Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 16:49
Chlory cooks and keeps house for Judge Allison; the keening she does when he dies is described as "slow billows of soprano sound as mellow as high-register organ tones and wall-shattering as a steamer siren" (782).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 16:41
Judge Howard Allison's only son and namesake is, as the Judge puts it, "the last of my name and race" (789). Young Howard loved riding his pony: "they were inseparable," the Judge says, and he carries a picture of the two of them (790). They boy was killed at the age of ten, found "dragging from the stirrup" of the pony (789). Although he does not appear in the story, one of the inhabitants of Beyond reports seeing him ride by on his pony "every day" (794).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 16:33
The child of a sickly woman, the Judge describes his life this way: "She died when I was fourteen; I was twenty-eight before I asserted myself and took the wife of my choice; I was thirty-seven when my son was born" (790). He is a Federal judge, "a Republican office-holder in a Democratic stronghold" who shares the political leanings of his wife's father and a "great reader" whose "life is a solitary one" (789). He is a lifelong religious skeptic whose doubts have only intensified since his son's death eighteen years ago.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 16:21
The Allison home has housed first the Judge as a boy and a single man, then the Judge and his wife, then the two of them and their son, and the Judge's mother and aunts lived there as well when the Judge was a boy. It is well-kept, tended by two black servants, a housekeeper and a groundskeeper; the furniture is old-fashioned but comfortable and well-made. It is the sort of home that befits "a Republican judge in a Democratic stronghold" (789).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 15:46
Mottstown - or as Faulkner sometimes spells it, Mottson - is the seat of the county on Yoknapatawpha's southern border. It appears frequently in Faulkner's fiction, though this is the only story centered there. As Georgie and his family arrive in the town, they "come down the last hill and into the valley where Mottstown was" (273). Georgie notes the "holly wreaths in the windows" of the houses in town, "like at home in Jefferson" (274).
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 15:31
Georgie lives with his mother and father in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood. Although the family has a black servant named Rosie, it's unclear whether she lives on the property, as his grandfather's cook does.
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 15:13
When Louisa comes from Mottstown to Jefferson, "papa" takes her to this hotel "to eat breakfast" (269). The story stops here only briefly, when Georgie's family picks up his father and Louisa on the way to Grandpa's (270). (Jefferson's main hotel is the Holston House, which often appears in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but the hotel in this story is never identified by name.)
Submitted by tmtowner@utdall... on Sat, 2017-12-30 14:54
When Faulkner created "Kingston" in "That Will Be Fine" (1935) he might have been thinking of "Kinston," the fictional town where Horace Benbow lives in Sanctuary (1931). Kingston is where Rodney catches the "fast train to Memphis" (279). Trains travel directly between Jefferson and Mottstown (like the one that Rosie takes, 276), but to travel from either town to Memphis one has to switch trains, which explains why Rodney "hires a rig" in Mottstown to travel to "the main [railroad] line" that runs through Kingston (279).
