Billy Faulconer

Billy Faulconer is Will Robie’s old friend and high-school football teammate, remembered first as a giant on the gridiron and encountered again near the end of his life as a gravely diminished man. His story binds their shared athletic past to Cantrell’s racial order, and turns his concern for Angie and Little Bill into a final measure of what he hopes to leave behind. At his funeral, the contrast between his former stature and the fragile body Robie carries to burial gives the loss a physical weight; the young white mourners gathered around his son also suggest that the town may not be entirely fixed in its old ways.

Identity and Background

When Robie finds him in a dim room, Billy recognizes him in a weak voice: “Son of a bitch, Will Robie,” Billy had once been one of the largest people Robie knew growing up. Now he looks, in Robie’s comparison, as if he has been deflated to barely a third of his former size. The changed body makes illness visible before either man has to explain it. Billy’s presumed terminal lung cancer places this reunion close to the end of his life, while the room’s small table, crowded with dirty plates and cups, offers an ordinary, unpolished setting for a meeting shaped by extraordinary change.

Billy’s recollection of Cantrell’s football years carries a specific social contradiction. During the season, people came to cheer the team and treated black and white players alike. When football ended, that temporary equality ended too: Billy was again marked as black and shunned by white society. The memory does not erase the town’s discrimination; it locates the exception within a bounded season, shared competition, and the collective excitement of the games. Billy’s life thus connects an intimate friendship with a racial divide that returns as soon as the players leave the field.

Friendship with Will Robie

The two men recover their friendship by reconstructing plays rather than by offering broad declarations about the past. Billy asks Robie to remember a second-quarter goal-line play in the state championship. Robie recalls the sequence in detail: a read-option right, a faked handoff and pitch, then his run left as Billy crashed down at the end and pancaked the outside linebacker. Robie scored standing up, just as their coach had drawn it on the board. Billy’s prompt gives Robie room to demonstrate that the play has remained in his memory, and the recollection restores them, for a moment, to the coordination and confidence of their younger selves.

Billy presses him to remember a third-quarter play as well, calling it his own moment of glory. He had spotted that the defense was overcommitting to the run, with the outside linebacker and strong safety cheating toward the box. Back on the field, Billy made himself eligible as a receiver. Robie faked a sweep, pulled the ball back, and lofted a pass into the end zone; Billy caught it in his large hands and then fell on his backside. The comic ending matters alongside the tactical detail. These are not simply highlights of victory but a shared story whose humor both men know how to complete. Robie smiles as he remembers, and Billy’s insistence that he remember makes their old teamwork an active connection in the present.

Family, Decline, and Provision

Billy’s concern turns from the past to Little Bill’s future. He says his son is doing all right but needs to get out of the place where they live. Billy hopes he can help make that possible: he has paid the premiums on a life-insurance policy so that the money will go to Little Bill and Angie. His attention is directed toward their security after his death, not toward a future he expects to share with them. He describes Little Bill as smart and especially capable with computers, while admitting that he himself does not even know how to turn one on. The practical contrast gives the plan a personal shape: Billy sees abilities in his son that he cannot claim for himself and wants the insurance money to help the younger man use them elsewhere.

Robie later brings a six-pack to Billy’s house. Billy drinks one beer, says, “Damn, that tastes good,” and tries to crush the can against his forehead, a gesture associated with his former strength. He cannot finish the job; the partly crumpled can falls to the floor. The failed flourish sharply contrasts the big man of the football memories with the weakened person before Robie. Its force comes from the visible limit of his strength, not from any stated explanation of what the gesture means to Billy.

Death and Funeral

By the time Robie and Jessica Reel return to the Willows, Little Bill is waiting on the porch with red, puffy eyes. His grief signals Billy’s death before the funeral chapter confirms it. On the day of the service, the heat is so intense that the flowers droop, as do many of the mourners. The gathering includes both black and white attendees. Robie first wonders why so many white people have come, then notices that many are young and that they have gathered around Little Bill to offer condolences. His thought that there may be hope grows out of that particular sight: not proof that Cantrell’s racial history has disappeared, but an image of a younger generation meeting Billy’s son with sympathy.

Robie volunteers as a pallbearer. Even with his injured arm, he finds the coffin depressingly easy to lift, an immediate measure of how far Billy’s body had declined from the player who once loomed over the field. As he passes Jessica Reel, the two exchange a look around the question of whether people like them will receive a funeral when their own time comes. The service therefore holds two kinds of loss together: Billy’s death and the uncertainty surrounding the lives of those who carry out dangerous work. A black minister speaks, then Angie and Little Bill say a few words. The coffin is lowered into the earth, and people drift away. The burial follows a ritual the narration presents without consolation: the living leave the dead behind and continue until their own turn comes.

Narrative Role and Significance

Billy’s place in Robie’s story is made through recurrence and contrast. The championship plays restore their shared past in exact movements and comic detail; the crushed beer can and the light coffin reveal the bodily decline that the memories cannot undo. His insurance policy is another form of continuity, an effort to provide for Angie and Little Bill after his own life ends. These details keep him from being only a recollection of a once-great athlete: he remains a father making plans, a friend recognized by Robie, and a man whose strength has limits.

The funeral extends Billy’s significance beyond the friendship. The crowd’s mixture of black and white mourners recalls the temporary inclusion of football season, but the young white people offering comfort to Little Bill suggest a different, more personal possibility. Robie’s hope is cautious and attached to what he sees, not to a claim that Cantrell has overcome its history. Billy’s life and burial thus set a shared athletic memory against enduring racial exclusion, and a community’s small gesture of condolence against the finality of the grave.