Walter is Willy Christian's janitor in The Town. "His grandfather had belonged to Uncle Willy's grandfather before the Surrender" (167). He and Willy have a lot in common, according to Charles Mallison, except that "if anything Walter was a little more irascible," and instead of morphine, Walter has a weakness for the store's "medicinal alcohol" (167).
As 'Uncle Willy' this drugstore owner appears in two other novels, and is the title character of the short story "Uncle Willy." In The Reivers, however, only his last name appears, in a passing reference to "Christian's drug store" (14).
General Burgoyne was a British commander who, as Eula puts it in The Town, "surrendered in the Revolution" after his forces were surrounded by a superior force of colonial soldiers (338). Historically his defeat had important results for the cause of American independence; in the novel, his surrender made V.K. Ratliff's ancestor the family's first American.
Ephriam Bishop is the county sheriff in The Mansion when Mink is released from prison. He and Hub Hampton alternate being Sheriff every four years. (In The Town one of Linda Snopes' suitors is referred to as "the youngest Bishop" boy, but neither novel makes any connection between these two Bishops.)
In The Town this unnamed Bishop "boy" is one of Linda's adolescent admirers and escorts during her last year in high school (222). He is identified as "the youngest Bishop," but the novel says nothing about the others in his family (222). (In The Mansion a man named Ephriam Bishop is the sheriff.)
Preacher Birdsong is a World War I veteran who "learned to box in France in the war" (192). He "lives out in the country," and likely is connected to the Birdsong family in Frenchman's Bend that appears in two other texts - but that's not made explicit. "Preacher" is his name, not a job title. Charles Mallison has seen him boxing with Matt Levitt.
In The Town Henry Best is the loudest and most exasperated man in Stevens' meeting with the town's aldermen to settle the questions raised by the stolen brass.
In The Town Adams is the Jefferson mayor who precedes Manfred de Spain in the office: "the mayor with a long patriarchal white beard, who probably seemed to young people like Cousin Gowan older than God Himself, until he might actually have been the first man" (11).
The mother of Theron Adams in The Town is the "old fat wife" of Mayor Adams (11). To the younger people in Jefferson, she and her aged husband are disparagingly called Adam and "Miss Eve Adam" - a "fat old Eve" too old to tempt or be tempted (11).
