Jack|Zack Houston's Land (Location Key)

Although Faulkner changes Houston's first name between texts, he describes Houston's farm essentially the same way in all 4 of them. The Hamlet goes into the most detail about it. There it is located in "the hills," at least "a mile" away from the "rich, broad, flat river-bottom country" where the hamlet sits (190). Houston grew up there, in his parents' "old pre-Civil War house" - described "too big for three" people, but "no mansion, owning no columns" (237). After an absence from Yoknapatawpha he returns to marry, building a "new house on a new site nearer the road" (238). His property includes a milking-shed, a stable, and the pasture with a creek and a ravine in it where Mink Snopes' calf spends a winter. This is also the pasture where Ike Snopes lies in the dew amid "the waking life of grasses and listens for her approach" (182). 'She' is a cow, and Ike's affair with 'her' turns the pasture into a different kind of place, somewhere between idyll and pornography, the romantic and the grotesque. To get back to the Houston's farm: the other three texts all agree that Houston owns it, and that it's prosperous.