Charles Rogers was born in 1913 in San Francisco, California, and lived sixty-six years as a newspaper compositor, setting type for dailies in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver. In 1940 he married the telephone operator Lorraine Faulkner Carter, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger known to the family book as The Slow Rook, and they raised two children, Mildred Rogers Faulkner, born in 1943 and living today, and Eugene Faulkner, born in 1946, who is also living and also a slayer. Charles himself was not a hunter and belonged to no house; the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated. He died in 1979 of a car accident, aged sixty-six. He married into the Faulkner bloodline, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger, and for thirty-nine years he was the one member of that household who could be relied upon to be where he said he would be, doing what he said he was doing, and the family remembers him as the compositor who set the Ledger's western pages and never once misspelled a name.
San Francisco in 1913 was a city of hills, ferries and print shops, still rebuilding itself from the fire of seven years before, and Charles was born into the trade. His father was a pressman on Mission Street, a large, patient man with ink in the creases of his hands, and his mother took in sewing. They lived in a flat south of Market, over a feed store, and the boy grew up to the thump of a flatbed press three doors down, which his mother said was the only lullaby he would accept. He was a round-faced, dreamy, careful child who liked order and disliked noise. He learned his letters from the signs on the street and his type from the founts in the pressroom, and at nine he could set his own name in six faces. At fourteen he went into the shop as a printer's devil and began, in the ordinary way, to learn the case, where each letter lived, how to read it upside down and backward, and how to justify a line so that it sat in the stick like a brick.
The compositor's craft is half arithmetic and half patience. A man stands at a case of type, with a composing stick in his left hand, and sets a column letter by letter, reading from copy, and the whole of it must be correct, because the thing is made of metal, and metal does not forgive. Charles, who was a little deaf in one ear and thoroughly unhurried, was very good. He went on to the Linotype in his twenties, a machine of brass, lead and ill temper, and was said by his foreman to be the only man who talked to his machine as though it were a horse. In 1938 he was hired by a Los Angeles paper, at a better wage, and took the Southern Pacific down the coast with a tin trunk and a small bundle of letters of recommendation.
He met his wife on the telephone. Lorraine Faulkner Carter was twenty and an operator at an exchange on Wilshire, and she had been put through, one rainy night, to the composing room at his paper, where a young man had called to ask for a number and, being a compositor, had spelled the name of the street back at her in full. She said that nobody had ever spelled back a street to her before, and he said that it was a habit, and she asked him where he had learned it. They talked until the foreman took the receiver away. He took her to a dance at a hall on Spring Street, and to a picnic at Griffith Park, and then, one hot afternoon, to a stationer's, where he bought her a pencil, and she said it was the most romantic thing a man had ever done for her. They were married in 1940, in a small church in Boyle Heights, with her mother Ada, a nurse, in the front pew, and with the pencil in her bag.
She was called the next year. She had gone to a house in the hills to see to a family that had been taken ill with a winter fever, and found it had taken everyone in the household except one, a little girl, who sat on the stairs in a nightdress and asked her, with great politeness, whether the gentleman had gone. She told her husband that night. She told him in the kitchen of their small bungalow, plainly, as a woman reads a telephone number, and he listened with his hands flat on the table. When she had done he said that he was not much use with a pistol, that he had never struck a man in his life and that he proposed, therefore, to be of use in the one way that he was fitted for. He asked her for the Ledger.
It was an old book, and the western pages were in a poor state, written in a dozen hands on the backs of envelopes and in the margins of other books. He set them. He took them home, a few pages at a time, and over three winters he put the western cousins' sightings, tallies and cautions into type, in a plain face, on good paper, on a small hand-press that he bought secondhand and kept in the garage. The Slow Rook, who was a Soldier, which the Faulkners count among the hunting styles, a hunter of drill, discipline and order, who works in a unit and keeps to the plan, had never had so tidy a reference. He ran off thirty copies and bound them himself. They went to cousins in Oakland, Sacramento, Phoenix and Reno, with a note in his own hand giving the date of the printing. He was careful about one thing. He never set a name in full. He used the initials the family used, and he kept the plates, when they were done, in a locked drawer, and melted them in the shop's pot, in the war years, on a Friday evening, with his own hands.
The war years were busy and strange. Charles, who had failed the physical for flat feet, worked nights on the paper, setting the casualty lists and the shipping news, while the city filled with soldiers and sailors going out through the port, and Lorraine worked the exchange by day and the Quarry Reading by night, as she had come to call her craft. It was the art of looking at the tracks, habits and leavings of a hunted thing and knowing where it would be next, and she was very good at it. Mildred Rogers Faulkner was born in Los Angeles in 1943, in the worst of the blackout, and her father set the birth notice himself, in eight-point type, and asked the foreman to put it on page nine. In 1945 he took a better post on a Denver paper, in a brick building near the railroad yards, and the family moved to the Rockies, where Eugene Faulkner was born in 1946, to a house in a quiet street with a lilac hedge and a view of the mountains. Both children took their mother's family name, as the Ledger's western cousins often did, and Charles, who knew a thing about names, did not object.
In the Korean War years he moved to the night desk, and in the Vietnam years he was a foreman, a grey, round, reliable man with a pencil behind each ear. He printed the Ledger's pages for three decades. He took the children on Saturdays to the pressroom, to see the great rolls of paper go through, and he taught Mildred, who was practical, to run the hand-press, and Eugene, who was dreamy, to set a line. Mildred went back to Los Angeles, where she still lives, and became a laundry supervisor. Eugene became an electrician. Neither was called in their father's lifetime, though his wife, who watched them, said that her son had the eye, and that the call would come to him late.
He died in the winter of 1979, in a car accident on a wet road outside Denver, on the way home from the night shift, aged sixty-six. He had a proof sheet in his coat pocket. Lorraine, who identified him, took it out and read it, in the corridor of the hospital, as a woman reads her husband's last letter, and found that it was perfect. She said so, to the nurse, and then she sat down. Eugene, who was called the following year after a fire that burned a whole lane, kept the sheet in a frame.
Charles Rogers is remembered in the Faulkner family as the compositor of the western pages, the man who put the Red Ledger into type and never once misplaced a comma. In the Slayerverse he stands for the printers, clerks and bookkeepers of the old houses, who did not walk the roads at night but who made sure that those who did had something clean and accurate to read by the light of a lamp.
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