Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Steady Lamp. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

The carpenter Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner used to say that he had been taught his trade by his mother's hands and his craft by a dead man's face. The first was a family joke about the midwife who brought half of Worcester County into the world; the second was the truth. In the spring of 1776, on a market day in the crowded square of Worcester, Massachusetts, he looked across a press of farmers and butter-sellers and saw a man he had helped bury the winter before. The man saw him too. That was Ebenezer's calling, and it made him a vampire slayer of the Faulkner line, later entered in the Red Ledger under the name The Steady Lamp. He was born in 1749 in Worcester, an inland market town whose courthouse, tavern and printing office sat at the junction of the roads from Boston, Springfield and Providence. It was a place of drovers and teamsters, of stage wagons churning up mud, of Congregational meetings that ran past the second candle. His father, Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, was a militia sergeant on the western edge of the colony and a slayer in his own right, the man the ledger calls The Frontier Sexton because he buried what he killed and marked each grave in the family's private book. His mother, Betsey Whittier, born in 1709, was a midwife who walked the county at all hours with a satchel of linen and a bottle of spirits. Ebenezer was the youngest of four. His brother Gideon Whittier Faulkner, born in 1733, had no calling and kept to the land; his sister Betsey Whittier Faulkner, born in 1739, and his brother Caleb Faulkner, born in 1741, were both slayers, and their long silences at the supper table told the boy more about the family than any speech. His mother died in 1756, when he was seven, and the household passed into the hands of his elder sister, who ran the kitchen the way a sergeant runs a company. His father was often away on the frontier watches and on scouting parties toward the Berkshire hills, and Ebenezer grew up largely in the company of Betsey and Caleb, who taught him to tell a working knot from a lazy one and to keep his mouth shut in public. He was apprenticed to a housewright at fourteen and learned to frame, joint and pin. Carpentry in that province was a trade of broadaxe and adze, of white pine boards ripped in pit saws, of barns raised in a day by a whole neighbourhood, and Ebenezer was good at it, with a level eye and a temper that seldom rose. When his father died in 1768, he was nineteen and already independent enough to take the contract for the coffin himself. By the middle of the 1770s Worcester was one of the places where the dispute with the Crown turned into something else. In September 1774 thousands of militiamen from the county had marched into town and forced the royal judges to resign their commissions, and the following April the Worcester minutemen turned out for Lexington. Ebenezer, then in his twenties, was among them, and he stayed in the ranks through the siege of Boston and the winter of 1775 to 1776. He was proud of the service but had no taste for parade. When people asked about the war he would say only that it had taught him how much a well-laid fire and a dry pair of stockings were worth to an army. The market-day calling in 1776 was not what he had expected. He had been raised around slayers and had waited half his life for the strangeness to reach him. But it came without ceremony. A face in the crowd, sallow and composed, in a coat that did not quite fit, turned to him and smiled. He followed it out of the square and up a lane behind the tavern, and lost it at a wall where the frost had not melted. That night he went to his sister and said that he had seen the miller's boy, a neighbour's son whose funeral he had attended. She answered that she had wondered when he would tell her. The next day he took down the long rifle that had been his father's, and began the slow business of learning to use it properly. He took as his craft the patient routine the ledger calls Dusk Patrol, walking a fixed circuit of the town and its outlying farms at the last light and again at the first, so that nothing new could settle in his neighbourhood without his hearing of it. The lamp in his name came from the small horn lantern he carried, kept trimmed and burning through every weather, and from the reputation he gained for being present. He made his own silver-cast shot, moulding it from old spoons and buckles in a ladle over the forge fire, and he laid his rifle down every night within reach of the bed. His entries in the ledger are the entries of a man who checked his sums twice: dates, places, the number of shots fired, the weather. He was not a brilliant hunter, but he had a reputation for never losing the trail. The same year that he was called, he married. Betsey Eaton, born in 1752 in Salem Town, was a dairywoman who had come inland to work for a farmer on the Leicester road, and they met at a barn raising where he was framing the roof. She had strong forearms, a slow way of speaking and a gift for reading animals that he found instantly restful. They were married in 1776, and she brought to the household a churn, a herd of six cows and her own quiet competence. In time she too would be called, in 1785, and the household would have two lamp-bearers. Their first child, Jacob Eaton Faulkner, was born in 1777 and grew into a steady, unassuming man who kept a shop and never wore the family's burden; he died in 1823. A daughter, Mary Eaton Faulkner, born in 1781, took after her father in the calling and after her mother in her stillness. She too died in 1823, the same year as her brother. Ebenezer worked into his sixties, raising houses in Worcester, Leicester and Sutton, and the frames he made still stood generations after his death, tight in their pegged joints. He taught Mary to shoot behind the barn when she was twelve, on the principle that no one should learn to be brave by surprise. He was a gentle presence at home, a man who whittled while he talked and never raised his voice to his children, and the town regarded him as a reliable, slightly humourless neighbour. The rivalry with the Proctors never touched him much. He once wrote in the ledger that a Yorkist cousin passing through had tallied a kill in his district and that he had not contested it, remarking that a man who counted more heads than he took would eventually run short. His wife died in 1801, aged forty-nine, of a fever caught in a plague house, and Ebenezer never quite recovered from the loss. He lived thirteen years more, growing quieter and more devoted to his tools, and died in 1814 of old age, aged sixty-five. In the wider Slayerverse he is remembered as the man who kept a light burning where others would have let the dark fall.