Although the man who becomes Ike's partner in the carpentry business is never named in Go Down, Moses, the description of him is very vivid: he is a "blasphemous profane clever dipsomaniac who had built blockade-runners in Charleston in '62 and '3," who "appeared in Jefferson two years ago nobody knew from where" (295). Ike takes care of him when he succombs to drink, and the man helps to build a "bungalow" in town (297) as a wedding present for Ike.
One of the "sons of [Ike McCaslin's] old [hunting] companions" (268), Boyd is a leader of the party of younger hunters in "Delta Autumn"; he has "the youngest face of them all, darkly aquiline, handsome and ruthless and saturnine" (268). The story reveals his ruthlessness in several ways, beginning with his driving and ending with his abandonment of the woman he had an affair with and the child they conceived together. He seems to think money can settle his moral and emotional debts.
In "Two Soldiers" the ticket salesman in the Jefferson bus depot gives the Grier boy "a ticket out of my own pocket," considering the gesture something of a civic matter (92). He seems understandably anxious to get rid of the boy, who pulls a knife on him earlier. The boy notes that "he could move quicker than any grown man I ever see" (90).
The younger of two Jefferson women in "Two Soldiers" who take charge of the young Grier boy and help him get to Memphis. She may simply be a concerned member of the community (the "fur coat" she wears suggests a lady rather than a public employee, 91) but she does carry a "hand satchel" with papers in it, and tells the boy "we must have a case history for our files" (91).
"The fellow in the radio talking" - this is how the narrator of "Two Soldiers" refers to the announcer who reports on the bombing of Pearl Harbor (81).
The narrator of "Two Soldiers" notes that "more folks" arrive at the Jefferson bus depot and buy tickets for the bus to Memphis that he is waiting to take (92).
When Mrs. McKellogg takes the young vernacular narrator of "Two Soldiers" back to what he calls "her house" (obviously, an apartment house, 97), he notes that the "little room without nothing in it" (obviously an elevator) is operated by "a nigger dressed up in a uniform a heap shinier than them soldiers had" (obviously the operator, 97). With the exception of the narrator's reference to Negro cabins on the outskirts of Jefferson (88), the Negro employees of the apartment building provide the story's only (linguistically racist) mention of race.
These "Japanese" should be understood to be 'the enemy' that the U.S. in fighting in the Pacific theater of World War Two. The young narrator of "Two Soldiers" as well as his mother refer to the people who attacked Pearl Harbor as "them Japanese" (81, 84). In the later story "Shall Not Perish," the same narrator, a year older, refers to the country's enemy and the forces responsible for his brother's death as "them Japs" (101).
In "Two Soldiers," when the Grier boy arrives at the place in Memphis where "folks join the Army" (9) - i.e. the Memphis recruiting station - he sees "two fellers standing . . . and some more folks there, I reckon . . . It seems to me I remember some more folks there" (94). The iteration seems Faulkner's way of suggesting how many young men are responding to their country's need in a time of war.
