Antagonist
Character Role Analysis
William "Fix" Boutan
No matter how you look at it and any way that you slice it, old Fix is bad news. We know it from the very beginning, when Janey first finds out from Snookum just why it is that Candy wants all of the old men to gather down at Mathu's place:
"What Candy want with them down at the quarters?"
"Something to do with Mathu and Beau. Beau laying on his back in Mathu's yard. And Mathu squatting there with that shotgun."
Janey's face changed quick. She was mad at first, now she was scared. (1.51-3)
Snookum might not be able to process the reason why Janey suddenly looks so scared, but Janey doesn't leave anything to the imagination. "Boy, you know what this mean?" she asks Snookum. "Mean Fix coming here with his drove. You too young to know Fix, but I know Fix" (1.60). Right away, we know that Fix means trouble. In fact, there's a good chance that if it had been somebody else besides Beau who wound up dead, people wouldn't be nearly as terrified. But everybody around those parts knows, as Lou so colorfully expresses it, that Fix is "going to demand […] blood" as payment for the death of his son (8.60).
Sure, Fix decides not to collect that gruesome payment, but there's no denying that he is one awful human being, if you could even call him a human being at all.
Luke Will
As if it's not bad enough we've had to worry about Fix and just how much hell he was going to raise for most of the novel, the fact we've got to deal with somebody like Luke Will is even worse. Don't misunderstand what we're saying. Fix is one foul dude, and he has done some seriously evil stuff. But every dog has his day, and—fortunately for us and the rest of the folks out at Marshall—Fix is forced to accept that his day has come and gone.
Luke Will, on the other hand, is still a serious force for evil. Not only does he take orders from the Ku Klux Klan, and seem to seriously enjoy terrorizing and brutalizing innocent people of color, Luke Will is a redneck bigot who is so downright despicable and rotten that even other redneck bigots are afraid of him. At one point, Luke almost throws Tee Jack a beating for even implying that nothing is going to happen to the folks responsible for killing Beau (13.77). We're certainly not fans of Tee Jack, but that doesn't make Luke Will any less vicious, mean, and nasty than he is, and he is definitely all of those things.