In "Two Soldiers," the first of the three stories about the Grier family that Faulkner published in 1942 and 1943, the mother of the 'soldiers' is called "Maw." Unlike her shiftless husband, although she wishes her son Pete wasn't determined to enlist, she accepts his decision to do so. Through her tears, she sends him off with mended and clean clothes and "a shoe box of vittles" (85). She also functions as something of a bridge between the World Wars, as her brother served in World War I.
Res, the farmer at the head of the Grier family, appears very differently in each of the three stories Faulkner wrote about the family during the early 1940s.
Doctor Alford appears in Flags in the Dust as a "newcomer" to Jefferson in his "thirties" (93). He shares offices with Dr. Peabody but expresses impatience and often contempt for Peabody's traditional ideas about the practice of medicine. He is courting Narcissa Benbow, but without arousing much interest in her. He is mentioned in As I Lay Dying when MacGowan tells Jody to send Dewey Dell "upstairs to Alford's office" when she asks "to see the doctor that works" there (241).
In the short story "The Unvanquished" and again in the chapter titled "Riposte in Tertio" in The Unvanquished, Bayard recalls the minister of Jefferson's Episcopal Church in the days before the War. Like many other white Yoknapatawphans, he is probably away in the War.
Doctor Lucius Peabody is the only character who appears in the first three Yoknapatawpha novels: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. He is only mentioned by Quentin in the second, but makes memorable appearances in the other two. According to Flags, he is "the fattest man" in the county (94). His medical practice takes him "out at any hour of the twenty-four in any weather and for any distance, over practically impassable roads in a lopsided buckboard to visit anyone, white or black, who sent for him" (95).
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun "Doctor Peabody" is one of the "new faces" that arrive in Yoknapatawpha after the first group of pioneers and becomes "old Doctor Habersham's successor" as the community's physician (206). He is presumably an ancestor of the Doctor Peabody who in other fictions takes care of Yoknapatawpha's sick and wounded until well into the twentieth century, but neither text ever specifies the relationship between the two men. This earlier Peabody provides laudanum to add to the whiskey given to the militia for their celebration.
Doctor Habersham is one of the original three white settlers in Yoknapatawpha, or as it's put in Intruder in the Dust, the first text to mention him, one of the men "who had ridden horseback into the county before its boundaries had ever been surveyed and located and named" (73). According to Requiem for a Nun, in fact, with his "worn black bag of pills and knives" he was so important to the settlement that for a time the place that became Jefferson was known as "Doctor Habersham's" (202).
In "Hand upon Waters" the insurance company doctor who examines Lonnie Grinnup in Mottstown "had never seen Lonnie Grinnup before, but he had known Tyler Ballenbaugh for years," and so has no qualms about qualifying Lonnie for the policy that Tyler pays for (77).
The second of the two unnamed doctors in Sanctuary is the Florida doctor whom Popeye's mother consults about her sickly child; he tells her to "feed him eggs cooked in olive oil" (305). (It is possible that Faulkner is making a strange and subversive reference to the cartoon characters Popeye and Olive Oyl; both these E. C. Segar characters had appeared in newspapers at least two years before Sanctuary was published.)
The first of the two unnamed doctors who appear in Sanctuary is the Jefferson physician who attends Ruby's child; after her child has a bad night in the hotel, Ruby tells Horace that "I finally got the doctor" (135). The doctor who appears in all three previous Yoknapatawpha novels is named Peabody, described as the fattest man in Yoknapatawpha County, but this doctor is someone else, "a young man with a small black bag" whom Horace obviously has never seen before (135).
