The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The location of Tull's farm here is about where Faulkner himself put it on his 1936 map of Yoknapatawpha. It does not appear directly in the narrative, but it can help us place the story's other locations. Since the narrator sees his father, Res Grier, ride off from the "board tree" to Tull's, where he makes a deal with Tull involving the dog they both own and the work they have promised the church, and arrive back at the tree just as the noon break ends, the church must be fairly close to the farm.

The Armstids' farm is close enough to the church for the men who are splitting shingles to hear when its bell rings for lunch. Armstid sees Res Grier's lantern on the church roof from his back lot, and arrives at the building soon after the fire starts.

All we can say for certain about the location of Solon Quick's farm is that it is twenty-two miles by road from Jefferson. Almost certainly it is further from the Frenchman's Bend church than the farms of the story's other characters, since Quick drives there in the "school-bus truck" that he made himself (17). All we can say for sure about the farm itself is that Quick himself owns it. In other stories the farmers in the Frenchman's Bend area are often described as share-croppers, tenants of Will Varner, but in this story it seems most of the farmers, though poor, do own their land.

The story says that Solon Quick drove the twenty-two miles to town every morning for a week looking for a job with the New Deal's Works Progress Administration. This was a federal program, but its offices may have been located in the county courthouse - the imposing building at the center of Jefferson that appears in many of the Yoknapatawpha fictions.

The "board tree" where most of the narrative takes place is probably a cedar or a pine. Res Grier, Solon Quick and Homer Bookwright spend (most of) the day splitting shingles from blocks - "bolts" - cut from the tree's trunk. Shingles split from straight-grained wood with a froe (also spelled "frow," and named from the to-and-fro motion by which a shingle is split off from the bolt) were a common roofing material in rural areas.

The narrator of the story calls it simply "the church," without telling us its name. Nor does he specify the form of Protestantism that Rev. Whitfield preaches, though the way the story calls attention to the "long nightshirt he would wear to baptize in" suggests he is a Baptist (40). The narrator lists Armstids, Tulls, Bookwrights, Quicks, Snopeses and Griers as the families that "belonged to that church and used it to be born and marry and die from" (41).

Res Grier rides his mule to "Killegrews" twice during the story, but the narrative never goes there, and the only real cue to its location we have is that is should take "forty minutes" to ride there, borrow a tool and ride back (17). At this farm live Old Man Killegrew (who is seventy years old), his wife and a cook. Killegrew's age suggests he may no longer be working the farm, and the presence of the cook in this part of the county, where very few of the families have domestic servants, suggests he may be a bit better off than his neighbors.

According to the story "Shall Not Perish," published half a year after this one, the seventy-acre farm from which Res Grier and his wife and son eke a living growing corn has been owned by the Grier family for at least several generations. It seems exceptionally poor, even by the standards of Frenchman's Bend. Res himself admits, a bit hyperbolically, that "I don't own anything there that even I would borrow" (34), and at different points in the story has to borrow both a froe and a crowbar from neighbors. The family does have a mule and at least one cow.