Albert Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Albert Faulkner was born in 1807 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and worked for thirty years as a ship's carpenter and housewright on the Essex County coast. He was the younger child of the teamster Daniel Sevier and the midwife and vampire slayer Sally Faulkner Hale, known in the Red Ledger as The Bitter Sentinel, and the younger brother of the schoolteacher Ida Faulkner. He never married and had no children. He died in 1854 of pneumonia, at forty-seven, a year before his mother, who was the hunter, and nine years after his sister, who had looked after him. He was not a slayer and did not pretend to be, but he made with his hands, in a quiet way, a good deal of what the Faulkners of the North Shore relied on, from a sound boat to a dry floor. His parents had married in 1802, when they were still in their teens, and had lived a wandering life that followed the freight. His father Daniel Sevier, who was born at Worcester in 1782, hauled loads for hire, and his mother Sally, born at Northampton in 1783, went where the confinements were. By 1807 the household had come to rest, for a while, at Ipswich, where Daniel had found regular work carrying the town's famous stockings and lace, and the products of its clam flats and salt marshes, to the Boston markets. Albert was born in a small rented house on the South Green, in the shadow of the old meeting house, four years after his sister. He was a large, placid baby, who slept through the night, which his mother, who was by then a busy practitioner, regarded as the best of his qualities. Ipswich was an old town, settled in 1633, and already a place of long memories. It had the air of a community that had seen most things twice. Its houses, many of them built in the seventeenth century, were low, dark and heavily framed, with enormous chimneys and leaning gables, and its streets ran down toward a tidal river in which the ships of the old days had anchored and the shallow fishing boats of the new ones still did. The town was famous for its lace, which was made by hundreds of women in their own kitchens, at pillows of bobbins, and for the great marshes that ran to the sea, where the salt hay was cut in summer and the gunners lay in wait in the autumn for the wild fowl. It was also a town that smelled of clams. Albert grew up knowing the difference between a clam flat at low water and a salt pan in the sun. His father died when he was fourteen. The loss was the great event of his boyhood, and it shaped him. He was a quiet, dutiful, rather stolid boy, and he took on the work of the household without being asked. He cut the wood, carried the water and mended what needed mending, and he found in the last the thing that he was good at. By fifteen he could repair a chair, a door, a fence or a roof. By sixteen he had found that he could build a thing from nothing, and he made for his sister Ida, on her eighteenth birthday, a small walnut writing desk with a sloping lid, dovetailed at the corners and fitted with a drawer that ran as sweetly as a swallow. It was the best piece he ever made, and she kept it for the rest of her life. He was apprenticed at seventeen to a ship carpenter at Essex, the next town along the coast, where the yards built the fishing schooners that fed New England. It was work on a large scale. A schooner of eighty tons, which was the usual size, took a crew of a dozen men about three months to build, and the carpenter's part, the framing, planking, decking and joinery, was the heart of it. Albert learned to trim a frame with the adze, to bend a plank with steam, to drive a treenail and to caulk a seam. He learned to read a half-model and to loft a hull on the floor of the mould loft. He learned, too, to work in every kind of weather, on a staging over the water, with the wind in his face and a mallet in his hand. By twenty-two he was a journeyman and a good one, slow, careful and thorough, the kind of workman whom a master puts on the joints that matter. It was about this time that he learned what his mother did. He had known, in the way that a boy knows such things, that she went out at night and came back with mud on her skirts. He had supposed it to do with her midwifery. He found out otherwise in the summer of 1829, when she arrived at his lodging one night, at two in the morning, with a bad cut on her arm, and asked him to sew it up. He did it. He asked no questions. When she had gone, he sat for a long time at the table, looking at the thread and needle, and then went to work on a boat shed, because it was nearly daylight. His sister Ida, who had known for years, said, when he told her, that she had wondered how long he would take. His usefulness to his mother and to her cousins was practical and continuous. The Red Ledger, in the Massachusetts coastal towns, had long needed boats. A hunter who was chasing a quarry along the shore, or who needed to reach an island at night, or to meet a vessel in the roads, could not always count on a fisherman's goodwill, and Albert, who could build a boat and knew every yard on the coast, arranged it. He made a number of small craft, light dories, skiffs and punts, to the hunters' order, and kept them hidden in barns, boat sheds and creeks from Ipswich to Newburyport. Each was painted a dull grey, and each had a pair of muffled oarlocks. They were used by the cousins for twenty years, and several of them were still in service in the 1880s. He was also, in a modest way, the family's repairman. A hunter's coat, a hunter's saddle, a hunter's gun case or the hunter's own wagon, when broken, went to Albert. He fixed the long box under his mother's bed, re-hinged the door of the safe room in his sister's cottage and rebuilt the stair at a cousin's house in Newbury after it had been broken by something that nobody could describe. He took no payment beyond his expenses. He said that he had always found it pleasant to put right what had gone wrong. He was a big, fair, slow-moving man, with a broad face, a soft voice and a great fund of patience. He was an odd mixture of the exact and the dreamy. He would measure a beam to the sixteenth of an inch, and then stand looking at the river for an hour. He loved to fish, and to walk on the marshes, and he knew every bird on the coast by its call. His friends at the yard called him the Parson, because he seldom swore, and because he had a habit of saying, when a job was finished, that it would do. It was the highest praise he gave. He never married, though the family suspected that he had wanted to. There was a young woman in Essex, a sailmaker's daughter, to whom he had been attentive for some years, who married a mariner and went to Gloucester. He said that she had chosen well. He lived afterwards in the little cottage near the Ipswich river that he had rented for his sister, and he went on living in it after she had left for Andover, and after she had died. He kept her desk in the window. His mother, Sally, outlived him. She was seventy-one when he died, still hunting in a modest way, and she came to his deathbed and sat by him for three nights. He took cold in the winter of 1853, in an open yard, and it went to his lungs. The doctor called it pneumonia and bled him, which did no good. He died in March 1854, at forty-seven, in the bed that he had made himself, and was buried at Ipswich, in the old burying ground near the river, with a stone of slate. His mother, who found it hard to cry, stood at the grave with her hand on the stone. She died the next year herself. Albert Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the boatbuilder of Ipswich, the gentle brother who made the skiffs. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen and quiet helpers who kept the Red Ledger afloat, and who left, in the hulls they built and the hinges they mended, a record of patient work.