Charles Eaton

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

Charles Eaton was born in 1814 in Bardstown, Kentucky, and worked for thirty years as a boatman on the Ohio and lower Mississippi. He married the seamstress and vampire slayer Mary Lowry Faulkner in 1838, raised two daughters with her, Georgia Faulkner and Fanny Eaton, the second of whom became a slayer, and died in 1862 of kidney failure, at forty-eight, in the middle of the Civil War. He was not a hunter and was not born to either of the great families, but for twenty-four years he was the husband of a woman who was one, and he carried, in the family's phrase, the wrong end of the work: the one that kept a hunter fed, rested and on time. He was a cheerful, deliberate, weather-browned man, who liked his wife's company and hers alone, and who asked, in a quarter of a century, only two questions about what she did. Bardstown, in the year of his birth, was a small and prosperous town in the rolling country south of Louisville, the centre of a district of farms, distilleries and Catholic settlements, and was already known for its whiskey, its cathedral and its hospitality. It stood on the road to the river. His father, whose name the family papers do not give, was a cooper, a maker of barrels, in a trade that was growing quickly, and the boy grew up in the smell of oak and charred wood, among a great many half-finished staves. He learned the cooper's craft first, and was good at it. He could raise a barrel in an hour. He could make it tight enough to hold whiskey, which is the harder thing. The river called him, as it called most of the young men of the district. The Ohio was twenty-five miles to the north and the Mississippi a few hundred beyond, and the steamboats, which in his boyhood had begun to crowd the western waters, were hungry for hands. At sixteen he went to Louisville and shipped as a deckhand on a stern-wheeler, and he took to the life at once. He was a strong, steady, sociable boy, who did not mind hard work, and he did not drink more than was sociable. By twenty he was a mate's assistant on a Louisville and New Orleans packet. By twenty-three he was a boatman in the proper sense, with his own small flatboat and a cargo of Kentucky whiskey to sell in the lower country. He met Mary Lowry Faulkner in the summer of 1837, at the landing at Louisville, where he was delivering a load of barrels. She was eighteen, a small, dark, straight-backed girl in a blue dress, standing on the wharf with a parcel of shirts under her arm, and she was arguing with a steamboat steward about the price of a hem. She won. He watched, and when the steward had retreated, he picked up her parcel and asked where it was to be taken. She said that she could carry her own shirts. He said that he had not doubted it, but that he had rather a long way to go and would be glad of the company. She looked at him for some time. She said that she lived up the bluff, at the cottage with the dairy, and that her father was a pilot who did not like strangers. Her father was Ezekiel Faulkner, the bitter, brilliant, difficult river pilot of Louisville, and he did not like strangers. He liked Charles, however, after a day. He saw that the young man handled a boat, admired his cooper's skill with a barrel and understood that he was, in his silent way, in love. He said that Mary might do worse. Mary's mother, Mary Lowry, said nothing at all, and put on a second kettle. They were married in 1838, in the spring, at the Presbyterian church at Louisville, and he moved into the cottage, at first, to be near the dairy. It was a cheerful household, with two cows, a goat and a large number of cats. He worked the boats. He was often away, for a week at a time, on the run to Cincinnati or Memphis, and sometimes a month, on the long trip to New Orleans and back, but when he was home, he was fully at home. He chopped wood, fixed the fence, rocked the cradle and helped with the churning. He sang. He had a deep, untrained baritone, and a repertoire of river songs that his wife could not stand, and that she asked him to sing all the same. It was Mary who told him about her family, after a year of marriage. He had suspected, without knowing what, that there was something. He had noticed the long box under the bed, and the silver spoons that were always being lost, and the odd visitors at odd hours. He was, however, a man who did not like to pry. She told him one evening, at the kitchen table, after the dishes, with the lamp turned low. She explained that her father was a hunter of the Red Ledger, that she had been taught the work from childhood, and that she went out with him as a helper and expected, in time, to be called to it. She said that she would be going out, sometimes at night, and that she could not tell him where. He took it in. He did not say anything for a minute or two. Then he asked her two questions. The first was whether she would come home. She said that she intended to. The second was whether there was anything that he could do. She said that there was. She said that he could be the person who was at home. He said that he had rather thought that might be the case, and he got up and put the kettle on. It was a role that he played well for twenty-four years. He kept the house. He kept the lamp lit, and the fire in, and a supper on the stove, for the nights when she came in late. He kept the long box cleaned and oiled, and learned, without being shown, to mend a strap, to fill a cartridge and to pour a silver ball. He kept his own counsel, which on a river was less common than it should have been. He used the boat, as she asked, to carry things up and down the river that could not be sent by the post, and on several occasions to carry her. A flatboat of whiskey barrels, going down the Ohio at night, is one of the best hiding places that the Red Ledger ever found, and he was the man who supplied it. Their daughters were born in the first years of the marriage. Georgia Faulkner was born in 1840 and lived until 1908, and Fanny Eaton was born in 1842 and lived until 1909. Fanny was called to the work, and became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger like her mother and her grandfather. Georgia was not, and became in time a healer and a wife, marrying in 1860 into the House of Delacroix in New Orleans. Charles taught both girls to swim. He taught them to tie a knot, to read a river and to sing, and he made them each a small, tight barrel, with a lid, to keep their treasures in. He was a large, sunburned, sandy-bearded man with a broad, good-humoured face and a habit of rubbing his hands together when he came in from the cold. He was popular on the river, for his easy temper and his honesty, and was known at every landing from Pittsburgh to Natchez. He had a hundred friends and, as far as anyone knew, no enemies. His father-in-law Ezekiel, who had no friends at all, regarded him with an exasperated affection, and left him, in his will, the oak yoke that he had worn for forty years. The war came to the river in 1861. The Ohio, which had been a highway, was now a frontier, and the Mississippi, below Cairo, was a battleground. Kentucky declared its neutrality and then abandoned it, and Louisville, which had always been a river town, became a Union base. Charles, who was forty-seven, was taken on as a civilian boatman by the army, and spent a year carrying stores and wounded men between Louisville, Cairo and Paducah. It was hard work, in cold weather, on short rations, and it was bad for his kidneys, which had never been strong. He died in the spring of 1862, at forty-eight, of kidney failure, in the cottage on the bluff, with his wife at his side. His last words, she said, were a remark about the river, which he said was rising. He was buried in the Louisville cemetery, where his father-in-law lay, and Mary, who was forty-three and had been burying the dead for years, stood at the graveside in a blue dress, with a revolver in her pocket and a cooper's stave in her hand, which she had taken from his bench. She said that he had been the best part of the work. Charles Eaton is remembered in the Faulkner family as the boatman of Louisville, the husband who stayed at home. In the Slayerverse he stands for the partners of the Red Ledger, the men and women who did not hunt, and whose steady hands, lit lamps and open doors were the reason the hunters came back.