Road West of Burden Place (Location Key)

In the Yoknapatawpha fictions Faulkner seldom uses the road that runs west out of Jefferson, but in Light in August it is along this road that Joe initially travels after killing Joanna. Its shape is described when the car that carries him "sways on the curves and up the hills and fleeing down again" (284). There is a smaller road that turns off from it, where Joe gets out of the car; when the sheriff's posse returns to this place we learn that nearby are "a small creek and a ridge" (298). Joe asks two different people where the road goes; the first time he is told the "next town" is "'bout thirty miles" away, but the town is never named (227, 283-84). The "countryman" who discovers the fire and the murder at the Burden house is "coming to town in a wagon" with his family on this road (90).