Elias Jewett Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Hollow Cairn. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

Elias Jewett Faulkner was born in 1841 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and lived twenty-four years as a carpenter and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, the last two of them in the uniform of a Massachusetts regiment. The family book knows him as The Hollow Cairn, a name that recalls the heap of stones, open at the heart, in which he hid his notes, and it classes him as a Spy, a hunter who learns before he acts. His craft was Long-Watch Tracking, the following of a quarry over days and weeks by keeping a steady watch rather than making a chase. He was the younger child of the carpenter Homer Jewett and of the seamstress and slayer Anna Faulkner, The Fallow Tinder, and the brother of the slayer Abigail Jewett Faulkner, and he trained under his mother. He married Lillian Nichols in 1864, in a marriage that had no children and lasted fourteen months, and died in 1865 of an old wound that never closed, aged twenty-four. He was born at Ipswich because his father had taken a contract there. In the winter of 1840 Homer Jewett, who was the best housewright on the North Shore and was tired of roofs in the wind, had been hired to frame a large house on the High Street for a retired sea captain, and had moved his family into a rented cottage near the Choate Bridge for the season. Anna was five months gone. The work took longer than expected, as work for sea captains generally does, and the child arrived in the cottage in the middle of a February blizzard, with the snow up to the sills and the midwife carried to the door on a sledge. Homer, who was on the roof of the captain's house at the time, came down at a run, slipped on the ladder and arrived at the bedside with a sprained wrist, which he described afterward as the only injury of the confinement. They called the boy Elias, after an uncle of Homer's who had been lost off Cape Sable, and took him home to Marblehead in a basket on the coastal stage. He was a thin, dark, solemn child with big hands and a habit of watching. He was the kind of boy who could sit for hours on a wharf post with a line in the water and who, when asked what he had caught, replied that he was not certain. His sister Abigail, four years older, mothered him, and his father, who found him at six in the shop, put a plane in his hand and showed him how to take a shaving. It was, for a few years, the whole of his ambition. He learned the use of a square, a saw and a chisel and the way a board will move in the damp. By eleven he could make a dovetail. He took to the workshop, in a dim and tidy and fragrant way, as some children take to the sea. He was given to silence, which in a workshop is a virtue. His father's death in 1856 was a blow to a boy of fifteen. He was in the shop when Homer was carried in, and he took the adze from the floor and hung it on its nail, before he had understood what had happened. The shop was, as it proved, to be the making of him. He finished his apprenticeship under his father's old journeyman, a one-eyed journeyman named Pardon Tarr, and set up, at nineteen, as a carpenter and general builder, working on the fish houses and the small new shoe shops that were going up on the hill. He was quick, accurate and uncomplaining, and more than one master builder remarked that he had never met a young man who was so good at looking at a roof and telling what it would do. His mother taught him the lore in the back room of the house in Marblehead, with the shutters closed, in the winter evenings, after the day's work. She told him at sixteen, which was late, and she taught him at a great speed. She drilled him in the history of the Ledger, in the five signs and the four cautions, in the use of silver, in the silence, and in the lamps of the harbour, which he never quite got the hang of. He was not a reader of lamps. He said so. Anna, who had not expected otherwise, put him out on the wharf at night and watched what he did instead. What he did, she noticed, was to fix on a thing, a door, a mooring, a window, and to keep it in view for hours with his whole attention, like a cat. He could lose a night. She told him that he had the gift of the long watch, and that her cousin Silas Thayer, in Kentucky, who had died some years before, had had it too. The calling came in the summer of 1863, in a field at Ipswich, in the middle of a harvest. He had gone back to the town on a carpentry job, to repair a barn, and had been asked, as a favour, to lend a hand with the salt hay on the marshes, where a family named Burnham had the last field of the season still to cut. It was a good crop. The mowers went out at dawn. By dusk they had come in, all six of them, and said that the field was done, but when the farmer went out the next morning it stood as they had left it, uncut, with the scythes laid in a neat row at the edge and no mower anywhere to be seen. Nobody in the parish had seen them leave. Elias, who had been asked to see what was amiss, stood at the edge of the marsh in the morning mist, looking at the row of scythes. He said afterward that it was like reading a word in a foreign hand. He sat down on a stump and kept the field in view, without moving, for eleven hours. He saw what came out of the creek at dusk. He went home to Marblehead the next morning and woke his mother, and said that he would like her to teach him the rest. Long-Watch Tracking, as he made it his own, was a Spy's craft. He chose a point on the ground, a mooring, a stile or a gate, and kept it under observation for as long as it took, without a fire and without a sound. He kept a kind of station. On the dunes at Ipswich, on the marsh edge and, later, in the hills above the Virginia fords, he would build, with the stones that came to hand, a low, round, hollow cairn, with a slit in the side through which he could watch, and in the hollow of which he would leave, for the cousins, a note in his own small cipher. It was from these that he took his alias. The hollow cairn was a hiding place and a signpost, and it served, he said, for a man who liked to be both. His gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, a spyglass and a short, flat pencil, and he was credited in the eighteen months of his career with some twelve vampires, the most of them along the Virginia roads. He enlisted that autumn, in a Massachusetts regiment of the Army of the Potomac, in October 1863. The regiment was not told why, and the Ledger saw no reason to tell it. He was a carpenter, and was put with the pioneers, and before the winter was out was detailed to the colonel's staff as a scout, which was a role in which, as a Spy, he was more at home. The army was a bad place for him, and a good one. It was full of the dead, and of those who make use of the dead, and the creatures of the night, as the Ledger's Virginia cousins had long known, followed a great army as gulls follow a plough. He watched them. He watched from hills and river banks and hedgerows, in the rain, for days at a time, and he sent his reports in a cipher that looked to the regimental adjutant like an unusually dull series of weather notes. He had already told Lillian Nichols what he was, in the autumn, a week before he left. He had met her at a church supper earlier in the year, and asked her which of the pies was safest, and she had told him the exact truth. They were married in February 1864, on a ten-day furlough, in the front room of her mother's house on Orne Street, with his mother, his sister and his brother-in-law Joseph Knight in attendance. He wore his uniform. He had five nights of marriage. Then he went back, and he wrote to her for a year in his small, exact cipher, about rivers, weather and the flight of birds, and said at the end of every letter that he was well. The wound came in March 1865, at a river crossing in Virginia, where he had been sent ahead of the regiment to watch the far bank. He saw what he had been sent to see. He did not see the second thing, which was behind him. It was a deep wound, low in the side, of a kind that the regimental surgeon had not seen and did not wish to see again, and he was carried to a field hospital and then to Washington. The Ledger found him there in May. They took him home to Marblehead, to the spare room on the ground floor of the house on Orne Street, where his wife had made up a bed. The wound never closed. It would scab and open, scab and open, through the summer, like a thing that remembered what it was for, and the doctors said that it needed time. He had it dressed, at night, by his wife and his mother in turn, and in the long evenings he told them what the river had looked like, and what he had seen on the far bank. He died in November 1865, at twenty-four, in the evening, with a lamp lit. His mother, who had been hunting for thirty years, sat with Lillian and the body until dawn. She had never seen a thing done better than he had done it, she said, and she had never seen a man leave a thing so neatly behind. His sister Abigail, who came down from Newburyport, found her mother in the kitchen afterward, sewing a shirt, and sat beside her without a word. He was buried in the old burying ground on the hill, near his father, with the hills of Marblehead at his back. On the headstone, at Lillian's request, there is a single cairn of carved stones, with a small hollow at the centre, and nothing else. Elias Jewett Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Hollow Cairn, the carpenter of Ipswich, the scout who kept the long watch. In the Slayerverse he stands for the watchers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who did their work at a distance, in stillness and in silence, and who left behind, in a hollow of stones, the word that made the next hunter's task a little easier.