Henry Dunlap

Henry Dunlap is a lawyer in Meade and the landlord of the farmhouse rented by Willard Russell and Charlotte Russell. His dealings with Willard turn a modest monthly rent into a recurring contest over money and dignity, while his own carefully maintained public authority conceals a marriage in crisis. Willard eventually kills him at his office, making Dunlap’s private collapse and his long antagonism with his tenant converge in a single act of violence.

Identity and Position

Dunlap practices law in Meade and treats real estate as a hobby. He owns the farmhouse on Mitchell Flats that Willard and Charlotte rent for thirty dollars a month. The house is leaky and run-down, but Charlotte grows attached to it and hopes that the couple can eventually buy it. For her, ownership promises the stable home she lacked as a child; she wants Arvin Russell to have a place he can always call home.

Dunlap’s status is visible in the contrast between his circumstances and those of his tenants. He lives near the Meade Country Club, while Willard works at a slaughterhouse and brings rent to Dunlap’s office in hard-earned cash. Dunlap is presented as meticulous in appearance, including his immaculate fingernails, but his polished manner does not make him considerate. His position as landlord lets him decide whether the farmhouse might be sold, and he uses that uncertainty to keep Willard off balance.

The Landlord and Willard Russell

When Dunlap learns that Willard and Charlotte want to buy the farmhouse, he repeatedly changes the terms: one month he raises the price, another he lowers it, and then he suggests that he may not sell at all. The shifting offer gives the couple no dependable path toward ownership. At the same time, when Willard delivers the rent, Dunlap comments on how little the money means to him, comparing it with luxuries such as meat for Sunday dinner or ice cream for his son’s tennis-club friends.

The insults become a monthly pattern. Willard is increasingly tempted to attack Dunlap, but he restrains himself because he imagines Charlotte waiting anxiously at home and fears that a confrontation could leave them evicted. He turns instead to the prayer log he has built in the woods, where he tries to direct his anger into prayer. The contrast is sharp: the lawyer’s office is a place where Dunlap belittles the money Willard has earned, while the woods offer Willard a private means of holding back his hands.

Their relationship briefly changes when Willard arrives late with rent and expects another confrontation. For the first time since the lease was signed six years earlier, Dunlap offers him a drink. Dunlap asks whether Willard is still interested in buying the house; Willard replies that he cannot afford it now because Charlotte is ill. Dunlap expresses sympathy and offers him more scotch. The exchange is more civil than their usual encounters, but it does not erase the years of taunting or the couple’s deteriorating financial prospects.

A Private Crisis

Dunlap’s public bluster conceals a humiliating domestic life. He married Edith Dunlap in 1943, shortly after finishing law school, and came to know of her repeated infidelities. He had long endured them, but his confidence in that arrangement is shaken when he discovers that she is involved with the gardener he hired to replace a younger worker. The discovery leaves him drinking alone at his office and considering what to do.

His first thoughts turn toward lethal possibilities: he takes a small pistol from his desk and contemplates suicide, then considers paying someone to kill Edith. He knows several men who might connect him to a hired killer, but trusts none of them. Rather than act immediately, he puts the gun away and tells himself not to hurry. A few days later, he hires the gardener full-time and gives him a raise. When Edith arrives home, Dunlap and the gardener watch her enter the house and exchange a smile. The gesture follows Dunlap’s effort to postpone a decision, but the scene does not establish exactly what either man intends.

This private narrative complicates Dunlap’s role without excusing his treatment of Willard. He is not simply a powerful landlord secure in his position: he is also a man whose home life has become a source of shame and whose usual confidence fails him when he faces a problem he cannot resolve through professional authority. His response is marked by calculation and delay, just as his dealings with Willard are marked by changing terms and controlled encounters.

Death and Narrative Significance

The final confrontation takes place at night, after Willard has spent the evening driving around and drinking. At about nine thirty he waits near Dunlap’s office, sees the lawyer arrive, and approaches by the alley entrance. Dunlap opens the rear door with a drink in hand and turns back toward his desk. Willard strikes him with a hammer, then confirms that he is dead. He puts on work gloves, drags the body toward the door, rights a bookcase, and cleans up the broken glass and spilled whiskey before taking the keys from Dunlap’s pockets. He leaves more than two hundred dollars from the wallet in a desk drawer.

Dunlap’s killing is the culmination of a relationship shaped by economic humiliation and Willard’s repeatedly restrained anger. The evidence establishes the long buildup and the killing, but does not reduce Willard’s decision to one clearly stated trigger. Dunlap’s moment of apparent courtesy, when he learns how sick Charlotte is, comes late and cannot undo the earlier pattern of insults or the instability surrounding the farmhouse.

The novel also places Dunlap’s violence within a larger story in which private despair and outward authority coexist. His own response to betrayal is hesitant and calculating; Willard’s response to the landlord is ultimately direct and fatal. Dunlap’s death therefore marks both the end of a specific conflict over rent and the failure of the restraint Willard had practiced for years. His character connects the everyday imbalance between a wealthy property owner and a working tenant to the much more consequential violence that follows.