The wheelwrights of Andover, Massachusetts, said that a wheel is only as true as the eye that dished it, and Denys Faulkner had the truest eye in the town. Born there in 1702, he made cart wheels, wagon wheels and the occasional spinning wheel in a shop beside the Shawsheen road, and for the last fourteen of his forty years he was also a vampire slayer, known in the Red Ledger as The Flint Latch. He died in 1742 after a long night on the marsh, aged 40, leaving a wife, two children, a rifle that was later carried by his daughter, and a set of entries in the Faulkner tally that later keepers regarded as models of economy.
His father was Denys Cooke, born in 1676, a saddler, who died in 1736; his mother was Hannah Faulkner, born in 1678, a farmer's widow who kept the family name for her children and who lived until 1751. The naming in that household was a small puzzle even to the family. Denys Cooke had given his own first name to his eldest boy and then, by a Faulkner custom, allowed his wife's surname to take the son. The result was a household in which a saddler's leather and a widow's rye field jostled for room. The children grew up in a farmhouse at the edge of the town, in a country of stone walls, apple orchards and low wooded hills, with a meeting-house bell for the hours and a river that flooded every April.
He had three younger siblings. Ezekiel Faulkner Cooke, born in 1704, became a printer and was not a slayer. Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, was called to the work and stood beside Denys on more than one hunt. Hezekiah Cooke, born in 1719, was the youngest, seventeen years his brother's junior, and did not take the calling either. A family of that shape was a busy one. The boys were fed on corn bread, salt pork, beans and cider, and taught to read from the Bible and a battered New England Primer. Hannah, who had a shrewd view of what her children would need, sent Denys at fourteen to learn a trade. The wheelwright he served under was a heavy, silent man who taught him to choose his timber by the ring it gave when struck, to season oak for a year per inch of thickness, and to fit an iron tyre by heating it until it was just larger than the wheel and letting it shrink into place as it cooled.
It was in the wheelwright's shop that Denys developed the habit of long, still watching. The work demanded it: a man cannot dish a wheel by hurry. When he was twenty he married Lydia Whittier, a shopkeeper, in 1722, and set up on his own, and within two years his daughter Patience Faulkner was born in 1724. His son John Faulkner followed in 1727. Both children turned out to be quick and observant, and both took to their father's shop as if it were a private country.
The calling came to him in 1728, when he was twenty-six. It happened on a market day in Andover, in a crowd of farmers, drovers and boys, when he looked up from a stall of iron fittings and saw a face he knew. It was the face of a man who had been buried, the previous winter, in the town burying ground, and whom Denys had helped to carry to the grave. The man was walking through the market in daylight, quite calmly, in a coat that Denys also recognised. Nobody else marked it. For Denys the moment was like a plank giving under his foot: the town had gone on around him at its ordinary pitch, the smell of horses and wet wool and roasting chestnuts, and there was that face, turning. It was the calling, and he knew it at once, in the way that such things are known, as a settled fact behind the eyes. The dead man saw that he was seen and left the market by a lane behind the tavern. Denys did not follow that day.
He did not have a mentor. That was unusual, and it made the early years harder than they might have been. His brother Ebenezer helped when he could, and there were Faulkner cousins in Salem and Ipswich who were willing to correspond, but the craft he developed came mostly from his own hours in the shop and the field. He was a hunter, in the ledger's classification of archetypes, a man who worked from distance and patience rather than from close combat, and the craft that came to him was named Falcon's Eye. It was an unusual gift of sight, the capacity to read a landscape at a great distance in poor light and to pick out from the movement of grass, water or branches the single thing that did not belong. The gear he chose to match it was a long rifle with silver-cast shot. He cast the balls himself in a mould he had carved out of a block of soapstone, melting the silver from coin and a broken spoon over the shop forge. He made the stock of curly maple and the rifle's furniture of iron, and he put on it a flint lock whose latch never failed, which was how the alias came about.
His methods were quiet. He rarely sought a fight. He would spend a week on the edge of a town, watching, noting the hours at which a particular door opened and closed, and then take one shot from a hundred yards. The Red Ledger records seventeen entries in his name across the fourteen years, an unspectacular number, but the notes beside each are careful and complete, and several are accompanied by sketches of the ground made in a wheelwright's neat hand. He had a good relationship with his brother Ebenezer, who worked closer in with an axe and a pistol, and the two of them were known to spend a long night on a marsh path, one high on a dyke with the rifle and the other down in the reeds. Of the rival house he said little. The Proctors of Pennsylvania were a long way off, and he considered them a distraction, though he never let a Proctor claim in the White Ledger pass without asking for the particulars.
He died in 1742 after a long night on the marsh, aged 40. The details are thin: he had gone out on the salt marsh near the Merrimack to deal with something that had been troubling the farms there, and he stayed out in wet cold until dawn, waiting, and came back to Andover with a chill in his bones from which he never recovered. Lydia outlived him by five years, dying in 1747. Patience, born in 1724, took up his rifle and became a slayer in her own right and lived until 1784, while John, born in 1727, went into trade and lived until 1790. In the Slayerverse the Flint Latch is remembered as the quietest of the Massachusetts Faulkners, a man who did with one true shot what others did with an afternoon of noise.
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