The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The metal gate that separates the Compson house from the street that runs past it and into town has been kept locked since Benjy was a child so that he cannot "escape." But he regularly goes down to the gate, first to wait for the young Caddy coming home from school (6), then, after she grows up and marries, to watch other school girls going past the house on their way home. This gate is accidentally left unlocked one day when Benjy is about 17-years-old, allowing him to get into the street where he tries to talk to a young girl named Burgess.

For at least some of the time the Compson children are growing up, their Uncle Maury is having an affair of some kind with Mrs. Patterson, the married woman who lives next door. The first memory that appears in Benjy's section is of him and Caddie carrying a note from their uncle to her just before Christmas, 1903; they cross the frozen "branch" (or creek) and walk through "the brown, rattling flowers" in the Pattersons' garden that lies alongside their house. Later Maury sends Benjy with notes by himself; on the occasion Benjy recalls doing that, it is not winter and Mr.

During the years covered by the Benjy's and Quentin's memories, the barn at the back of the Compson place contains a number of horses and cows, with a pen next to it for the family's pigs. By the time Benjy passes it in 1928, the "stalls are all open" and the "roof is falling" apart (12), though the aged horse Queenie is still there someplace.

This is the tree that Benjy refers to as "the flower tree" (3).