Deborah Faulkner Endicott

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

Deborah Faulkner Endicott was born in 1786 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and worked as a laundress in the harbour and mill towns of the Massachusetts coast for more than fifty years. She never married and had no children, and she lived to seventy-seven, dying of old age in 1863, long after the war of her youth and in the middle of the war of her old age. She was the daughter of a circuit preacher and a schoolteacher who was also a vampire slayer, and the younger sister of the carpenter Joshua Endicott Faulkner. Among the women of the Red Ledger she held an unusual place: she was the one who kept the family's linen, and with it a good part of its secrets, in a neat, well-ironed order. Her father, Reuben Endicott, was born in 1754 and died in 1830. He was a circuit preacher, one of the itinerant Methodist ministers who rode from settlement to settlement on horseback, preaching in barns and cabins and sleeping wherever a bed was offered. He was away for weeks at a stretch, and his daughter grew up knowing him mostly as a cheerful voice in the hall, a pair of wet saddlebags on the floor and a smell of horse and wood smoke. Her mother, Naomi Lord Faulkner, born in 1757 and dead in 1823, was a schoolteacher whom the Red Ledger calls The Fallow Drover, a hunter who moved her quarry slowly and in a straight line until it had nowhere left to turn. Deborah's brother Joshua was four years older and had been born in Pennsylvania, in Germantown, where their mother had kept a school. By the time Deborah was born the family had moved to the coast of Massachusetts, where the Faulkners were thickest on the ground. Marblehead in 1786 was a town recovering from a hard war. It had lost hundreds of its fishermen to the Continental service and to the prison ships, and its widows filled the streets. The fishing fleet was slowly rebuilding, the wharves were busy with the salt-cod trade and the houses, squeezed onto the granite ledges above the harbour, were packed with families. Deborah's earliest memory was of her mother teaching a dozen children at the kitchen table while a pot of fish chowder simmered on the hearth, and of the window behind her, which framed the masts of the schooners in the harbour like a fence. She was a practical girl. She did not take to her mother's schoolroom as her brother had, and she showed no sign of the calling, but she had a great liking for order and for the clean, simple satisfactions of physical work. At ten she was helping a neighbour with the washing, and at twelve she was doing it herself, on her own account, for three or four households on the street. Washing in those years was the heaviest of domestic tasks. Water was carried from the well in buckets and heated in an iron kettle over a fire. The linen was soaked overnight in lye, scrubbed on a board, boiled, beaten, rinsed, blued, starched and hung to dry on lines or spread on the grass to bleach in the sun. It took the better part of two days to do a household's weekly wash, and a good laundress was worth her weight in coin. Deborah was a very good laundress. She was a small, brisk, high-coloured girl with strong forearms and a rigid respect for whiteness, and by the time she was twenty she had the best washing trade in Marblehead, with a clientele of sea captains' wives, merchants, clergymen and the owners of the town's two taverns. She kept a notebook in which she recorded each household's pieces by number and mark, and she never lost a sheet. She was known for her prices, which were high, and for her reliability, which was absolute. Linen left with Deborah Endicott came back on the day she had promised, folded in tissue and smelling of lavender. The Faulkner family came to rely on her in ways that the ledger does not record. A hunter's clothes came home stained with things that no ordinary laundress could be expected to handle, and Deborah handled them. She knew how to lift a bloodstain without setting it, how to remove tar, wax, lamp-black and river mud, and what to do with a shirt that had been torn by something with claws. She asked no questions and gave no sign that she knew what she was dealing with, but she sent back, folded in the pile, small notes: a torn sleeve is mended, a button is missing, this cuff was soaked in salt and hot water, you will want to see a doctor about the arm. The hunters of the Marblehead branch called her the family's quartermaster. Several of them said that they trusted her opinion on their condition above a physician's. She also had, as a laundress, an excellent view of the town. Her rounds took her into every kind of household, from the grand brick houses on the hill to the fishermen's cottages by the water, and the state of a family's linen told her more about their circumstances than their own tongues would. She noticed, in the autumn of 1812, that the washing of a house on Orne Street had begun to show a particular sort of stain, and she mentioned it to her cousin, and within a week the Red Ledger had recorded a vampire taken on the premises. She repeated the feat three times in her life. Each time she said merely that she had been doing the wash. She never married. A widower, a cooper, offered for her in her thirties, and she gave him a good supper and an honest answer. She lived for most of her life in a narrow house near Old Burial Hill with a yard full of lines, a great copper and a shelf of flatirons, and she took her nephews and nieces to her kitchen on Saturdays to give them cake. After her mother's death in 1823 she took the trouble to go to Germantown, Pennsylvania, for the funeral, and to sit with her brother Joshua in the house he had built, which she thought was too quiet. She was still working at seventy. In 1861, when the Civil War began, she was seventy-five, and she washed and mended uniforms for the Marblehead volunteers until her hands gave out. She died in 1863, of old age, in her own bed, having just been visited by the minister. The Faulkner family buried her in the old burying ground above the harbour, on the side from which she could see the lines of the town's washing. Deborah Faulkner Endicott is remembered as the laundress of Marblehead, the woman who knew everything about a household from its sheets. In the Slayerverse she stands for the domestic trades that served the Red Ledger from behind the scenes, where a clean shirt and a good memory were as valuable as a silver bullet.