Ada Rogers

Spouse of Joseph Carter, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

The black bag that Ada Rogers carried for fifty years held the usual things: a roll of lint, a bottle of carbolic, a pair of curved needles and a thermometer in a leather case. It also held, in a pocket stitched into the lining by her own hand, a small tin of silver nitrate and a length of silk thread that had been boiled in vinegar and blessed by no one. She was born in 1891 in Phoenix, Arizona, and worked as a nurse in the hospitals and sickrooms of Phoenix and Los Angeles until she was past seventy. In 1915 she married the railway clerk and vampire slayer Joseph Carter, The Proud Drover, and they had two daughters, Thelma Faulkner Carter and Lorraine Faulkner Carter, of whom the younger became a slayer. She died in 1975 of heart failure, aged eighty-four. She was not born to the Faulkner bloodline and belonged to no house of the Ledger, and she was not a hunter, nor ever claimed to be. But for forty-two years of widowhood and eighteen of marriage she mended the people who were, and the western chapter of the Red Ledger, which descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, regarded her stitches as the best on the coast. Phoenix in 1891 was a territorial town of some three thousand people on the flat floor of the Salt River Valley, with adobe houses, wooden sidewalks, a brick courthouse and a great many irrigation ditches lined with cottonwoods. The canals that the settlers had dug on the old Hohokam channels brought the river out over the desert, and the town lived by the water. Ada's father, a canal rider whose business it was to ride the banks and watch for breaks, was a lean, sun-dried, taciturn man who looked at the water as other men looked at a wife, and her mother took in boarders and sewing. She was the third of five, and the one who was always found, at dusk, with a wounded animal. She doctored the cats. She splinted a sparrow's wing with a matchstick and a thread. At nine, when a ditch rider's boy was gored by a cow, it was Ada, who was the only person within two hundred yards who did not scream, who held the wound shut with both hands until the doctor came. The doctor, who thought her a very odd child, asked what she meant to be. She said that she had not decided and would let him know. She trained at the hospital kept by the Sisters of Mercy on the north side of the town, a long, white, cool building with deep porches where the consumptives lay in rows of chairs and the territory's workers, cowboys, miners and railwaymen, were mended after accidents. It was a hard school. The Sisters, who held that a nurse's first duty was to the patient and her second to the clock, taught her to make a bed in ninety seconds, to take a pulse without looking at her watch and to say nothing whatever of what was said in her hearing. She learned to lance and to dress, to wash the dead and to sit with the dying. She learned, from a stout Irish nun with a shrewd tongue, that a hospital is a place where people are at their least dishonest. By twenty-one she was a graduate, with a cap, a pin and a reputation for steadiness among the surgeons. She met Joseph in the spring of 1913, when the Arizona Eastern sent a new rate clerk out from Los Angeles and he came, in the third week, to the hospital to see about a case of freight. She was there on an errand for the Mother Superior. He had the wrong ward. She told him so, and told him also that the date on his paper was wrong, and he checked it and found that she was right. A lean, sunburnt, courteous man with a pencil behind each ear, he asked her to supper. She said that she was on nights. He said that he would wait, and he did, for two years, at a boarding-house table, on a church step, on the platform of the depot on the days that she left to nurse in the country. She said later that he was the only man she knew who could wait without being a nuisance. They were married in Los Angeles in 1915, in a small church, in a blue serge suit that she had made for him herself. She learned what he was by accident, in the winter of 1916, and she took it like a nurse. He came home at three in the morning with a gashed forearm and a dead man's coat on his arm. The gash was a wound that she could not make sense of, a ragged, bloodless slash, and she cleaned it, and sutured it, and said not a word until it was done. Then she asked him what had made it. He told her, at the kitchen table, in the sort of order in which he would have sent a report, and when he had finished she tied off the thread, put the needle in the saucer and asked whether he had eaten. She said afterward that she had known there was something. She had thought that it was another woman. The truth had come, in its way, as a considerable relief. She never hunted. She was a nurse to the end, and she held to it with a stubbornness that her mother-in-law, the schoolteacher and slayer Alice Faulkner, whom she liked very much, described as the most reliable hostility to a stake that she had ever encountered. But she made herself indispensable. A vampire's bite, as she discovered, healed slowly and ill, and the Ledger's hunters were reluctant to take their wounds to a doctor who might ask questions. She asked none. She dressed them in the kitchen at Boyle Heights, on the table, in the small hours, with a lamp and a basin and a gentle, steady hand, and her husband's cousins, the drifters and the clerks and the quiet women who made up the western chapter, left the house with their arms in a sling and a plate of her cornbread in their pockets. She kept a notebook of the wounds, in the Latin of the Sisters, and never wrote a name. The influenza found her at the County Hospital in the autumn of 1918, when she was twenty-seven and had an infant of eight months and a daughter of a year. She went on the isolation ward on the first day, in a gauze mask, and worked fourteen hours at a stretch for six weeks, in a long, bare, high-ceilinged room in which the beds were set so close that a nurse could not walk between them, and she lost, in that time, one hundred and six patients and kept, by her own count, a good many more. She did not catch the disease. It was said by her husband, who left a hot supper under a cloth on the stove every night for six weeks, that she was too busy. Joseph's death in the barn in 1933 was a blow that she received on the steps of the hospital, in her cap, from a sheriff's deputy who had no idea what to say. She said it for him. She went out to Pomona, identified the body and took from his pocket a waybill with the last destination written on it. Then she went back to work. She was a widow of forty-two with two daughters, a house in Boyle Heights and a profession, and the Depression, which emptied the factory floors, filled the wards. She moved from the old building to the great new County General Hospital, which opened that year with a thousand beds, and ran the night shift of a surgical ward for a quarter of a century. She had a ward to run, and she ran it. The younger nurses were frightened of her, and did what they were told. Her younger daughter Lorraine, who had her father's long legs and her father's habit of looking at a trail, was called to the work in her turn, and Ada, who was by then used to it, dressed her wounds as she had dressed her husband's. She said once, to a cousin of the chapter, who had asked how she bore it, that she did not bear it, she simply did it, which in her experience was the same thing without the speech. Thelma, who had become a stenographer in the city and kept a tidy flat, came to supper on Sundays. The three of them, in the evenings, sat in the kitchen with the lamp lit, and Ada, who liked company, was never asked to account for the bag on the dresser. The Korean War came in 1950, and with it the transports of wounded to the veterans' hospital at Sawtelle, in the west of the city. She was fifty-nine. She had no need to go, and went, as a volunteer, three nights a week, on the bus, with her bag, to sit on the wards among boys with shattered legs, and she did it for three years, until the armistice, and for a good many more after, since there was, as she said, no armistice for a wound. She retired in 1962, at seventy-one, from the surgical ward, with a pin and a pension, and took up her knitting. She died in 1975, at eighty-four, of heart failure, in the house in Boyle Heights, in the same kitchen in which she had stitched her husband's arm, with a cup of tea on the table and the bag at her elbow. Her daughters laid her beside Joseph. In the pocket of the bag, when it was opened, they found the tin of silver nitrate, a fresh length of silk thread and a slip of paper on which she had written, in the Sisters' Latin, the date of her last patient. Ada Rogers is remembered in the Faulkner family as the nurse of Boyle Heights, the wife who sewed up a slayer at the kitchen table and asked him only whether he had eaten. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses and healers of the Red Ledger, the women and men with steady hands who never carried a stake and who kept the hunters on their feet, one clean stitch at a time.