Buck McCaslin

Theophilus "Uncle Buck" McCaslin is a son of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the twin brother of Amodeus McCaslin, and the father of Ike McCaslin, who was born into his father's old age when Buck, after eluding Sophonsiba Beauchamp's determination to marry him in the novel's first chapter and a bachelor "past fifty and then sixty" (248), is somehow trapped - their wedding takes place offstage. Buck is "the one who ran the plantation and the farming of it" while his brother "did the housework and the cooking" (248). After being bed-ridden for some time, he dies several months after Buddy in 1873 (260). Ike seems to have no clear memories of his father; Buck is more vividly described from the perspective of Ike's cousin Cass in the novel's opening chapter, "Was." But when at age sixteen Ike tries to learn more about his own "flesh and blood" by reading the ledgers, the records of the McCaslin plantation which Buck and his brother kept, it is from "the yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink" in the handwriting of his father and his uncle (248) that he discovers the horrific injustice that all three McCaslins inherit from the "evil and unregenerate" man who founded the family (280). Ike's response to that sin is at the center of the novel's narrative, but Buck's response is never made clear.