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Iced Tea & Bourbon. Bill's drinking was such common gossip in Oxford that when he tried to organize a Boy Scout troop one winter he was denounced as unfit by the minister of the Baptist Church. But most of his drunks, says Brother John, were just play acting. He would go for weeks without taking a drink and then a call would come from his wife Estelle that it was time to come and "sober Billie up." That job usually fell to Mother Faulkner, a tiny, fiercely energetic woman who understood Billie's desire to be waited on. Once she devised the ruse of serving him iced tea laced with whisky in gradually diminishing amounts. When he mumbled that he could not get up because he was drunk, she told him that he had been drinking plain tea for twelve hours; Billie climbed out of bed and went to work.
Long before Father Faulkner settled into retirement after a random career as farmer, freight agent, owner of a livery stable and finally treasurer of the University of Mississippi, Bill had become the patriarch of the clan. The role suited him ideally. He cultivated a patriarchal mustache, dispensed eggnog to his cousins every Christmas morning and justice to a flock of Negro family retainers (including a hunting companion known as "Right Now For Bear" Doolie) the year round.
Bill was never one to talk much about his writing, and his brother has very little to say about it beyond the fact that the critics have read too many complexities into it and that Bill wrote about "the worst side of the South" only because "he wrote what people will believe, for that's what they will pay to read, and even a writer has to make money." His father was deeply disappointed in Sanctuary, John adds: the elder Faulkner had always hoped that Bill would write westerns.