Gavin refers to the women - groups of "four or five or six ladies in sunbonnets" who live on "back-country roads" (240) - as the customers to whom Ratliff sells sewing machines, and from whom he has learned how to listen. Gavin's use of "ladies" is generous; these are the wives of the poor farmers who inhabit Yoknapatawpha's "back-country" in the fictions.
When the furniture store owner in Memphis asks Flem about his "background," Flem says he had a grandfather, "because everybody had"; he adds that he never knew the man, but "whoever he was he never owned enough furniture for a room" (233).
As County Attorney, Gavin reports to "the Board of Supervisors"; these men don't appear in the novel, but he does think of them, facetiously, docking his pay for writing a personal letter on county "letterhead" (223).
