Charles Faulkner Lord

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Hollow Weir. Craft: Falcon's Eye.

Charles Faulkner Lord was born in 1869 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived seventy-nine years as a carpenter and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Hollow Weir, a name that puts together a dry channel in a river and the low dam that a fisherman builds across it, and describes a man who waited in an empty place for something to come through. He was a Soldier, a hunter who works in line, by drill, fieldcraft and orders, and his craft was Falcon's Eye, the discipline of watching a whole field at once and of sitting so still that the field forgets to be careful. He carried a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was the elder son of the horse farmer Edwin Lord and of the boarding-house keeper and slayer Fanny Eaton, The Proud Wren, and he trained under his mother. His younger brother was Charles Faulkner. He died in 1948 of a stroke, aged seventy-nine, in a house that he had built himself, having outlived his parents, his brother and two wars. He was born at Lexington, which was not where his parents lived, because his father's mother kept three rooms above a harness maker's shop on the Richmond road and had made it plain, in writing, that a first grandchild would be born under her roof and nowhere else. Edwin was a horse farmer of forty acres on the Shelbyville road east of Louisville, and Fanny, who was heavily pregnant and out of patience with travelling, came up on the stage in the last week of May, took the back bedroom and gave birth on a hot night with a neighbour's daughter holding the lamp. The baby weighed eleven pounds. Fanny, who had counted a good many lodgers into her house, said that she had never handled anyone so heavy who did so little to announce himself. He was christened Charles for his grandfather Charles Eaton, and Faulkner for the Ledger, and Lord for a father who had not been asked. He was carried home to the Shelbyville road within the month. He grew up between a boarding house and a horse farm, and took something from each. In Louisville, where his mother kept the tall brick house near the landing, he sat under the dining-room table with a slate, at four years old, and tallied the lodgers by their boots. On the farm he sat on the fence rail beside his father, from the age of three, and learned that a horse can be calmed by a man who does not move. He was a long, quiet, watchful child with freckles, and he spoke so little in company that visitors took him for slow. He was not. He had found out, before he could read, that a person who is silent hears every word said round him, and he kept his counsel as other boys kept marbles. His mother taught him to hunt the way she had been taught herself, with stillness first. She had the old method from her own mother, Mary Lowry Faulkner, The Hollow Rook, who had learned it watching a pan of milk and who lived at the Louisville bluff until 1900, and she gave it to her elder son on the long evenings of his fifteenth winter, with a lamp, a clock and a dish of dried peas. Fanny's own gift had been a patient following of one person. The boy, to her mild surprise, had his grandmother's. He could sit on a fence for an hour and say afterward which of the nine parts of the field had changed. It was Falcon's Eye, pure and simple, and his grandmother, who was sixty-five when she first saw him do it, said, with her usual economy, that he would do. He was sent up to the bluff to sit with her on the porch every Sunday afternoon, and he spent two summers looking at the river. He went into carpentry at sixteen, because the work was there. His father had bought a second-hand set of tools at a sale, and a joiner on the Shelbyville road, a large, bald Scot called Murray who built barns, stable fittings and the framed houses of the new Louisville suburbs, took him on as a boy at a dollar a week. It was the right trade for a watcher. A carpenter looks at a structure, and looks at it again, and sees what is out of true. He learned to read a timber for a flaw, to lay out a roof by eye and to hang a door so that it would shut without a sound. He learned that the work is done before the tools are taken out, in the looking. Murray, who did not flatter, told him at nineteen that he had the best eye for a rafter he had ever taught. The calling came in the autumn of 1888, in a barn. Charles was nineteen and was on a job at a horse farm off the Frankfort pike, framing new stalls for the owner's stud, when a stranger was found dead in the hay loft. He was a pale, well-dressed man who had asked the groom for a night's lodging and had been put in the loft, and in the morning had been found on his back in the straw. The dogs of the farm, a dozen of them, would not go in. They stood in the yard in a half-circle, with their hackles up and their tails between their legs, and the collie that had been bred for the stock would not even look at the door. Charles, who had come up the ladder to see what was wrong, knelt beside the body and looked at the neck. He saw two marks. He saw, too, the old barn-beam above the man's head, which he had measured that week, and saw that there was a fresh scratch on it that was higher than any man could have reached from the floor. He sat in the loft for the rest of the day, without a word, and he watched the trap door in the roof, and at dusk, when the field had gone quiet, something came back for the body. He did not go down. He went home that night and told his mother at her kitchen table in Louisville. She put down her ladle, listened to the end, and told him, in a level voice, that his grandmother had sat on a horse for a whole afternoon in 1844 and watched a gap in a fence, and that it was the same thing. She took him out the next evening with a pistol, and stakes in a leather case, and showed him how to watch a house so that the house did not know. She was the best teacher he ever had, and the most exacting, and his first kill, a month later, was made from her own back porch at a range of forty yards. He was a Soldier in the Ledger's sense, which is a hunter who works to an order of battle, and the family book is explicit that it was the Falcon's Eye that made him one. He would survey a farm the way an officer surveys a line, and would choose a place, a roof or a hedge or a loft, and sit, without moving, for as long as it took. He marked positions. He placed his cousins. He was the man who said, in a Kentucky barn at midnight, that the fence on the left was open, and that the thing would come through it at about three. He served the Ledger for sixty years. He enlisted, in 1898, in a Kentucky volunteer regiment, and spent the war in camps, in the company of a great deal of dysentery and some unusual hunting, and he said afterward that the Army had taught him two things, both of which he already knew. When the Great War came, he was forty-eight, too old for the line, and went to the great army camp at Louisville in 1917, where a whole city of barracks was put up in a winter, and he was one of a thousand carpenters. He framed four hundred buildings and found a thing in the cellar of one of them. The influenza of 1918 took some of the carpenters and a great many of the soldiers. He buried his mother in 1909 and his father in 1911, long before, and lost his brother Charles in 1939 of a bad heart. He built, in the thirties, in the depth of the Depression, a good many cheap houses and a few coffins, and had some months of no work and of a great deal of looking. He did not marry, and he lived for forty years in a two-room house that he had built on the Shelbyville road, beside the paddock, with a long window on the lane. He died in 1948, of a stroke, at seventy-nine, on the porch of that house, in the evening, in a chair that he had made. He had been sitting there, it was said, since four, with his eyes on the far fence, and the neighbour's boy, who found him, said that he looked as though he had been told to wait and had not yet been told to stop. The hounds of the neighbourhood lay in a row across the yard until the burying. Charles Faulkner Lord is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Hollow Weir, the carpenter of the Shelbyville road, the watcher who sat in an empty barn and was never found. In the Slayerverse he stands for the Soldiers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who won by patience and position, and who could see the whole of a dark field from one place.