Ethel Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Proud Anvil. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

In a kitchen drawer in Algiers, under the tea towels and above the string, lies a notebook in a crabbed hand that once belonged to a bootlegger's driver, and the woman who keeps it has never in her life let it out of reach. Ethel Faulkner was born in 1954 in New Orleans (Algiers), Louisiana, and is living today in Algiers, where she worked for decades as a telephone operator and, from 1973, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Proud Anvil, and it classes her as a Hunter, the plainest of the hunting styles, a person who finds the thing and goes straight at it, without a disguise, a cover story or a crew. Her craft is Long-Watch Tracking, the following of a creature by patience, and her gear is a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She is the elder child of the cotton factor and slayer Milton Faulkner, The Sure Shuttle, who was also her mentor, and of the typist and slayer Beatrice Seneca, The Bitter Latch, and the sister of the slayer Leonard Faulkner. She never married. She descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and the family remembers her as the hunter who could wait longer than anything that she was waiting for. She was born in the spring, in the little house near the ferry landing where her parents had settled after their marriage, in the same year that the family had at last stopped arguing about whose turn it was to keep the Louisiana pages of the Ledger. Her father, who had a great respect for fixed times, noted that she arrived on a Tuesday, at the hour when the ferry was due, and he took it as a sign. Her mother, who was thirty-one and had hunted for thirteen years, took it as a convenience. Her brother Leonard followed within a year. The house filled with the noise of two children who had been told that the pistol in the hall closet was not a toy and who therefore thought of little else, and with the quieter sounds of two parents who kept the strangest set of working hours in the parish. Ethel was a square, dark, solemn child with the Faulkner jaw and a habit, which the family found alarming, of being able to sit absolutely still for an hour without apparent effort. Her father said that she was the only child he had ever seen who could wait for a ferry as if she were doing it professionally. She was eleven in the September of 1965, when Hurricane Betsy came up the river and the levees below the city gave way, and it was the year that her mother died. Beatrice had been ill for more than a year, and when the power failed on the night of the storm, and the whole city lost its lights, she asked for a candle in the front window. Milton, who had been out all night with the levee crews, brought one. Ethel held it, in both hands, for the better part of an hour, while her mother, in the bed, said that it was a very fine lamp and that all the shades were right. The child did not move. She says that it was the first time that she understood what her mother had meant when she talked about the lights, and that it was also the first long watch that she kept. It took her a good while to understand why she had been able to do it. She had not been brave. She had been waiting for something to be over. Her father taught her the rest. He took the children to the ground in the evenings, as a sergeant takes in recruits, by assignments, and by fifteen she could walk a levee road in the dusk and say where a creature would be likely to go, in what order, and where a person might stand to see it do so without being seen. She left school at eighteen, in the last year of the draft, and took a place with the telephone company, on the long-distance board at the Algiers exchange, because the night shift paid better than the day and because a girl who sat at a switchboard in the small hours heard a great deal. It was not a hunter's trade, exactly, but it was the best possible one for her. She learned who in the parish called whom at four in the morning and who suddenly stopped. She learned that silence on a line is often the first symptom of anything. The calling came in the autumn of 1973, when a house on the edge of the parish was found empty and unburied. She was nineteen. A line in a district beyond the lower road, which she had connected a hundred times, had gone quiet for four days, and the operator who normally handled the exchange was away, so it fell to Ethel, on her own initiative and in her own car, to go and look. It was a plain frame house at the end of a shell road, with a gallery, a cistern and a pecan tree. The door was unlocked and the rooms were empty. The family, a retired shrimper's widow, a daughter and two grandchildren, had gone out of it, and nothing had been taken. In the front room, laid out on a board on two chairs, with the candles burnt down and the rosary in her fingers, was the old woman's sister, who had died the previous week and who ought to have been buried on the Thursday. She had not been touched. There was no smell. She lay there with her face composed and her hands folded, and the clock on the mantelpiece, which a person had wound, said a quarter to three. Ethel sat in a chair beside her for four hours and watched the door. Nothing came in. Then she drove home and told her father in the order that she had been taught, from the line to the board. He said that it was a clear account. She was his pupil for five years. Long-Watch Tracking, as she practised it, was the craft of the hunter who does not chase. A creature of the dark is very quick and has a great deal of time, said Milton, and the only thing that a mortal has that it lacks is the willingness to be bored. She learned to take a place, a car at a levee crossing, a back step across from a boarding house, a pew in an empty church, and to stay in it for as long as the work required, with a thermos, a notebook and a pistol in her lap, until the pattern showed. She kept a log, in her own hand, of every watch. Her longest, in 1976, lasted nineteen days. She was named in the spring of 1974, after a night on which she stood in the open for eleven hours in a cold rain on the Algiers levee, with a creature working at the water's edge two hundred yards off, and did not move until it came to the spot she had chosen for it. The elders of the Ledger's Louisiana chapter, who had not known whether she would take the work, declared that she was as proud and as hard to shift as an anvil, and that a hammer would only ring. She took her first creature that summer, and by the end of the Vietnam years, which in the family's memory ran on into the middle of the seventies, she had taken three. She did not shoot a great many. A hunter of her style, she said, did not need to. The place was chosen, the creature came, and the rest was a matter of being where she had said she would be. In the autumn of 1978 her father went out to a churchyard in St Bernard where a creature had been taking the new graves, and she found him at dawn, sitting against the gate, with the lamp still lit beside him. She was twenty-four. She says that she did not cry, and that she picked up the lamp, and that it was still warm. She took the notebook from his pocket that morning, and she has had it ever since. Her brother Leonard followed in the March of 1981, in another churchyard, to a blow of the same kind, and she was the one who took the call. She sat with his widow Frances Fontenot through the wake and drove her to the funeral, and in the September she stood godmother to the child, Mark Fontenot Faulkner, whom she trained herself, on the weekends, with the family's pistol and her father's notebook. She did not marry. It was a decision that she made quietly in her late twenties, and it was not a sad one. She said that there was a man in a ferry queue every week who looked at her, and that she had long since decided that she preferred her own company, her own watch and her own kitchen, in that order. She was a tall, spare, silent woman, a little lame in the left knee from the cold, who kept her house exactly as her mother had, with a lamp in the front window. She was fifty-one in the August of 2005, and the hurricane that was to flood the city caught her on the day shift at the telephone company, where she had become a supervisor of the restoration teams. Algiers, which stood on high ground, lost its power but not its roofs, and she spent nine days in a van, with a headset and a generator, putting the lines back for the hospitals. She was also, in that week, a hunter who watched. The city was full of strangers, and some of them, in the dark that followed, were not what they seemed. She kept a long watch on a church in the Fifth Ward for six nights and took what came. In the next year she buried Mark. She does not say how. She retired from the company in 2010 and lives today in her house in Algiers, with a porch, a drawer of string and Frances in the next street, and she goes to Mass on Sundays, where she sits in the same pew and watches the door. Ethel Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Proud Anvil, the telephone operator of Algiers who could wait out a creature in the cold and who has kept her father's notebook for the better part of fifty years. In the Slayerverse she stands for the patient hunters of the Red Ledger, the ones who won not by speed but by being in the right place at the right hour, and who proved that a lamp, a thermos and a long watch will hold a river road against anything that comes up it.