Erin Penner is Associate Professor of English at Asbury University. She is the author of Character and Mourning: Woolf, Faulkner, and the Novel Elegy of the First World War and has written on Faulkner for Studies in the Novel, African-American Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Theresa M. Towner and published by the University of Virginia Press.
Will Varner (sometimes known as Uncle Billy Varner) is a very frequent character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, where he typically plays a major role in the life of Frenchman's Bend. Here, however, he only appears in passing, as the person who gave Tull the hound that is at the center of the story's plot. (He appears or is mentioned in nine Yoknapatawpha fictions, in two of them as "Uncle Billy," and in seven as "Will.")
"The cook" at Killegrews won't lend out any of Killegrew's tools (28). While neither the gender nor the race of "the cook" - as the published story refers to her twice (28) - is specified, all but one of the 'cooks' in Yoknapatawpha are women and all of them are black. (And in the typescript version of "Shingles" she is referred to, twice, as the "nigger cook.")
The Killegrews are neighbors to the Griers. Pap blames the fact that "Mrs. Killigrew was worser deaf than even Killegrew" for his tardiness in reporting for work at the church (28).
