Bill Barnes

Bill Barnes is the farmer’s son at Yew Tree Farm, where Sunday Small takes indoor work after hearing that the farmer needs help. Rather than offering her security, the household brings a new form of danger: Bill treats Sunday’s presence and labour as grounds for sexual and domestic entitlement, while she repeatedly has to defend her boundaries. Her resistance makes him a sharply defined source of conflict in the farm episode, though the evidence does not establish what becomes of him after her escape.

Identity and Arrival

Bill Barnes enters the story when his father comes into the room where Sunday is working, accompanied by his son and a blast of cold air. Sunday has already approached the farmer at the market, weeks earlier, after hearing he was seeking indoor help. She disliked him then, and Bill’s arrival does nothing to reassure her: she judges the young man no friendlier than his father. The farmer identifies him as his son, establishing Bill’s place in the household and his connection to the employer who controls Sunday’s working conditions.

Sunday tries to begin without provoking trouble. She serves the two men bowls of stew and bread, and tells herself that circumstances might improve with time. That hope is tested almost immediately by Bill’s attention to her. His watching makes her feel exposed, but she inclines her head politely, choosing caution rather than confrontation. The contrast between her careful manners and his unwelcome scrutiny sets the terms of their relationship: she is the new worker trying to keep her position, while he behaves as if her presence makes her available to him.

Harassment at the Farm

During the month Sunday remains at Yew Tree Farm, she comes close more than once to packing her things and leaving. Bill’s over-familiar conduct is a central reason. When she is carrying pots to the sink, he pinches her. She sets the pots down on the large wooden draining board, turns back, and slaps him across the face. The gesture is an unmistakable attempt to stop him, but it does not have the result she wants: he laughs and treats her show of resistance as amusing. Sunday stalks back to her room, increasingly detesting him as the days pass.

The episode shows that a direct refusal does not make Bill reconsider. Instead, he interprets Sunday’s anger as evidence of spirit and carries on as if her objections are a form of play. His mother, Selah Barnes, further exposes the household’s assumption that Sunday might be absorbed into it through marriage. When Sunday comes back downstairs after ensuring Bill has gone out, Selah suggests that he might eventually put a ring on Sunday’s finger and that the men will need someone to keep house after Selah is gone. The remark treats Sunday’s domestic labour as a path to becoming the household’s unpaid replacement caretaker, not as a reason to respect her independence.

Proposal and Refusal

Bill makes the prospect explicit when Sunday comes downstairs dressed in her best clothes. He presents marriage as if he were doing her a favour, citing her thinness and workhouse upbringing as disadvantages he might overlook while praising her as a good worker. His proposal therefore repeats the same imbalance as his treatment at work: he evaluates Sunday according to her usefulness and presumed social inferiority, while expecting her to welcome his choice as an offer of security.

Sunday recognizes the presumption and asks icily whether he is proposing marriage. Bill confirms it and waits confidently for an answer, swaggering as though she will accept. She does not. She says that she is not ready to marry anyone, rejecting not only Bill but the idea that his decision or household circumstances should determine her future. The refusal is particularly significant because the farm offers her few comforts and she has already considered leaving; even so, she does not treat marriage to Bill as an escape from precarious employment.

Intrusion and Resistance

Bill’s conduct escalates after Sunday has made her refusal clear. While she is changing in the attic, he appears at the top of the ladder and watches her. She angrily demands to know what he is doing and grabs her dress to cover herself. He brushes aside her objection by invoking the possibility that they might be married, as though a marriage he has proposed and she has rejected would give him a right to her body. Sunday again tells him to go away. The scene makes his entitlement explicit without making his presumption a fact: she has not consented to marriage, and she is trying to make him leave.

Later, Sunday wakes in the dark to the sound of someone climbing the ladder. She suspects Bill and searches for something to defend herself with; the only object available is one of her old work boots. When his head appears at the top, she strikes it with the boot. Bill loses his grip and falls back to the floor below. The act reverses their positions: the worker previously cornered by his advances uses what she has to prevent his entry. Selah opens her bedroom door and limps toward her son, but the supplied account does not say whether Bill faces any further consequence.

Bill’s part in Sunday’s story is defined by the repeated gap between her clear refusals and his assumption that he may persist. The pinching, derisive response to her slap, unwanted proposal, and intrusion into the attic form a progression from workplace harassment to an immediate threat to her privacy. Sunday’s boot is not a resolution supplied by the household or its employer; it is her own improvised defence. The narrative thus presents her departure from Yew Tree Farm as a matter of self-protection as well as choice, while leaving Bill’s subsequent fate unspecified.