Asa Faulkner Chandler

Gangster slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sable Ferryman. Craft: Night Trapping.

Asa Faulkner Chandler was born in 1833 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and lived seventy-nine years as a wheelwright and, from the age of sixteen, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Sable Ferryman, a name that recalls the dark-coated man who carries a cargo across a water that has no other crossing, and it classes him as a Gangster, a hunter who runs a crew, a territory and a set of debts, and who fights by owning the ground. His craft was Night Trapping, the setting of traps by dark, and his gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot. He was the elder son of the carpenter Warren Chandler and the shopkeeper Ida Sherman Faulkner, and the brother of the slayer Henry Faulkner. He never married. He died in 1912 of a stroke, aged seventy-nine, having worked the mill towns and harbours of New England for sixty years. He was born in Deerfield by an accident of his mother's timing. Ida Sherman Faulkner, who had moved to Worcester with her husband in 1831 and kept a shop on the Boston road, was a careful woman who did not intend to bear a child among strangers, and so, in the spring of 1833, she took the stage up the valley to her mother's cousins in Deerfield, a quiet village of elms, old houses and tobacco barns on the Connecticut meadows. The child came a fortnight before he was expected, in a bedroom with a sloped ceiling, and she was a month in Deerfield before she could travel. He was always a little sensitive about it, since Deerfield was a place where people were buried with their dates and their massacres, and he said that he had been born among the dead and was bound to end up among them. He grew up in Worcester, in the house behind the shop, in a household of shavings and ribbons. His father, who was red-faced, thickset and humming, taught him to use a square at six. His mother taught him his accounts. He was a stocky, dark, quiet boy, with a heavy brow and a habit of looking at a wheel, a gate or a person as though he were working out where it would break, and by twelve he could frame a small shed. But it was wheels that took him. A wagon wheel, he said, is the most honest thing ever made, since it is made of a dozen pieces that each know their place, and is ruined by the failure of any. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a wheelwright near the railway depot, a bald Yorkshireman who made cart wheels, carriage wheels and, on commission, the great spoked flywheels of the small mills, and who taught him to bend an iron tyre, to dish a wheel and to tell, by the sound of a spoke, whether the oak that made it had been properly seasoned. He was called at sixteen, in the autumn of 1849, in a cellar. It was a farm in the hills west of Worcester, an out-of-the-way place at the end of a long track, where the wheelwright had sent him with a pair of new wheels for a hay wagon. There was nobody at the door. The barn was open, the cows were lowing unmilked, and in the kitchen a pot stood on the cold stove, with the spoon in it. He went into the cellar to look for the family. The cellar was full. Barrels of apples, hams, flour, preserves, a side of pork in brine, cheese, cider, the year's whole stores, and none of it touched. A rat had not been at the flour. A mouse had not touched the cheese. There were four beds upstairs, with the sheets turned back, and in the cellar, in the dust on the floor, a single line of marks that went from the stairs to the far wall, where the stone had been moved, and stopped. He sat on the cellar steps for an hour. It did not occur to him to be afraid until afterward. He went home, at dusk, in the empty cart, and told his father, who heard him out and then said, in the tone of a man who has known that the question was coming, that they should fetch his mother. It took three nights and a good deal of tea. The next spring, at seventeen, he began to learn, from his mother's cousins of the Red Ledger, how to hunt. Night Trapping, as Asa made it, was the art of the set piece. A vampire, he observed, is a creature of habit, which goes by the same lane at the same hour and uses the same door, and a man who knows the habit can put a wall in the lane. He therefore did not chase. He built. He found the road that the thing took, and in a week he had a cellar door that would not open, a drain that had been closed, a fence that had been mended, a lamp that had been lit and a stair that creaked, and on the night, at the hour, a revolver at the end of a corridor. He had a wheelwright's patience and a carpenter's eye. He used trip-wires of fine silver thread, swinging doors, weighted nets, old mill-race sluices and, once, a three-ton hay wagon. It made him the best trapper of a built-up place that the Ledger had had, and it gave him his method. He ran it as a crew. This was what made him a Gangster. In the mill towns and harbours, where the trouble lay, the Red Ledger's hunters were not numerous, and a slayer who wished to cover a district had to find the people who could be trusted with a wall, a watch or a whistle. Asa found them. He recruited teamsters, dock foremen, stevedores, ferry hands, a pair of Irish coopers and a retired harbour pilot, and ran them from a wheel-shop on the water at Providence, and later from another at New Bedford, with a system of debts, favours, cheap drink and quiet jobs. The men who worked for him knew little and trusted him a great deal. He paid on the Saturday and never once asked for a thing that he could not repay. They called him the Ferryman because he took people across, from a place where there was no hope to one where there was a door, and the word sable was for the long black coat that he wore on the quay. When the war came he enlisted with his brother Henry in a Worcester regiment, and spent four years in it, with a good deal of digging and a number of skirmishes in which his habits of mind proved unexpectedly useful. He was in the ranks, not the officers' tent. He was mustered out in the summer of 1865, somewhat thinner, and came back to Worcester, where his father, who was standing on the platform with his hat in his hand, said that he had brought the same face home. His father's death in 1871 and his mother's in 1872 fell on him heavily. He left the Worcester house to his brother and moved for good to the harbour. He lived the rest of his life between Providence and New Bedford, in rooms over a wheel-shop, with a cat, a parrot and a large collection of tyre-bending tools. He was a reserved, stout, grey-whiskered man, who nodded, kept accounts and did not gossip, and in the Ledger's New England pages he has a long and orderly entry. He trained two generations of the crew. He was still at the bench at seventy, tapping a spoke, and he had a stroke in the spring of 1912, in the workshop, and died in an hour, with his hand on a wheel. Asa Faulkner Chandler is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Sable Ferryman, the wheelwright who built walls where the night had been walking. In the Slayerverse he stands for the organisers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who held that a district is won by the men who know its doors, and that a good trap is, in the end, a piece of honest carpentry.