Arthur Faulkner

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

Arthur Faulkner was born in 1815 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and worked for forty years as a wheelwright in the hill towns of the central part of the state. He was the elder son of the Methodist circuit preacher Amos Wheeler and the herbalist Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, the brother of the chaplain James Faulkner Wheeler, and the grandson of the Salem wheelwright Silas Goodwin, whose trade he took up. He was not a slayer and did not pretend to be, but he was, for forty years, the man who made the wheels on which the Red Ledger's cousins rode, and he made them, it was said, to outlast the men who used them. He never married. He died in 1873 of what his doctor called old age, at fifty-eight, having worn himself out at the wheel pit, and having kept, in a drawer of his bench, a small, flat, unmarked book in which a good many dates and names were written. His father, Amos Wheeler, born in 1792 and dead in 1847, was a circuit rider, a tall, earnest, red-haired preacher who travelled the hill towns on horseback. His mother, Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, born in 1791 and dead in 1869, was a herbalist of Worcester, the sister of the riverboat pilot and slayer Ezekiel Faulkner. The couple had been married in 1813 and lived on the road, in a covered gig with a medicine chest under the seat, and Arthur was born in a rented room at Worcester during a week when the circuit took his father through the town. His younger brother James was born three years later, in Ipswich, in the same manner. The boys were brought up in the gig, in the parsonages, in farmhouse spare rooms and on other people's hay, and learned early that a home was something one carried. It was the wheels that he noticed. A child who spends his first years in a wheeled vehicle, going from town to town over roads of every quality, acquires an opinion about wheels. By five, Arthur could tell from the sound of the gig whether the tyre was sound, and by seven he could tell whether a wheel was dished. At nine, on a visit to his grandfather Silas Goodwin in Salem, he stood for three hours in the wheelwright's shop, without speaking, watching the old man fit a felloe, and at the end of it said that he wished to learn how it was done. His grandfather, a large, slow-spoken craftsman with forearms like hams, looked down at him and said that it was a great deal harder than it looked. It was. A wheelwright in those years was a craftsman of a high order. A wheel, which looks like a simple thing, is among the most complicated objects in wood. It consists of a hub, or nave, which is turned from a block of elm; of spokes, which are riven from oak, tapered and set into mortises in the hub at a slight angle, so that the wheel is slightly dished; of felloes, which are the curved segments of the rim, cut from ash and pinned to the spoke tenons; and of an iron tyre, which is heated, slipped over the rim and quenched, so that it shrinks and binds the whole together. Every part must fit. A wheel that is out of true by a sixteenth of an inch will shake a wagon to pieces in a year. Arthur loved it. He loved the smell of seasoned ash, the ring of the iron on the anvil and the drawn, high hiss of the quench. He was apprenticed to his grandfather at fourteen. Silas Goodwin taught him for six years, and taught him well. The old man, who was already past sixty, was a hard but patient master, who believed that the only way to learn a wheel was to make a hundred, and had him do so. Arthur made the hundred. He made carts, wagons, gigs, barrows, coaches and a single enormous mill wheel. He learned to dish, to gather, to true, to hoop. He learned the different woods and their uses. He learned to repair a wheel that had been wrecked on a stone, a stump or a rutted road. At twenty he left his grandfather, who gave him a set of tools and a short, dry blessing, and went west to Worcester, where the growing town needed wheelwrights, and set up a shop on the edge of the Boston road. He was a thin, stooping, dark young man, with the long hands of his mother and the ceiling-gazing habit of his father, and he had a manner that was so quiet that strangers often took him for a clerk. He was nothing of the kind. He was one of the finest craftsmen in the county, and within a few years he was making wheels for the stage companies, the freighters and the big mills. The railroad, which opened in 1835, did nothing to reduce the demand. There were still wagons to be hauled to the depots, carts to be made for the contractors and a thousand ordinary conveyances for which a good wheel was essential. His mother, who was living at Worcester with him for some years after his father's death in 1847, told him about the Red Ledger when he was thirty-two. He had known, in the vague manner of a child who has overheard a good deal, that she had a brother who did something on the river. She explained it, sitting in the workshop with a cup of tea. She said that she was not a hunter, nor was his father, but her brother was, and her brother's children, and a number of cousins, and that it was a family matter. He said that he had supposed it was. He asked whether there was anything that he could do. There was. A hunter's wheel is a different object from an ordinary one. A slayer of the Ledger who was in pursuit of a quarry, along the post roads of New England, needed a light, fast conveyance that would not break down, and would not draw attention, and he needed it to carry a long box. Arthur made them. He made a particular kind of gig, very light, with large, narrow wheels of hickory and a body of ash and canvas, which could hold a man, a box and a lantern, and could do twelve miles an hour on a road that would ruin a stage. He made the tyres from the best Swedish iron. He also, without drawing anyone's attention to it, made the axle hollow. The cousins, who called the contraption the Wheeler, used it for forty years. He made other things. A hunter's horse is a precious animal, and a wheelwright, in those days, often did the work of a farrier, and was often consulted about a horse's feet. Arthur shod the Ledger's horses, at cost, in the workshop, and found that the stable, in the back of the shop, came in useful as a halting place. He kept a cot in the loft. He kept a kettle, and a cupboard, and a lamp that was left burning in the window on nights when a hunter was expected, which, in the Worcester country, was frequent. He never asked a question. He said that a wheelwright who asked questions would soon find that he had no customers. His brother James, who was three years younger, was in the pulpit, and the two met at Christmas and in the summer. They were very unlike. James was large, sanguine and ruddy, a fine preacher with a good voice and a love of company, and Arthur was thin, dry and silent. They were devoted to each other. James, who could not keep a coin, was always in debt, and Arthur, who could not spend one, was always lending him money. It was a balance that worked for thirty years. When James died in 1863, Arthur, who had not cried since childhood, closed the shop for a week. He lived alone, in a neat, bare house at the back of the workshop, with a housekeeper who came in twice a week. He never married. There was, he said, nobody who would have put up with the noise, and it was true that the workshop rang from six in the morning until six at night. He had two hobbies, which were clocks and chess. He made, in his spare time, a fine tall-case clock with a wooden movement, which still keeps time in a Worcester parlour, and played a slow, relentless, defensive game of chess with the Methodist minister, who said that he had never won a game and never lost a night's sleep over it. The Civil War brought a great boom in business. The army wanted wagons, gun carriages and ambulances, and the Worcester shops were employed day and night. He made four hundred wheels in one year, and trained a dozen apprentices. He was forty-six, too old to go, and he gave what he could. He made a number of wheels for the ambulances of the Massachusetts regiments, which were said to be the smoothest in the army. He died in the winter of 1873, at fifty-eight, at his bench, having spent the morning truing a wheel for a coach. The apprentices found him in the afternoon, sitting on the stool with his chin on his chest, and the wheel in front of him spinning faintly on its trestle. It was perfectly true. It went round, they said, for nearly a minute after they found him. Arthur Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the wheelwright of Worcester, the grandson of a wheelwright who made the wheels that carried the hunters. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen of the Red Ledger, the quiet makers who asked no questions and built what was needed to go where it had to be.