Charles Faulkner

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

Charles Faulkner was born in 1872 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived sixty-seven years as a carpenter and horseman on the Shelbyville road east of Louisville, in the horse country of the river landings and the bluegrass farms. He was the younger son of the horse farmer Edwin Lord and of the boarding-house keeper and slayer Fanny Eaton, The Proud Wren, and the younger brother of Charles Faulkner Lord, the vampire slayer known as The Hollow Weir. He was entered in the family book as Charles Faulkner, without the Lord, because of a clerk's slip at his christening that nobody ever corrected, and he answered to it for the rest of his life. He was not a hunter and was not called to be one. He died in 1939 of heart failure, aged sixty-seven. The Faulkners remember him as the son who stayed, who kept the farm going and the barn roof on, and who for four decades made the doors, bars, shutters, hinged panels and false floors that the Red Ledger's Kentucky country needed and never had to ask for twice. The slip was made at the christening, in the spring of 1872, in the Presbyterian church at Lexington, where the clerk, a stout, deaf old gentleman who did the registers on Sundays, entered the child as Charles Faulkner, son of Edwin and Fanny, and went on to the next. Nobody noticed until the certificate was wanted for a school, when it was found that the boy's name had lost a syllable, and that there were two Charleses in the house, one Lord and one not. Fanny said that she had no intention of paying the clerk's fee twice. His father, who was slow to take offence, said that it would make things easier, since one had only to look at the horse to know which son was on it. The family told the brothers apart as Charlie Lord and Charlie Faulk, and they did not seem to mind. Charles Faulkner said that he was the only man in Kentucky who had been entered in a book as a Faulkner by an honest mistake, and who had afterward found that the mistake was correct. He was born at Lexington, three years after his brother and in the same way, because his mother had again been caught out by the calendar. Edwin's mother, who had kept rooms over a harness maker's shop on the Richmond road, had died the winter before, but Fanny, who still had friends in the town, went up in the last week of March to the boarding house on Short Street that Minnie Putnam had kept, and her daughter now kept, for the Ledger's western cousins, and was put to bed in the back room above the kitchen. The house was full of lodgers, and the landlady Ellen, Minnie's daughter, a stern, practical woman of thirty-three, took the baby on her knee at the end of the first day and held him for an hour. He was taken home in a basket, on the stage, at three weeks, with a coachman who said that he had never heard so well-behaved a child. He grew up on the farm, between his father and the horses. He was a fair, stocky, cheerful child, broader than his brother and a good deal less silent, who was good with his hands from the start. He whittled. At four he had made a wooden horse with four legs that would stand. At seven he built a hen-house for the farm's single hen, to the astonishment of its owner, and at ten a shed for a neighbour's mule. He was not a watcher like his brother, and his mother, who tried him on a dish of dried peas, had to admit after a fortnight that he could not sit still for five minutes. She was not disappointed. She said that a house in which everyone sat watching would fall down, and that somebody had to put up the next wall. It was his father who found him the trade. There was a joiner on the Shelbyville road, a large, bald Scot called Murray, who built barns and stable fittings and the framed houses of the Louisville suburbs, and who took on the elder brother in 1885 as a boy. Charles Faulkner followed three years later, at sixteen, and went to the same bench. He was a slower, steadier workman than his brother, and he had a great affection for wood. He said that every board had a grain and a temper, like a horse, and that the trade was to find out what the board wanted to do and let it. He learned to frame a barn, to hang a door, to cut a dovetail, to lay a floor and to make a box that would close without a sound. He was not quick. Murray said that it was the best thing about him, because the work had to be done only once. His brother was called in 1888, and Charles Faulkner, who was sixteen, watched it happen across the supper table. He did not resent it, and he was not jealous. He was told, in the plain manner of the house, that there was a war, that his brother and his mother were in it, and that there was a place for him too, if he wanted one, that did not involve a gun. He said that he would make whatever was wanted. He never hunted, and the family book, which records his brother's alias and craft, records of him only one line, in his mother's hand, which says, Carpenter. Makes the barn. It is one of the warmest entries in the book. He made what was wanted. The Ledger's Kentucky country was full of barns and stables, old farmhouses and country churches, and the hunters who used them needed places of a particular kind: a loft with a door that could be barred from within, a cellar with a false wall, a chest whose bottom lifted, a coffin that would not split when a thing was nailed into it. He made all of them. He learned, from his mother, where the cousins were and what they wanted, and from his brother, who had the better eye, where a thing would come in. The two of them worked like a pair of hands. The elder watched and said that the window on the left was a weakness, and the younger went away and built a shutter for it that could be closed from the inside in a second. There was a barn near the Frankfort pike that he fitted out in 1894 with a trapdoor in the loft, a beam on a hinge and a cellar with two entrances, which was used by hunters for thirty years, and in which, it was said, sixteen vampires were taken. He kept the farm going through the long decline of his parents. His mother fell ill in her late fifties, and gave up the stair, the ledger and the house in Louisville, and came out to the farm, where he and his father put up a room for her at the front, with a wide window looking on the lane. He cut the frame, hung the sash and planed the sill. She sat in it for nine years. She died in 1909, and his father in 1911, and it was Charles Faulkner who found the old man at dawn, sitting up in bed, with his hand on the window sill, as if he had heard a horse. He buried his mother at Louisville beside her father, and his father beside her. He said that his father had been the only man he had ever known who was never wrong about a horse, and that his mother had been the only woman who had known why. He stayed on the farm, in the house that his parents had left, with the horses and the paddock and a hound that followed him to the barn. He worked as a carpenter through the Great War, when his brother went to the army camp at Louisville and he took the small jobs of the district, barns and sheds and coffins, and he worked through the influenza winter, when every undertaker between the river and the Bluegrass was out of boards. He made, in that one winter, more than a hundred coffins, in a shed at the back of the barn, working by lamplight. He did not sleep much, and never spoke of it. In the Depression he took whatever came, a gate for a quarter, a stall for a dinner, and he kept the horses fed, as his father had, by a method of which he said only that it worked. His brother, who had been the best eyes in the county, died in 1948, nine years after him, and sat, in his last years, on a porch of his own building, looking at the lane. Charles himself went in the winter of 1939, of his heart, at sixty-seven. He had been planing a board in the shed, and was found by a neighbour's boy with his hand still on the plane and a long curl of shaving on the floor. The board was a length of walnut, and it was the lid of a box that he had been making, it turned out, for his brother, and that he had not yet decided how to give him. Charles Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the carpenter of the Shelbyville road, the brother who stayed at home and made the barn. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen of the Red Ledger, the men who fitted the hunters' country with doors, shutters and false floors, who never carried a pistol, and whose honest joinery kept the dark out of a great many Kentucky barns.