Andrew Carter

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

Andrew Carter spent thirty-five years lifting other men's cargo at San Pedro and Wilmington, and the only thing he ever asked of the Red Ledger was that it should not make him famous. He was born in 1862 in Los Angeles, California, and worked as a dockworker in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West until a long illness took him in 1926, at the age of sixty-four. In 1887 he married the schoolteacher and vampire slayer Alice Faulkner, and they had two sons, Andrew Carter Faulkner and Joseph Carter, both of whom became slayers. He was not a hunter himself, and he belonged to no house of the great families, but he came of the Faulkner bloodline through a cadet branch that had drifted west with the gold rush, and so he stood, as the family put it, at the edge of the Red Ledger, close enough to hear it and far enough to hold the coats. The Ledger counts the line back to Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. Los Angeles in 1862 was a sleepy pueblo of perhaps four thousand people, a great many of them Californio and a good many of them drunk by noon, with a plaza, a church, a zanja ditch for water and a river that in the wet years was a menace and in the dry years a rumour. His mother's people, Faulkner cousins by the old Massachusetts connection, had come out round the Horn a decade before, and his father kept a livery on Main Street. The flood of the winter of 1861 and 1862, which drowned the lower valley, was the background to his birth. The family always told it that he was delivered in a room with six inches of water on the floor, by a neighbour who was a retired ship's surgeon and who held him up by the heels and observed that he was the first person in the town to be born with his feet already wet. He went to the harbour early, as if it were his vocation. It was a long way to the harbour in those days. San Pedro was twenty miles of dust and sagebrush from the pueblo, with a wooden wharf, a few warehouses and a lumber schooner, and the boy who walked there at fourteen, to ask a stevedore for work, was a tall, raw-boned, sunburned lad with big hands and a patient way of looking at a heavy thing. He was taken on. He carried lumber, hides and, in the season, the wool and the barley that came down in the wagons, and he learned what a dock is, which is a place where a great many objects have to be moved from one place to another by men who would rather be elsewhere. He also learned to tie a hitch that did not slip. The boom of the eighties, which brought the railroads to Los Angeles and filled the town with tourists and speculators, gave the harbour more work than it could hold. A dockworker who could be trusted to show up on Monday was a man of consequence. The Ledger found him because of the ships. The western chapter of the Red Ledger was short of hands, and a number of cousins passed through the harbour, coming and going by sea, on errands that the family did not discuss. A man who worked the wharf knew when a vessel had come in without a crew, or when a cargo had been landed at night, or when a crate was heavier than its bill of lading said it should be. Andrew told nobody what he saw. But he had a cousin in the chapter, and he began, from the early eighties, to write down what he saw in a small tallybook and to drop it into the collection box of the Wilmington post office. He said that it was the nearest thing he had to a hobby. He said that a man with a heavy job needs a light one. He met Alice Faulkner in the summer of 1886. She had come out from Massachusetts in the spring, following the death of her mother, the milliner Abigail Jewett Faulkner, and of the printer father who had gone before, and her sister Abigail, who had married a machinist, had written ahead to a cousin of the western chapter to ask that she be given a post. She was twenty, a small, fair, brisk young woman with a long nose and her mother's habit of tilting her head when she listened, and she had a certificate and a letter of recommendation from a school committee in Newburyport. The harbour district of Wilmington needed a teacher. She arrived on the stage from Los Angeles with two trunks, found the schoolhouse had a leaking roof and a class of forty, and went down to the wharf to find somebody who could mend it. She was sent to Andrew. He looked at the roof, and then at her, and said that it would take him two Saturdays. It took him six. They were married in 1887, in the small Methodist church at Wilmington, with the ships' bells ringing in the harbour and the schoolchildren, who had been given the morning off, sitting in rows along the front. She told him what she was, and what her mother had been, on the evening before, on the steps of the school, in the plain dry voice in which she taught arithmetic. He listened, with his big hands on his knees. He said that it was a great relief, since he had been writing things down in a tallybook for four years and had been afraid that it was only him. She said that she had read the tallybook. He said that it was the first time he had ever been read. Their sons came soon. Andrew Carter Faulkner was born in 1888, and Joseph Carter in 1889, and both grew up in a small house at Wilmington, between the school and the harbour, among primers and rope, and both, in time, were called, each in his own way, and became slayers of the Red Ledger. The elder took his mother's family name, in the Faulkner custom that lets the name pass through the women, and the younger kept his father's, since, Andrew said, somebody ought to. Alice taught the boys their lessons. He taught them the docks, and how to read a ship by the way she sat in the water. He did not teach them anything else. He said that the rest was their mother's department, and that he was prepared to carry whatever they needed to the place they needed it. He carried a good deal. A dockworker moves cargo, and a great deal of the Ledger's western cargo, in those years, went through his hands, in crates marked as hardware or fruit. There were silver bars in kegs of nails. There were cases of stakes in boxes of oranges. A hunter who needed to reach San Francisco without being asked questions went as a stowaway in a bale of hides, with a porthole cut in it, and Andrew, who signed for the bale, never once opened it. He also carried the wounded, at night, from a boat to a wagon, in a manner that would not have disturbed a sleeping child. He said afterwards that it was the heaviest cargo he ever shifted and the lightest on his mind. The years after the turn of the century were kind to the harbour, which grew into the great port of the Pacific coast, and unkind to the men who worked it. The dust of the lumber, the grain and the cement found his lungs in his fifties, and a cough that he had called the wharf cold became, by the time of the Great War, a thing with a name. In the influenza of 1918, which swept the port in a month, he nursed his neighbours on his days off, and was not taken, and Alice, who had taught for thirty-two years, closed the school for the first time in her career. He went on working until he could not lift. He spent his last four years in a chair on the porch, in the desert-edge sun that the doctors prescribed, watching the ships through a spyglass that his wife had found, and he died in the spring of 1926, of the long illness, at sixty-four, having lived to see both his sons grown and at work. Alice followed him two years later, in 1928. Andrew Carter is remembered in the Faulkner family as the dockworker of San Pedro, the man who signed for the crates and did not open them. In the Slayerverse he stands for the haulers and carriers of the Red Ledger's western chapter, the men with big hands and closed mouths who took the hunters' freight wherever it had to go and never once asked to see the bill.