Hait

Mrs. Hait is one of Faulkner's more memorable women, but her "defunct husband" is harder to get into focus (252). Everyone in town learns that he has been helping I.O. Snopes cheat the insurance companies for a while when his "mangled remains," along with "the mangled mules and savage fragments of new rope," are recovered from the tracks beside his house after a train accident (253). Beyond these remains, however, and the $8500 that his widow collects on his death, and the "man's felt hat" that belonged to him and that she still wears ten years later (250), and her undying resentment toward mules and I.O., nothing of Hait himself appears in the story.