Ellen Putnam Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sable Shuttle. Craft: Night Trapping.

Ellen Putnam Faulkner was born in 1839 in Paducah, Kentucky, and lived thirty years as a boarding-house keeper and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the river landings and horse farms of her native state. The family book knows her as The Sable Shuttle, a name taken from the dark, darting shuttle of a bagging loom and from her habit of weaving a night's work across a town before anyone had noticed the thread, and it classes her as a Soldier, a hunter who works in company, by plan and in the open. Her craft was Night Trapping, the setting of lamps, nets, doors, pits and silver wire so that a quarry walks into a place it cannot leave. She was the only daughter of the storekeeper and slayer Silas Thayer Faulkner, The Plain Fowler, and of the boarding-house keeper Minnie Putnam. She married the boatman Henry Howe in 1861, raised two daughters, Ida Howe and Sarah Howe, the elder of whom became a slayer, and died in 1869 of a fever caught in a plague house, aged thirty. She was born at Paducah in the last week of February, a month ahead of anybody's reckoning, and within a quarter of a mile of the landing at which her father had himself been born twenty-eight years before. Silas had gone down the Ohio by packet in the autumn of 1838 on a hunt that was expected to last the winter, and Minnie, who did not hold with being left and who had a cousin there with a boarding house in need of a manager for the river season, followed him at Christmas on the next boat. She was in her ninth month when the ice went out. The child arrived in a back bedroom on Water Street, on a night of sleet, with a river pilot's wife in attendance and the lodgers eating their supper through the wall. Silas, who had been out since dusk watching a wharf, came home at dawn and was handed a daughter. He said that she was the second Faulkner to be born within sight of that landing, that he had been the first, and that he supposed the family would go on doing it until somebody objected. The baby was carried home to Lexington in the spring, in a basket, on the deck of a steamboat, with the lodgers of three boarding houses queuing to look at her. She grew up at Short Street, in the big brick house with the long dining room, and was the child of that house in every sense. She was tall for her age and dark, with her father's pale attentive eyes and her mother's carrying voice, and she was the most serious infant that the lodgers had ever seen. At three she was sitting on the stairs with a doll, waiting up for the news of a new cousin's arrival. At six she was carrying the plates. At eight she could read her mother's ledger, which was a matter of some family pride, since the book contained, next to each lodger's name, a single word for what sort of person he was, and the child, to her mother's delight, began to add her own. Her entries were shorter than her mother's and rather more severe. She wrote down, against one of the regular drummers, the word careful. Against another, in 1848, she put, at the age of nine, the word wrong. He was arrested for forgery within the month. She was taught the work by her father, who was a patient and quiet teacher, and by the cousins who passed through the house. He took her out on the roof at night, from the age of twelve, and had her watch the stable yard for an hour. He taught her to sit still. At fifteen she was given a revolver, a small, heavy, plain one that had been her grandfather's, and was taken out to a disused quarry on the edge of town and shown how to use it. He died in the winter of 1855, of pneumonia caught on a long watch on a bridge in the rain, and she nursed him with her mother for six days. She was sixteen. She did not cry in the room. She went out to the kitchen and peeled potatoes for thirty, and was found an hour afterward, sitting on the back step with the knife in her hand, looking at the stable yard. Her mother died five years later, in the spring of 1860, of a fall on the cellar stair, and left the house and the ledger to a girl of twenty-one. Ellen took both. She managed the lodgers, paid the butcher, kept the two back rooms for the Ledger's travellers and said nothing about it to anyone. In the autumn of 1860 a boatman came to the house, a cheerful, sunburned, broad-shouldered young man from the Kentucky River with a chipped front tooth and a good tenor voice, and he took a room on a Tuesday, paid in advance and sang in the bath. Ellen put him down in the ledger, in her small, upright hand, as kind. Henry Howe worked a steam packet on the Kentucky and Ohio rivers, a small, dirty, reliable vessel that carried hemp, tobacco and horses, and he came to Lexington every fortnight to deliver the freight. He courted her for a winter by bringing her a present from every landing. They were married in June 1861, in the Presbyterian church where her parents had been married, and he moved into the house on Short Street, when he was in it, which was half the time. She told him the truth within the month, at the kitchen table, at midnight, as her mother had told her father. He said that he had wondered why the back rooms had two doors. She said that she had hoped he would. He asked whether there was anything that he could do with a boat. She said that there was. Their elder daughter Ida Howe was born in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, and lived until 1906, and became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, in her time. The younger daughter Sarah Howe was born in 1866, and lived until 1923, and was not called. The war was a strange time for the house. Kentucky, which had declared itself neutral and then was not, was full of soldiers of both sides, and the town changed hands more than once. Henry's steamboat was pressed into the service of the army's supply, and he hauled bacon and hay up the Kentucky River for three years, and came back thinner and not at all altered. She ran the house alone. She raised a child, kept forty guests, and held the watch at the back gate in the evenings, with her grandfather's revolver in her apron. The calling came in 1868, in a mill. A large bagging factory had opened on the edge of town, a long brick building full of looms for hemp sacking, which ran day and night, and a number of the night-shift hands boarded at Short Street. One morning in September she set the breakfast table as usual and the shift came in. There were eleven of them. They were pale, all eleven, pale as candle wax, and they sat down without a word and did not touch their food. They were not ill. She looked at their hands, which were folded flat on the cloth, and their necks, which were all turned in the same direction, and she understood. She had been writing, for ten years, in the ledger, a word against each name, and she understood that she had for once, without knowing it, written the right word. She went out to the yard. She stood in the dark of the morning and looked at the mill, which was lit from top to bottom, and she said to herself, quite calmly, that she knew what it was and that she was going to stop it. It was the work of a Soldier. She did not go in alone. She gathered the cousins, half a dozen hunters from the Kentucky country, and a river pilot, and she drew a chart of the mill, on the back of a menu, with every door, stair, window and lamp. Then she laid the trap. It took nine days. She had the loading door chained from outside, the side door wired with a string of tin cans, and the roof hatch left ajar. She put silver wire across the threshold of the boiler room, sewed into the hem of a length of sacking, and put hemp sacks, lightly soaked in lamp oil, in the main passage. It was a net made of light and dark. On the tenth night, at a quarter to three, it was sprung, and before dawn the night shift was ordinary again, and went home tired, hungry and bewildered to a good breakfast. She took the alias of The Sable Shuttle from the mill, where the foreman, hearing the story, said that she had woven the thing up like a bag. Night Trapping became her craft. She was called to other places in the following year, to a stable on a horse farm, a church on the river and a cooper's shed, and each time she set a net. She planned every detail. She knew what a thing would do, which way it would turn, where it would wait and what it could not bear, and she knew how many of her cousins she would need, and where each should stand. Her gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, and she carried a coil of silver wire in her apron pocket, next to a pencil. In the autumn of 1869 a fever broke out in a shut-up house on the landing at Covington, where several families had died in a week, and the cousins of the Ledger, who had heard that something besides the fever was going in and out, asked her to set a trap. She went up by the evening train. She went in on the third night, with two cousins, in a cloth mask and a pair of oilskin gloves, to chain the cellar door. It was done. The thing was dealt with, and was the last of her kills. She came home with a fever that was not its doing. She died on the fourteenth day, at Short Street, in the back bedroom above the dining room where she had eaten all her suppers. She was thirty. Her husband sat by her, and her daughter Ida, who was seven, was told everything, at her own request, in the last week. Henry Howe lived until 1908, and raised the girls, and kept on the boat. He never remarried, and on his stone he put only the word she had written of him in the ledger, which was kind. The ledger itself went to Ida, who added a last entry against her mother's name. It was a single word, and the cousins did not dispute it. It said: planned. Ellen Putnam Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Sable Shuttle, the landlady of Short Street, the hunter who wove the night. In the Slayerverse she stands for the planners of the Red Ledger, the slayers who won their hunts before they began, with a chart, a lamp and a good deal of arithmetic.