Brother J.C. Goodyhay

A former "Marine sergeant" (295) who, after seeing a vision of Jesus during a battle in the Pacific, comes back to the U.S. to run a religious community out of his ramshackle house. His wife reportedly "ran off" with a salesman while Goodyhay was at war (294). He is described in The Mansion as "a lean quick-moving man in the middle thirties with coldly seething eyes and the long upper lip of a lawyer or an orator and the long chin of the old-time comic strip Puritan" (293). According to his mailbox, Goodyhay's initials are "J C" (292), which links him to the Jesus Christ he sees in his vision - and also to Faulkner's Joe Christmas. In Christmas' case, the association with Jesus seems essentially ironic, but Goodyhay is one of the few preachers in the fictions whom Faulkner treats with respect.