Effie Harlan Faulkner

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

Effie Harlan Faulkner typed, by her own estimate, some nine million words in thirty years, and not one of them was about herself. She was born in 1886 at Deerfield, Massachusetts, and lived forty-six years as a typist in the mill towns and harbours of New England, most of them in the drawing offices and front counters of the Quincy shipyards. She was the elder daughter of the machinist Walter Harlan and of Abigail Knight, the typist and vampire slayer known in the Red Ledger as The Bright Kestrel, and the sister of the schoolteacher Catherine Faulkner Harlan. She never married and had no children. She was not called to the work her mother did, and never claimed to be, but she belonged to the Faulkner line by blood and kept its papers in order for the whole of her adult life. She died in 1932 of a fall, aged forty-six, a year after both her parents. The family remembers her as the girl who could type a hunter's report so that nobody who was not meant to read it could make sense of it. Her birth at Deerfield was a matter of the family's kind of arithmetic. Her parents lived in the valley town of Northampton and later in Lowell, but her mother, who was twenty-four and expecting in the spring, had been told by the Red Ledger's elders that a hunter's child should be born among the Knights, in the old town on the Deerfield, and went up in March by the Connecticut River railroad, in a hat, in a great deal of discomfort, to the house of her late father's cousin on the Street. The Street at Deerfield was a mile of wide lawns and old elms, with a meeting-house at one end, an academy at the other and a great many ancient frame houses in between, several of which still had the scars of the raid of 1704. It was not a quiet town for a Faulkner. The child was born in the front bedroom of the cousin's house, in a snowstorm, on the eighteenth of March, and was named for a great-aunt on the Faulkner side, who had died the winter before and had left, in her will, a silver thimble. She was taken home to Lowell in a basket at six weeks, with her father's machinist's gauge in her hand. It was the only toy she would hold. She was a pale, round-faced, quiet, rather stubborn little girl, who liked order and minded noise. She stripped and oiled a revolver at ten, to please her father, and was bored by it. Her father, who had taught her the parts by name, and who was delighted with her accuracy, could see that she had no taste for the weapon. She liked the paper. She liked the little cards that her mother kept in the tin trunk, with their columns, their dates and their tiny, regular notations, and she liked, above all, the machine on which her mother wrote them. It was a Remington, black, with gilt lettering, that sat on a table in the parlour. She was allowed to touch the keys at eight, and could, by ten, type a page without a fault. Her mother, who was a hunter by night and a typist by day, took the view that the world had a great many jobs in it and that there was no good reason for her daughter to have the hard one. She did not press. She said, simply, that there was a good deal of work in the Ledger that could be done indoors by people with a clear head and a good hand, and that she would be glad of a clerk. Effie took her at her word. By fourteen she was typing the Ledger's New England circulars in the evenings, in a flat, uniform type, on thin paper, six copies at a time, with carbon sheets that left her fingers purple to the knuckle. She typed the cautions, the route lists and the name-notes of the Massachusetts cousins. She learned, without being taught, to omit. A circular, she said, should tell a hunter what he needed and a stranger nothing. She took the commercial course at Quincy, where the family had moved in the new century, and in 1904, at eighteen, she went to work in the drawing office of the Fore River shipyard, where the great hulls of the coastal schooners and, later, the destroyers and the battleships were designed. She was one of a dozen girls at a long table, typing specifications. It was a peculiar education. She typed the weights of engines, the thickness of plates and the exact dimensions of the fittings for a vessel that would not be launched for two years, and she found that the language of the shipyard, with its strict nouns and no adjectives, was precisely the language that she preferred. She was quick. She was accurate. By twenty-five she was the chief typist of the drawing office, and had charge of the six girls who sat at the long table, and a small room, with a window, from which she could see the slip. She lived at home, in the house on Hancock Street, with her parents and her sister. The house was noisy in a way that she approved of, with the lathe running in the cellar and her father's voice coming up the stairs with a question about the state of a bearing. Her mother was often out at night. Nobody remarked on it. The daughters were brought up to understand that the family had a business, and that it was not a thing to talk about, and Effie, who was not a talker, found it simple. She kept the tin trunk in order. She typed, in the evenings, in the spare room, her mother's reports to the Ledger, in a cipher of the old Faulkner pattern, and mailed them on the morning train. A cousin in Boston, who received them, said that the typing was so clean that it read like print. The Great War brought the yards to a fever. Between 1917 and 1919 the Fore River works built a destroyer in a few weeks, and the drawing office worked in three shifts, and Effie, who was thirty-one, typed, in eighteen months, the specifications of thirty-five vessels. She did it with a stack of carbon paper and a flask of tea. She wrote, in the office's annual return, a single line of comment, that the work was satisfactory. In the autumn of 1918, when the influenza came to Quincy, carried by sailors from the Boston Navy Yard, and the yard lost a hundred men in a month, she kept the office open with three girls out of twelve, and typed the lists of the dead for the company. She was not ill. She said it was the smell of the carbon paper. Afterward she became quieter. The yard was cut back after the war, and she was moved to a small insurance office in Boston, on State Street, where she typed policies for a marine underwriter, with a view of the harbour and a window that would not open. She took the train in every morning, with a book. Her mother was slowing, her father was tiring, and the work of the Ledger, which she had kept so faithfully, came to her more and more, until she was, in effect, its clerk for the whole of the Massachusetts cousins. She had a small, black, locked cabinet in the spare room with six hundred cards in it. The Depression years cost her her job in Boston, in 1931, and cost her, in the same autumn, both her parents, who died within weeks of each other. She stayed on at the house. She took in typing. She fell on the stairs of the house on Hancock Street in the winter of 1932, on a January night, carrying a box of cards down to the cellar. It was a long fall and a bad one. She was found in the morning by her sister, at the bottom of the flight, with the box, and the cards, six hundred of them, in order, in her arms. The doctor said that she must have died at once. Catherine, who buried her beside her parents at Northampton, sorted the cards and found that not one was out of place. There was no other mark on the stairs or on the cellar door, and the family, who looked, looked twice. Effie Harlan Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the typist who kept the New England Ledger's cards in order, the daughter of the machinist and the Bright Kestrel, who made a hunter's words as clean as print. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and copyists of the Red Ledger, who stayed at their machines while others went out in the dark, and whose careful, unremarked labour was the thing that let the work be done twice.