On the way from Jefferson to Mottstown, George stops the carriage "at a branch" that crosses the road in order to soak a handkerchief so that his wife had wipe Aunt Louisa's face (272). ("Branch" is the local term for a creek or small stream.)
Grandpa's cook, Mandy, lives in a cabin "in the back yard" of the big house where her white employer lives (274). The narrator calls it both "Mandy's cabin" and "Mandy's house" (274, 276), but it seems likely that Grandpa owns it. It may have been a slave cabin in the past, like other backyard cabins in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but the story does not explicitly say that. When Rodney is locked inside it, we learn that it has a "door" and at least two "windows" (276).
These two men prevent Georgie from seeing his uncle's corpse. One of these men picks up Georgie and carries him away. This man has a sense of irony worthy of Faulkner himself. When Georgie naively asks if the "wrapped bundle" that other men are carrying (Rodney's corpse, "wrapped in a quilt" and laid on a shutter) is "a Christmas present for Grandpa," this man replies yes, "From all the husbands in Mottstown" (286).
These Mottstown men carry Rodney's body; Georgie says, "I could look back and see the six men in the moonlight carrying the blind with the bundle on it" (286).
Mrs. Jordon is Grandpa's Mottstown neighbor in "That Will Be Fine"; at the end of the story, after Rodney is killed, Rosie is taking Georgie to her house for the night.
Emmeline is the nursemaid for Aunt Louisa's baby. She takes Mandy's place in cooking breakfast, complaining "that she was going to waste all her Christmas doing extra work they never had the sense she give them credit for and that this looked like to her it was a good house to be away from nohow" (279).
Mandy cooks for Grandpa, but she seems to have disappeared the day before Christmas, missing her duties as cook and leaving her cabin mysteriously "locked on the inside" (274).
The wife of the President of the Compress Association in Mottstown is having an affair with Rodney, the uncle of the story's narrator. According to gossip, Mrs. Pruitt would have been an easy conquest for Rodney. However, Rodney's sisters Louisa and Sarah claim that their brother was led astray by Mrs. Pruitt. Their opinion perhaps says more about them than about her, but at least according to Louisa, Mrs. Pruitt is a "Painted common thing, traipsing up and down the streets all afternoon alone in a buggy, and the one and only time Mrs. Church called on her, and that was because of Mr.
After Mrs. Church pays a call on Mrs. Pruitt, she gossips about her with the women of Grandpa's family, saying that she uses too much makeup, does not dress properly, and drinks.
