Beatrice Kowalski

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

Beatrice Kowalski was born in 1948 in Phoenix, Arizona, and lived sixty-three years as a librarian in Denver, a woman of the Faulkner bloodline by marriage who was never a hunter and who served the Red Ledger from behind a reference desk. In 1970 she married the electrician Eugene Faulkner, The Pale Scythe, a vampire slayer, and they raised two children, Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, who became a slayer in her turn, and Mark Kowalski Faulkner, who did not. Beatrice belonged to no house of the Ledger and carried no alias, archetype or craft. She had a catalogue, a pencil and a sense of where things were kept. She died in 2011 of a long illness, aged sixty-three, and the family remembers her as the quiet woman at the library counter who could find, in an afternoon, the one old newspaper column that explained a winter. Phoenix in 1948 was a small city that did not yet know how large it would be, a place of citrus groves, canals, a few tall hotels downtown and a great deal of flat desert in every direction. It was the sort of place that people came to for their lungs. The Kowalskis, who were Polish-American and had come out from the coal country of Pennsylvania after the war, took a bungalow on the north side near the canal, with an orange tree in the yard and a swamp cooler on the roof, and Beatrice, the younger of two girls, was born in the hottest week of the August of that year in a hospital where the power failed for ten minutes, and the nurses fanned the infants with newspaper. It was observed that she did not cry. She was a thin, dark, thoughtful child, and she was happiest in a corner with a book. The public library, a low, cool building on Central Avenue with a revolving door and a smell of floor wax, was her real home from the age of seven. She read through the children's room by ten, and persuaded the librarian, a stern and kindly woman in her sixties, to let her into the adult stacks at twelve. She said that it was the first time that she had understood the point of a catalogue. It was a map of a country that nobody had drawn. She learned to use it in the manner of a child learning a card game, and by fourteen she could find any title in the building without looking, and was given a small wage for it. Phoenix, in her girlhood, grew like a weed. The new subdivisions went up in the desert, the swamp coolers gave way to air-conditioning, and the canals were fenced. She did not care for it, as such. She liked the old part of the town, the adobe, the dry cleaner's with the tin sign, the shaded porch, and she liked the desert, in which she took long walks with her father at dusk, and from which she learned the first rule of a researcher, which is that what looks like emptiness is a great deal of detail. She went to the state university at Tempe, took a degree in English, and in 1968 went north to Colorado, to the library school at the University of Denver, on a scholarship that paid for the tuition and a cold room in a boarding house near the campus. Denver, in the winter of 1968, was grey, snowbound and strange. She was twenty and had never seen a winter, and she found it clean and loud and a little frightening. She took a part-time post at a branch library on the north side, a brick building near the railroad, and it was there, in the first week of the January of 1969, that the lights went out. The fuses of a whole block had blown. An electrician came, a large, grave, slow-spoken young man of twenty-two with a toolbag and a flashlight, who stood in the dark between the stacks for some time looking at the ceiling, and said that the fault was not in the panel. It was in the lamp over the history shelf, and had been there for years. She asked how he knew. He said that it was the only place that was warm. His name was Eugene Faulkner. He did not ask her to supper that night. He came back the next day to mend the lamp, and asked whether the library had a book on the old railroad yards, and she found him three. He returned them, with a note. He returned for another, a month later, and for a third in the spring. She said later that she had never before been courted by interlibrary loan. They were married in 1970, in the church in Denver, in the first week of June, with his mother, Lorraine, in her good grey and his father in a suit he had set himself, and her own father, who had flown from Phoenix, in a state of shock about the snow on the mountains. She was twenty-one and he was twenty-four. She was told what the family was soon afterwards, at the kitchen table, in a small house on the north side, by her husband's mother. It came up, as everything came up in that family, indirectly. She had been asked to look in a newspaper index for a drowning in the South Platte in the nineteen-twenties, and when she found it, Lorraine, who had come up from Los Angeles on the train, said that it was exactly what she wanted and that she had been looking for someone who could read an index since the war. Beatrice, who was twenty-one, said that she would be glad to. It was a good deal later that she learned what the drowning had been, and she was, to her credit, annoyed that nobody had told her before she did the work. She finished her degree, and in 1972 became a reference librarian at the Denver public library, where she remained for thirty-nine years. It was a long, high, noisy room on the second floor, with a clock, a card index and a microfilm reader in the corner that was always out of order. She had two children, Lorraine in 1971 and Mark in 1973, and brought them both up in the shadow of the reference desk. She ran it as a quiet war. She knew, from a question, what a reader needed, and she knew the cabinet, the volume and the year of the paper in which it might be found. The Ledger had a hundred years of western sightings written on the backs of envelopes, and she made it her work to match them to the printed record, on her own time, with a notebook, over twenty years. She never once said that she was doing it for the family. She said it was a hobby. She was good at it. She found, in the files of a Colorado paper of 1911, an account of a ranch that had gone quiet for a winter. She found, in a county report of the thirties, a list of the places in which the cattle had been found without blood. She found, in the late seventies, a pattern in a series of fires, which was the reason that Eugene, in the winter of 1980, knew where to look. When he was called, after the fire in the lane behind Larimer Street, she was the first to be told, and she sat him down at the kitchen table, and made him tell it in order. She wrote it down. She said that it was the worst piece of reporting that she had ever heard, and that she would take it. The Vietnam years and the war that followed had been one kind of shadow, and the attacks of September 2001 another, and she watched the second on the television in the reference room, with the patrons, standing quite still. Her daughter Lorraine was called some years later, and she went with her to the first night, and held the thermos. Her son Mark, who had his mother's quietness and no taste for the work, became an oil-field roughneck and said that his mother's was the more dangerous profession. She was diagnosed with her illness in 2008, and she worked another two years, taking the book cart out for the last time in the spring of 2010. She died the next winter, in 2011, at sixty-three, in the house on the north side, with the lamp that Eugene had mended burning over her bed. Beatrice Kowalski is remembered in the Faulkner family as the librarian who found the evidence and filed it, the Phoenix girl who married an electrician and read the Red Ledger's West into a catalogue. In the Slayerverse she stands for the researchers, indexers and reference clerks of the Faulkner line, who were never called and who found what the hunters needed in the stacks before the hunters ever went out to the road.