Caleb Thayer Faulkner was born in 1807 in the Treme quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-four years as a storekeeper and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Narrow Yoke, a name that recalls the tight, cramped, dangerous passages in which he did his best work, and it classes him as a Spy, a hunter who learns before he acts. His craft was Hawthorn Craft, the use of thorn, hedge and boundary as a weapon and a warning. He was the son of the boatman and slayer Silas Faulkner, called The Flatboat Falcon, and of the dairywoman Patience Thayer, and he trained under his father. He married the herbalist Clara Alden in 1828, raised a son and a daughter, and died in 1871 of heart failure, having lived through the annexation of Texas, the Mexican war, the Civil War and the first years of Reconstruction.
His father, Silas Faulkner, born in 1772 and dead in 1831, was the boatman who took the family down the Mississippi in 1804, from the Ohio country to the lower river, and who afterward hunted the river parishes of Louisiana for the Red Ledger. His mother, Patience Thayer, born in 1774 and dead in 1816, had come from the Kentucky River country, had milked cows in a fort at the age of ten, and was the first of the family to sell butter in the Vieux Carre. Caleb was the third of four children. He had an elder brother, Lewis Thayer Faulkner, who was a printer in Kentucky, an elder sister, Eliza Faulkner, who in 1828 married Hippolyte Delacroix, and a younger brother, Silas Thayer Faulkner, born in 1811, who would be a slayer too.
He was born in a cottage at the edge of the Treme, the quarter that lay back of the old city across Rampart Street, and that in 1807 was a place of small creole houses, market gardens, free people of colour, sugar carts and ditches full of frogs. It was hot, damp, green and loud. The language of the household was English, and of the street was French, and of the kitchen was a good deal else. His mother kept two cows in a shed behind the house and sold milk and butter to the boarding houses of the Vieux Carre, and he grew up carrying a pail. His father was away for weeks at a time, poling up the river or hunting in the parishes, and came home sunburned, lean and unusually silent.
It was a city of many dangers. It was a port, open to the sea, and through it came every fever, vice and rumour of the Caribbean. The yellow fever visited in the summer, the cholera in some years, and the smaller sicknesses in all. Nor were the dangers of the night confined to disease. The Red Ledger's Louisiana chapter, which Silas had opened, was a busy one, and the boy grew up with a father who took a lantern and a gun from the wall at dusk, and a mother who laid a silver spoon on the window sill, and who said, when he asked, that it was to keep the ants out.
His mother's death in 1816, in an accident, when he was nine, left a mark. The household was broken up for a time. His elder brother was sent up the river to be a printer and his sister went to an aunt, and Caleb, who was too young to be dispersed, stayed with his father, in a rented room on the levee, and followed him about. It was in those years that he learned what a hunter's life was. He sat in the boat and held the lantern. He watched. He learned to be still. By twelve he could sit motionless for an hour, in the dark, in a pirogue under a cypress, without a sound, and by fourteen he had been given a short, sharp knife and instructed to use it only if asked.
He was apprenticed at fifteen to a storekeeper on Rue Chartres, who sold hardware, ironmongery, rope, lamps, tar and ship's chandlery to the merchants of the levee. It was a good trade, and Caleb, who was a patient and careful boy, took to it. He learned the stock. He learned to deal, in two languages, with captains, planters, free men of colour and the dockyard agents. He learned that the customer who gave the most trouble over a price was usually the one who was really worried about something else. By twenty he was running the counter. By twenty-one he had saved enough to buy a half share in a small store of his own, on the edge of the Treme, where he sold everything that a household might need and a number of things that it should not have wanted.
He was called in 1828, in the fields, after a hunt. It was an ordinary country hunt, a fox drive on a sugar plantation in the river parishes, to which he had been invited by a customer, and for which he had borrowed a horse. The hounds were cast off at dawn, and the field rode after them, through cane and across ditches, until, about noon, the pack came back through a gap in the hedge, alone, in a bunch, with their tails down and their hackles up, and the huntsman did not return. They found him later, in a hawthorn thicket at the edge of a cypress swamp, lying on his back with his arms crossed on his breast, cold and white and quite without a mark. The hawthorn, the planters said, had been planted there by a French grandfather. The hounds would not go near it.
Caleb, who had stayed behind the field, stood at the edge of the thicket for some time. He looked at the hedge. It was old, thick, thorny and very tall, and a good deal of it had been cut back, he saw, in a line that led to the thing on the ground. He said afterward that it was like reading a word in a foreign hand. He went home that evening, and found his father at the table, cleaning a pistol, and said that he would like to know what was in the thicket. Silas put the pistol down. He said that he had been waiting to be asked.
Hawthorn Craft, as Caleb made it his own, was a matter of boundaries. The hawthorn, in the old tradition of the Faulkners, was a plant that marked a line, in the hedgerows of England, the fields of Massachusetts and now, in cuttings brought over by a cousin, the bayou country of the lower South. A vampire, says the old lore, does not like to cross a line that has been drawn against it. Caleb therefore drew lines. He planted thorn hedges around the safe houses of the Ledger's cousins, laid thorn branches across thresholds, and strung thorn wire along the edges of a district that was to be closed off. He made the lines narrow, so that there was only one way through, and then he waited at it. It was the source of his alias. The narrow yoke was the gap in the hedge.
His gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, carried in a coat with a deep inner pocket. He also carried, always, a stout, short stick of hawthorn, cut from his own hedge, that served as a walking stick, a club and a measuring rod. As a Spy, he spent more time watching than shooting. He worked from his store, where he could see everyone who passed, and from the back room, where he kept a small, locked ledger of the people of the quarter, their habits and their visitors. He took, in forty-three years, some fifty vampires, and was credited by the Ledger with having cleared the whole of the lower Treme.
In 1828, the same year as his calling, he married Clara Alden, a herbalist from Algiers, across the river from the city, a tall, calm young woman with a good many pots and a good deal of sense. She grew her herbs behind the store, and her remedies became as popular in the quarter as his hardware. Their daughter Carrie Alden Faulkner was born in 1830 and lived until 1910, and their son Caleb Alden Faulkner was born in 1834 and lived until 1901, and became a circuit preacher. Neither was a hunter, but Carrie worked in the store and kept the family's books.
The years that followed were busy ones for New Orleans. His father died in 1831, in the river, and Caleb took on the work. There were the yellow fever summers, in which he closed the store and worked for the sick. There was the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico, when the city filled with volunteers and with trouble. There was the secession, the capture of the city by the Union fleet in 1862, the occupation, and the long, uneasy years of Reconstruction, in which the cotton exchange was opened and closed and opened again. He kept his store throughout. He sold to soldiers of both sides, and his wife tended their wounds.
He died in the spring of 1871, at sixty-four, of heart failure, in the back room of the store, among the lamps. His children closed the shop for the funeral. A hawthorn hedge, which he had planted behind the building forty years earlier, was found to have grown through the wall.
Caleb Thayer Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Narrow Yoke, the storekeeper of the Treme, who closed the gaps. In the Slayerverse he stands for the boundary keepers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who understood that a line, well drawn and well watched, can hold a city.
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