Ezekiel Faulkner was born in 1792 in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived fifty-nine years as a riverboat pilot and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book calls him The Bitter Yoke, a name that started as a complaint about the weight of the oak yoke he wore across his shoulders on portages and ended up as a description of his temper. He was a Spy in the Faulkner sense, a hunter who gathered information on the move, and his craft was the Dusk Patrol, the regular nightly circuit that his family had carried from the Massachusetts coast to the western rivers. He married Mary Lowry in 1816, had two daughters, both of whom carried the Faulkner name forward, and died in 1851 in a fall.
The record of his birth contains a small puzzle that the family has never entirely resolved. His father, Silas Goodwin, was a wheelwright of Salem who had moved for a few years to the Massachusetts hills, and his mother was Rachel Osgood Faulkner, a farmer's wife from Marblehead. Yet the Faulkner register places Ezekiel's birth in the Bluegrass town of Lexington, nearly a thousand miles from the family home. The most likely explanation, handed down in the family, is that in 1792, the year Kentucky became a state, Silas took his wife west over the Wilderness Road with a party of cousins to look at the country and to work for a season on the wagons of the new settlements, that their son was born at Lexington in the autumn, and that the family came home to Massachusetts two years later with nothing more to show for the journey than a baby who talked about horses. His elder sister, Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, born in 1791, was not one of the party.
Ezekiel grew up in Salem, in a household that smelled of oak shavings and hot iron, among the carts and wheels of his father's shop. He was a restless boy, who found the harbour a great deal more interesting than the wheelwright's yard. He watched the ships come in from the Indies and learned their names, flags and rigs. At fourteen he shipped as a boy on a coasting schooner, and at eighteen, having learned the trade of the sea, he took the road west that he had been carried down as an infant. The Ohio was open, the country beyond the mountains was filling up, and a young man who could handle a boat could find a living on it.
He found it on the river. In 1811 the first steamboat on the western waters, the New Orleans, made its passage from Pittsburgh to the Gulf, and within a decade the rivers were busy with paddle wheelers. Before that the trade was in keelboats, flatboats and barges, poled, rowed and warped upriver by gangs of hard men. Ezekiel, who was small, strong and unflappable, became a pilot. A pilot's work was to read the water: to know where the channel lay, how high the river was, where the snags, bars and sawyers had moved since the last trip. On the Ohio and the Mississippi, where the bottom changed with every flood, it required a memory for detail and a tolerance for fear. Ezekiel had both, and by his middle twenties he was a licensed pilot on the Ohio, working out of the river landings of Kentucky.
He met Mary Lowry in 1815, at a horse farm near Lexington where he had gone to collect a cousin. She was twenty-two, a dairywoman, the daughter of a farming family from the Bluegrass country, with a steady gaze and a tongue that could take the paint off a fence. He said something clever about the cows. She said something cleverer. They were married in 1816, the year after the victory at New Orleans, and they set up house in a small frame cottage on a bluff above the river at Louisville, where he could keep an eye on the landing.
Their daughter Rachel Lowry Faulkner was born in 1818 and lived until 1902, a long life that took her into the age of the electric light. She did not hunt. Their daughter Mary Lowry Faulkner was born in 1819 and lived until 1900, and was called to the work in time as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. Ezekiel, who had been a hunter for several years before she was old enough to understand, took her with him as a girl on the short trips, and she grew up with a pilot's ear for the river and a hunter's eye for the landing.
His own calling came late, in 1826, when he was thirty-four, after a storm. A big blow had come up the Ohio in the spring and driven half the boats on the river to shelter, and in the morning a steamboat, a stern-wheeler of the new pattern, was found aground on a bar below Louisville. Her crew of twenty-two were aboard, every one of them dead, laid out on the decks in rows, cold and bloodless, and not a mark on any of them. The boat's boilers were still warm. Ezekiel, who had been the first pilot out to her, climbed on board and walked through the silent vessel, and found in the pilot house a book, a log, in which the last entry had been written in a hand that grew steadily less steady. He brought it to his cousin, who said that it was time he knew what his family did.
The Dusk Patrol, on the water, became a matter of landings. Each evening, at the hour when the light failed, Ezekiel walked the river front at Louisville, then at Cincinnati, then at Natchez, as his work took him, stopping at the same points, checking the same boats and noticing what had changed. His eye for a boat was infallible, and a vessel that sat too low in the water, that showed no lights or that never seemed to load or unload was noted and tracked. He took, in twenty-five years of hunting, some forty vampires, most of them on the rivers. His gear was silver-cast shot and a revolving pistol, which he kept in a waterproof case, and the long oak yoke, which he wore on his shoulders on the carries between the landings.
The bitterness of his alias was half a joke and half a fact. He was a difficult man. He was impatient, blunt and quick to take offence, and he quarrelled with owners, agents, harbour masters and the occasional cousin. But he was honest to the bone, and the river men trusted him, and more than one hunter owed him a life.
Mary died in 1850, of kidney failure, a loss that took the heart out of him. He piloted for a few months more, and then, on a cold night in the spring of 1851, he fell from the upper deck of a packet at the Louisville landing and struck his head on the wharf. He was fifty-nine. His daughter Mary, who was a hunter at thirty-one, buried him beside his wife.
Ezekiel Faulkner is remembered as The Bitter Yoke, the pilot who found the silent steamboat. In the Slayerverse he stands for the river branch of the Red Ledger, the hunters of the landings and the paddle wheelers, whose beat was the long brown water between the states.
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