Killigrew is seventy years old, and prosperous enough to have a cook. He hunts foxes the old-fashioned way, which in Faulkner's Mississippi means "squatting on a hill" rather than riding to the hounds (27).
The one member of the Snopes family who appears in the story is not given a first name, and only given two minor roles to play: he brings the ladder to the church in his wagon (38), and is among the members of the congregation who are there to watch as the church burns down (41).
Unlike "Mrs. Tull" in As I Lay Dying, in this story Tull's unnamed wife never says a word. In fact, she only appears here because the narrator pluralizes "Tulls" when he lists the people who "was all there now," at the site of the burned church (41).
While Faulkner does not give Mrs. Armstid a first name in this story, elsewhere he gives her two different ones. She is called Lula in As I Lay Dying, and Martha in Light in August. She's probably her husband's "better half," but she should not be equated with these other Mrs. Armstids.
A silent member of the group of people who gather at the church the morning after it burns down, he is identified only by his last name. But it's likely that Faulkner is thinking of Henry Armstid, an important character in "Spotted Horses" and The Hamlet.
An offstage figure in this tale, Vernon Tull is a Frenchman Bend farmer who reappears or is mentioned often in Faulkner's fiction. Here, Res Grier and Solon Quick run their contest through him.
Homer Bookwright is a member of the church in Frenchman's Bend and part of the group re-shingling its roof. He is mostly a silent observer of the narrative's proceedings.
The narrator's "Maw" seems always to know the immediate and long-term needs of the people around her. In this story, she nurses her husband with liniment and toddy.
A small farmer, Quick also drives the "school-bus truck" (27) - a bus he made by customizing the body of a truck - that takes the children of Frenchman's Bend to school during the week and the people of Frenchman's Bend to town on Saturdays. He thinks he's learned a few tricks from President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration that will help him make a new deal for himself, but he has a challenging opponent in Res Grier.
Whitfield is a much more attractive figure in this story than in As I Lay Dying, the text by which most readers know him. The magisterial Baptist minister makes his wishes plain to the Almighty in prayer and to his parishioners, such as Res Grier, by chastising them. To the narrator, the way Whitfield stands there among his congregation and amid the ashes of a building is a sign that maybe "there was something that even that fire hadn't even touched" (42).
