Eugene Sullivan Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Proud Heron. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

Eugene Sullivan Faulkner was born in 1996 at Denver, Colorado, and is living today in Denver, where he works as a bartender and, since 2025, as a vampire slayer of the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Proud Heron, a name for the long-legged bird that stands in shallow water for an hour without moving and then takes what it came for in a single stroke, and it classes him as a Spy, a hunter who learns before he acts, who goes into a place in ordinary dress and comes out with what the place knew. His craft is Hawthorn Craft, the use of hawthorn in stake, hedge and thorn-barrier against the dead, and his gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He was called in 2025, during a harvest, when the last field went unreaped and the reapers were never seen. He is the only child of the line cook Michael Sullivan and of the hospital cook and slayer Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, The Slow Bell, who was his mentor, and the grandson of the electrician and slayer Eugene Faulkner, The Pale Scythe, for whom he was named. He has not married and has no children. He was born in the small hours of a dark October morning in 1996, in the same hospital in the east of Denver in which his mother had been born twenty-five years earlier, and the first thing that anyone remarked on was that he did not cry. He looked at the ceiling lamp. His mother, who had been on the early shift until the day before and who was large, calm and incapable of being hurried, said that he was exactly like her father, and his grandfather Eugene, who had driven over from the house on the north side in the pre-dawn cold and was standing in the doorway holding a bunch of grocery-store carnations, said that it was too early to tell. Michael Sullivan, who was twenty-one, red-haired and had come straight from the kitchen with a burn on one hand and a pan of rolls that he was afraid to leave, said that he hoped the boy would have a trade. He was assured that the family had several. He grew up in a brick bungalow in the south of the city with a lilac hedge that his grandfather had planted a cutting of, and the first of the things that he learned was how to keep out of the way of a kitchen. His mother ran a hospital line by day and a household by night, and his father, who worked late shifts at a steakhouse on Federal Boulevard, taught him the second thing, which was how to stand in a crowded room and listen. He was a tall, fair, lanky, rather solemn boy with his father's red-gold hair, and a habit of standing at the edge of a room, saying nothing and taking it all in, that his teachers described as watchful and his grandfather as heron. It was his grandfather who first took him out. On Saturdays in the spring, with a thermos, the old man drove him to the creek banks and the dry arroyos east of the city, and set him to look at a patch of ground and say what had happened on it, and it was on one of these walks, at eleven, along Cherry Creek, that the boy noticed a thorn tree. It was a hawthorn, a small gnarled one with a flat white head of blossom and red haws, and he said that the birds did not go in it. His grandfather, who had been about to say the same, put his hand on his shoulder and said nothing for a long time. The Faulkners had kept the hawthorn from the beginning. In the Lancashire of the first Thomas it had grown in hedges, on boundaries and across thresholds, and the old women of the line had known that a hedge of it kept the dead off a field and a stake of it settled one, and the knowledge had come down the generations in a flat tin of notes that had crossed the ocean with the first of the American Faulkners and been recopied every thirty years. His grandmother Lorraine Faulkner Carter had added a chapter in Los Angeles. His mother, who had no time for the notes, had given them to him at sixteen, in a shoe box, on the grounds that he was the one who read. He read them in three nights. By eighteen he knew the cutting seasons, the angles, the seasoning of the wood, the right way to lay a hedge across a gap, and the Colorado kinds, which grow along every creek between Fort Collins and Pueblo and which nobody has looked at in a hundred years with a stake in mind. He told himself that he was not going to follow. He took a job at nineteen in the back of a bar in the old warehouse district, washing glasses and carrying ice, and found that he liked it better than anything he had done. A bar is a kind of stage on which the same sixty people say, in the course of a night, almost everything that is true of them. He was behind it at twenty-one, in a white shirt and a black apron, and by twenty-four he was the night bartender at a long, narrow, brick-walled cocktail place on a street below Union Station, a tall, quiet, watching person who could name a stranger's trade from the way that he put a wallet on the bar. He did not ask questions. He poured, he listened, and in the pandemic years, when the bar was shut for eight months and he delivered groceries in a mask to old people in the south of the city, he found that the habit of listening went with him, and that a door opened to a bartender in a way that it did not for a policeman. The call came in the summer of 2025, in the last week of July, on a wheat farm in the plains of the north-east of the state. A friend of his, a bartender named Kyle Brandt, whose people farmed four sections near Yuma, had asked him for a weekend of work, since the family had been left short-handed by a hospital stay and the harvest was ripe in the heat. They had taken on a custom crew by telephone, a travelling outfit with its own combines, the kind that follows the wheat up from Texas in a line of red machines. They had paid the deposit. The crew had cut three fields in the first week and then stopped, and the last field of a hundred and sixty acres, the one at the edge of the shelterbelt, stood in the sun with its wheat falling, and nobody had seen the reapers since. The combines were found on the Wednesday, parked in a row in an old barn at the end of the road, cold, with the keys in them. There was no sign of anyone. Eugene, who was walking the field's edge at dusk with a bottle of water, looked at the ground, as his grandfather had taught him, and saw a trail that ran from the barn to the shelterbelt through the standing wheat in a line as straight as a ruled page, with the wheat on either side of it not bent but laid, as if it had been stroked, and no track on the path at all. He did not tell anyone. He stood a long time at the edge of the trees, a row of Russian olive, plum and one old hawthorn that had been planted in the nineteen-thirties by a farmer from Lancashire, and as the light went he felt, he said afterwards, exactly as he had in the creek bed at eleven, which is that the birds had stopped. He rang his mother from the road. Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, who was at the hospital, finishing the lunch service, listened to the whole of it without a word, took a day's leave and drove up through the night, in a van with a thermos, and told him, at a table in a farm kitchen at dawn, what her own father had told her on a road at Raton, which was to be slow. She spent the weekend teaching him how to wait. He told her, on the Saturday night, that he knew where the thing slept by day, which was a corrugated shed behind the old barn. They did it together on the Sunday evening. He cut the hawthorn that afternoon, six stakes, at the angle that the notes demanded, and laid the thorn across the one gap in the shelterbelt through which the thing came and went, as his great-great-grandmothers had laid it across a Lancashire threshold. Lorraine laid her road flares and her lamps. The Proud Heron, as the Colorado cousins call him, stood for an hour in the dusk at the end of the wheat, in the posture that had got him the name, until the creature came out of its shed and found only one way, which was between two lines of thorn, and he took what he had come for in a single stroke. The Brandts' wheat was cut on the Thursday by a crew from Kansas. The Ledger does not say what happened to the first crew, and the family does not ask. He is twenty-nine, a tall, narrow-shouldered, fair man with a good grey shirt for Sundays and a cutting knife in a drawer in his flat, and he lives in the south of the city, three streets from his parents, with a hawthorn in a pot on the balcony that he waters on Mondays. He works the bar on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and on the other nights he walks the creeks with a thermos. His grandfather, who is eighty, goes with him when his knees permit. His father, who has been told as much as he has asked to be, sends him home on Sundays with a pan of rolls. Eugene Sullivan Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Proud Heron, the Denver bartender who stood at the edge of a wheat field until a thing came to the one gap that he had left open. In the Slayerverse he stands for the Spies of the Red Ledger, the watchers who learned the old hedge-craft of the Faulkner line, and who showed that a listening ear, a patient stance and a stake cut at the right angle will close a harvest as surely as any machine.