Miss Nancy Sawyer

Miss Nancy Sawyer is the neighbor whose unglamorous charity keeps Shocky housed and fed, drawing quiet criticism from Aunt Matilda for neglecting the means of grace to wait on everybody. Her willingness to take in a pauper child, and her readiness to fetch his half-blind mother, exposes the gap between Flat Creek's professed Christianity and its practiced stinginess. She matters because her small mercies give Ralph a moral ally and Shocky a refuge while the schoolmaster's own troubles gather.