Catherine Faulkner Harlan

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

Catherine Faulkner Harlan was born in 1888 at Ipswich, Massachusetts, and lived seventy-four years as a schoolteacher on the South Shore, where she taught the fourth grade at Quincy for forty-one years and was, at the end of it, more widely remembered than the mayor. She was the younger daughter of the machinist Walter Harlan and of the typist and vampire slayer Abigail Knight, known in the Red Ledger as The Bright Kestrel, and the sister of the typist Effie Harlan Faulkner. She never married and had no children of her own, although by her own calculation she taught eleven hundred. She was not a slayer, and was never asked to be one. She belonged to the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger through her mother, and she was the last of her family in New England to hold its papers. She died in 1962 of a car accident, aged seventy-four. The family remembers her as the teacher who outlived everyone, kept what was worth keeping and could make a room of ten-year-olds go quiet by lowering her voice. She was born at Ipswich because her mother, in the last months of her second confinement, was sent to her own father's cousins on the Argilla Road, a pair of widowed sisters in an old house with a low ceiling and a chimney that drew badly. The Ledger's elders had a preference for births in the old towns, and Ipswich, which had been a Faulkner town since the seventeenth century, was one of them. It was a salt-marsh and shoe town at the head of a tidal river, with a stone bridge, a great many old houses and a clam flat, and it smelled, in the last week of April, of mud and lilac. The child arrived on the twenty-sixth, at four in the morning, in a rainstorm, and the elder of the sisters, who had delivered two hundred babies and did not believe in fuss, handed her to her mother with the remark that she had a pair of lungs. She had. It was the last loud thing that she did for twenty years. She grew up in Lowell and Quincy, in her father's house, in the shadow of her sister. Effie was two years older, a sure, pale, exact girl who did everything first, and Catherine, who was quick, fair and a little shy, learned early that the simplest way to get on was to pay attention. She did. She read every book in the house, which included the Bible, Dickens, a machinist's handbook and a very large volume on the strength of materials, and she learned from her father the virtue of asking what a thing was made of. She learned from her mother, who was out by night and in the office by day, that one could be two people and not be uneasy. The hunting she knew about, as a child knows about a parent's job, and she neither envied nor feared it. She simply understood that it was not hers. She had, she said afterward, a different kind of work in mind. She decided on teaching at eleven, in the fifth grade, when a substitute teacher, a large, tired woman with a voice like a saw, was overwhelmed by a class of forty and Catherine, without being asked, took a stick of chalk and explained long division to the back row. It took six minutes. The substitute, who had been about to cry, sat down. After that, Catherine said, the question was only one of means. She took the normal course at the Bridgewater Normal School, where the state trained its teachers and where, in the 1900s, she was one of the youngest in her year, and she graduated in 1908 at twenty with a certificate, a good reference and a stubborn habit of writing in the margins. She took a post at once in a school on the Quincy side, in Wollaston, teaching forty ten-year-olds in a room with a stove. She never left it. The school was a long, dark brick building on a hill, with a coal furnace, a bell and a lawn, and her classroom was on the second floor, on the east side, with four tall windows, a blackboard along two walls and a picture of Washington over the door. She made it her own. She taught the multiplication table by chanting, handwriting by drill and geography by the method of putting her pupils on the train, a long paper railway which she chalked on the floor, with stations that were the great ports of the world, so that a child from Quincy could be said to have gone to Liverpool by Tuesday. She taught them to read the newspaper. She was stern about lateness, slovenly writing and lies, and she was fair, and they loved her with the violent, inarticulate fidelity that children give to a teacher who means what she says. Her family saw her every Sunday. At dinner in the house on Hancock Street she sat between her father and her sister, and she was the only one of the three who talked. Her mother was slowing. The Great War came and went, and the destroyers on the Fore River slips were launched in their dozens, and she watched from the schoolyard, in the gap between lessons, the great grey hulls going down the ways, and taught her pupils, who were mostly the children of shipyard men, the names of the parts of a ship. In the autumn of 1918, when the influenza closed the schools for five weeks and then reopened them, she went back to a room in which a third of the desks were empty. She did not remark on it. She set the children to draw a picture of someone they missed, and when they had drawn it, she put the pictures on the wall, and they stayed there until the spring. The early thirties took nearly everything. Her parents died within weeks of each other in the autumn of 1931, her father of the machinist's chest and her mother of a tiredness that had been coming for years, and her sister Effie, who had taken on the work of the Ledger's New England cards, fell on the cellar stairs in the following January. She buried them, all three, at Northampton. She found herself, at forty-three, the only one left in the house on Hancock Street, with a lathe in the cellar, a tin trunk in the attic, a locked cabinet of six hundred cards and a full timetable. She did not stop teaching for a day. She took the cards, which she could read and did not wish to, and put them in the bank, and she wrote to the Ledger's Boston cousin to say that she was not the person for the work and was not going to pretend. He wrote back, kindly, that he knew. The cabinet stayed in the bank. Her life after that was the school and the house. She took the tram every morning and walked home every evening, with a bag of papers to mark, and she sat in the kitchen with a pot of tea and a pile of exercise books until ten. She kept her father's lathe oiled, for no reason that she could name. She was not lonely. There were the pupils, and their children, who came back to her classroom in the thirties, and their grandchildren, who came in the fifties and were told, with a dry eye, to sit up straight. During the war years, when the South Shore filled with soldiers and sailors and the yards ran all night, she taught an evening class in English to the wives of the workmen, in the same room, under the same picture, with the blackout blinds drawn. She took no pay for it. She retired in 1949, at sixty-one, with a clock, a scroll and a speech from the superintendent, who was one of her old pupils and forgot his text. She went on tutoring children at the kitchen table, for nothing, and on Saturdays she took a few of them to Ipswich, on the train, to see the house on the Argilla Road, where the old sisters' great-niece still lived. She told them that it was where she had been born. She did not tell them that it was where a good many others of her line had been, or what for. She was killed in the autumn of 1962, at seventy-four, in a car accident on the Quincy shore road. She was a passenger in the car of a former pupil, who was driving her home from a reunion, in the rain, and a truck crossed the line. The pupil survived. He said afterward that she had been talking about fractions. The school closed for the afternoon of her funeral, and eight hundred people, more than the church could hold, stood out on the lawn. Catherine Faulkner Harlan is remembered in the Faulkner family as the teacher who taught a generation to read and the last of her line to keep the New England papers, a woman who declined the work of the hunters and did a great deal of good by her own. In the Slayerverse she stands for the teachers and keepers of the Red Ledger, who never walked a night watch and who proved that a clear voice and a chalked floor are also a way of holding back the dark.