Rafe MacCallum

One of the six sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust, and of the five sons of Anse McCallum in "The Tall Men," and the twin brother of Stuart, Rafe appears in more texts - five - than any of his brothers. In Flags he is an old friend of the Sartoris twins, John and Bayard, and tries to help Bayard with his pain by offering homemade whiskey and a chance to talk about the war. He is only mentioned in As I Lay Dying as the twin brother of the MacCallum (Stuart) whose first name Samson can't remember (119). In "The Tall Men" he remains largely silent, but when he shakes hands with the outsider in the room where his brother Buddy lies seriously injured, the hand he offers is "hard enough, but the grasp quite limp, quite cold" (47). In "Knight's Gambit" the fact that he "had bred and raised and trained and sold horses all his life" and "knew more about horses probably than any man in the country" becomes relevant when he unknowingly sells a weapon - a very dangerous horse - to a potential murderer (176), an episode that is recalled in The Mansion, the last text in which he figures. Like all but one of his brothers, he is named for a Confederate hero: Raphael Semmes, the Confederate naval officer who commanded the Alabama during the Civil War.