William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem comprises two alternately interleafed strands, The Wild Palms and Old Man. The Wild Palms concerns the travails of Harry Wilbourne, an unmarried twenty-six-year-old, and Charlotte Rittenmeyer, a married twenty-seven-year-old. Charlotte, who has two young daughters, leaves her husband Francis for erstwhile medical intern Harry, but Francis refuses Charlotte a divorce. Charlotte falls pregnant during her relationship with Harry. She persuades Harry to perform an abortion. The procedure is both a success and a failure: he aborts the fetus, but inadvertently kills Charlotte. Old Man concerns the travails of an unmarried twenty-five-year-old prisoner from Parchman State Penitentiary, Mississippi, and a pregnant woman of similar age whose marital status remains unknown. The narrative grants neither of these characters a proper name: he remains the tall convict; she remains anonymous. The prisoner, while conscripted into the emergency response to the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, rescues the woman from the spate. She gives birth while in the tall convict’s care. He manages to bring her and her newborn to safety. On returning to the penitentiary, however, the authorities add another ten years to his sentence, covering up their earlier official acceptance of his death with the charge of attempted escape.