Andrew Carter Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Plain Tinder. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

The dead do not usually knock. Andrew Carter Faulkner used to say that this was the first thing he learned about them, on a wet night in the autumn of 1917, when a neighbour who had been buried on a Tuesday stood at his back gate on the Friday and would not come indoors. He was born in 1888 at Portland, Oregon, and lived forty-six years as a druggist and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West. The family book knows him as The Plain Tinder, a name that recalls the dry scrap that catches first and asks for nothing, and it classes him as a Hunter, a slayer who fixes on one quarry and follows it until the business is ended. His craft was Long-Watch Tracking, the patient following of a trail across many nights by the smallest of signs, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was the son of the dockworker Andrew Carter and of the schoolteacher and slayer Alice Faulkner, The Silent Beacon, who trained him, and the elder brother of the slayer Joseph Carter. He never married. He died in 1934 of a sudden collapse, aged forty-six. Portland in 1888 was a lumber and wheat port on the Willamette, with a river full of masts, a waterfront of saloons and boarding houses, a bridge that was always being rebuilt and a rain that never stopped. His father Andrew Carter, a big, silent, sandy man from Maine, loaded ships on the docks at Albina, at the north end of the city, where the railroad met the river and where men who could lift a sack of wheat were always wanted. His mother had come out from Massachusetts two years earlier, a young schoolteacher of twenty, recruited by the school board of the East Side, with a trunk, a hatbox and a reference from her sister, who had written in a great hurry that Alice was clever and steady and should on no account be let near a hunting quarrel. Alice had, in fact, already been called. She did not say so. She married the dockworker in 1887, a match that surprised her family, and registered her son, like her own mother before her, under her own surname. The register, she said, was hers. He was a brown-haired, broad-faced, slow-moving boy, the image of his father and, it was thought, without any of his mother's edge. He was patient. He could sit on the end of a pier for four hours with a line, watching a float, and come home with a single fish and a look of contentment. His mother, who watched him do it, noticed that he never once looked away. He learned to read from the newspapers that she brought home from the school, and to do sums from the cargo manifests that his father left on the kitchen table, and he learned, at the age of nine, the thing that mattered most, which was how to look at a place and see what had changed. His father would come home, and Andrew would say that the third piling at the end of the wharf was leaning. It was. He was right about the pilings for years. The family lived on a street of small frame houses not far from the river, and Alice, who taught at the school on Russell Street, also kept, in the attic, a long shelf of small boxes that belonged to the Ledger, a wooden case of lamps, and the tally cards of a line of hunters that went back to Newburyport. She taught herself what she could of the West. The Ledger's western roll was a short one. There were cousins in San Francisco and Seattle and a single old hunter at Spokane, and the great pale stretch of the Columbia country, the desert ranges of the interior and the new railroad towns had no one at all. She wrote to her sister Abigail in Massachusetts every month, and her sister wrote back, and Andrew and his brother grew up knowing that they had an aunt in the East who wrote on a typewriter and a mother who, for reasons never discussed, kept a revolver in the flour bin. Andrew left school at fifteen and went to work in a drugstore on Williams Avenue, sweeping, running errands and delivering. It was a good stroke of luck. The druggist, a German named Emil Kraus, who had trained at Heidelberg, took to him, and taught him the trade over eleven years with a patience that matched his own. He learned to compound, to weigh, to read a prescription and to keep the poison book. By twenty-three he was a licensed pharmacist. By twenty-six, in 1914, he was Kraus's partner and, when the old man retired, the owner of a narrow brick store on the corner of Williams and Russell, with a soda fountain, a wall of amber bottles and a painted sign that said Faulkner Pharmacy. It was the registered name, though he never explained why a Carter had taken his mother's. His customers assumed that it was a Faulkner's shop and that the Faulkners were a large family. They were. The calling came on a Friday night in October 1917, when he was twenty-nine. A neighbour of his, a stevedore called Olaf Brandt, who had lived three doors down and had been buried in the city cemetery on the Tuesday, after a drowning in the river, appeared at the back gate of the house at about eleven, in his good suit, with his hat in his hand, and stood there in the rain. The back door was open. Olaf did not come in. He stood at the gate, pleasant and patient, looking at the lamp in the kitchen window, and he said that he had had an odd week and would be glad of a cup of coffee. Andrew, who had sat up with the dying and thought that he knew every way a man could come to a door, stood in the doorway with the coffee pot and did not move. The neighbour's face was perfectly calm. It was also, he saw, perfectly dry, in a downpour. He held the pot out. The man at the gate looked at it, and at him, and at the threshold, with the intent look of a dog that has been told not to come in, and did not move. It was his mother who found them, at midnight, on the steps, and took the pot from his hand. She said, very quietly, that she had been waiting for this for twenty years. She trained him herself, in the attic and on the docks, for the better part of a winter. The Ledger had no other hunter in Oregon, she said, and there was no time to waste. She taught him to shoot, to follow and to wait. A cousin in Massachusetts sent him, that spring, by express, a flat, hinged case of hand-turned steel, in which a hunter's whole kit lay flat under a coat, and a note in a typist's clear hand that said that it had been made by her husband for a cousin who would know what to do with it. He knew. He kept it in the drawer under the counter, next to the poison book, for seventeen years. He was a Hunter, and Long-Watch Tracking was his craft. It was a discipline of time. Most hunters, his mother said, tracked a thing for a night, and a good many for two. A Long-Watch tracker followed one quarry across weeks, by the smallest of signs, a displaced stone, the smell of river clay on a stair, the absence of a shadow, the gap in the order of a street. He learned to sit in the same doorway, in the same coat, for eleven nights, eating the same sandwich, until the thing that he was watching ceased to notice him. He learned to keep a book of signs in a hand that nobody could read. He followed the dead stevedore, in the end, for nineteen nights along the Albina waterfront, into the cellar of a closed cannery, and ended him there, on the twentieth, with a single stake and no noise. He said afterward that it was not very difficult. He had simply been there the whole time. The war and what came after filled the docks. In the autumn of 1918 the influenza closed the schools and emptied the streets of Portland, and the pharmacy was the one place that stayed open, and he and his staff filled, by his own count, three thousand prescriptions in five weeks. He kept a cot in the back. He got no sleep, took no sick leave and lost, in that time, no customer who came in early enough. He hunted too. A plague, he said, brought out a particular kind of pest, which fed on the sick and could be found by the same signs, and he followed them through the wards, in a druggist's white coat, with a soda siphon in one hand and the other in his pocket. His brother Joseph, who had been called the year before, was in the East by then, and the two wrote to each other, in a code of their mother's devising, every week. His father Andrew Carter died in 1926 of a dock accident, a year before the great floods of the Columbia, and his mother in 1928, of a long illness, in her bed, with a window open onto the river. He nursed her. She told him, at the last, that she had been proud of her sister's hunting and of her own, and that she was prouder still of a druggist who could sit for eleven nights in a doorway, and he said that he would be there for as long as it took. The Depression years hit the docks hard. He extended credit to the unemployed longshoremen, gave away a good deal of soda and cough syrup, and kept, through the worst of it, both the shop and the watch. He died in the spring of 1934, at forty-six, behind his own counter, in the middle of a prescription. He had been at the post, in an overcoat, since four o'clock in the morning, following something that had come in on a lumber schooner, and he had closed the night's book and gone back to open the shop. The apprentice found him at seven, sitting on the stool, with the pestle in his hand. The doctor said that the heart had stopped without warning. The book that he had kept open on the counter was found to have an entry for that night, in a hand that could not have been read by anyone else, and the last line said, Gone at dawn. Andrew Carter Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Plain Tinder, the druggist of Williams Avenue who waited longer than anything he hunted. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trackers of the Red Ledger's western roll, the slayers who were taught by a mother, sent a kit by an aunt and kept a watch for the people of a port city that did not know that it needed one.