hamlet-like character: Gerald is adored by his mother, an accomplished lady's man, athletic and decisive.
The Mrs. Bland mentioned in "Ad Astra" probably doesn't exist. Bland has apparently invented an imaginary wife for his own neurotic reasons. The narrator reports "when [Bland] was tight he would talk about his wife, though we all knew that he was not married" (408). In the story's last line, he refers to her as his "poor little wife" (429).
In The Sound and the Fury Mrs. Bland is the mother of Quentin's Harvard classmate Gerald; she has moved from Kentucky to Cambridge to be close to her son. She lays claim to an aristocratic heritage, and in person is both formal and insistent. Shreve calls her "fate in eight yards of apricot silk" (106).
In Flags in the Dust Virgil Beard is a "pale, quiet boy of twelve or so" (104), the son of the people who own the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives. To disguise his handwriting in the letters he sends Narcissa, Byron gets Virgil to write them by promising to buy him an air rifle. Despite Snopes' attempts to dodge that promise, Virgil is shrewd enough to make sure that he gets his gun - and uses it to kill a mockingbird.
In Flags in the Dust Will Beard is a "mild, bleached man of indeterminate age and of less than medium size" (104), Will Beard owns a grist mill in Jefferson and probably owns the boarding house where Byron Snopes lives - though that is run by his wife. He is identified by the "evil reek" of his "black evil pipe" (104, 105).
