Gideon Whittier Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Gideon Whittier Faulkner was born in 1733 at Deerfield, Massachusetts, on the far western edge of the colony where the Connecticut River meadows gave way to forest and the memory of raids was still fresh in every family. He was a carpenter by trade and a Faulkner by blood, but he was not a vampire slayer, though he grew up surrounded by them. His father was a slayer, his brother and sisters were slayers, and Gideon was the one who built the doors, shutters and coffin-boards that the others depended on. He died in 1804 at the age of seventy-one, of what the family record, in its plain and slightly puzzling way, calls childbed. Deerfield was a garrison town in all but name. The old palisade had gone, but the houses still stood close together along a single street, with heavy plank doors, small windows and the kind of thick oak frames that had stopped a hatchet in an earlier generation. Children there learned early to look at a chimney and count the ways in. His father, Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, served as a militia sergeant on the western edge of the colony and doubled as the family's hunter under the alias The Frontier Sexton, a name earned from a habit of digging in graveyards at night that the town chose to overlook. His mother, Betsey Whittier, born the same year, was the town midwife. She was a brisk woman with red hands who delivered half the children in the valley and who, by Gideon's account, had a way of judging a stranger by how he held a newborn. He grew up between those two callings, the one that ended lives and the one that began them. His siblings arrived in a row: Betsey Whittier Faulkner in 1739, Caleb Faulkner in 1741 and Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner in 1749, each of whom would be called to the work in their turn. Gideon, the eldest, watched the calling come to the others and did not feel it himself. The family did not treat this as a failure, but a boy of fifteen notices what is not said at supper. His father put a hand on his shoulder and told him that a house full of hunters needs someone who can mend a broken window at three in the morning and keep the wind out, and that this was work too. He was apprenticed to a joiner in Hatfield at fourteen, in the usual indenture of seven years, and learned to rive oak, cut a mortise, hang a door true and lay a floor that did not creak. The trade was hard on the hands. In winter the shop was unheated and the glue froze in the pot. His master was a Congregationalist of the stricter sort who fined his apprentices for whistling, but he was also a fine craftsman, and Gideon left the indenture able to build a staircase, a cradle or a cupboard without a drawing. He came home to Deerfield in the early 1750s with a chest of planes and a reputation for exactness. The family's needs shaped his work. He built shutters that could be barred from the inside with a single motion. He cut trapdoors into the floors of three farmhouses, so that a household could drop into the cellar without light. He made hatches in the eaves of barns and false backs in cupboards where silver-cast shot and powder could be kept dry. When his brother Caleb needed a platform for a night watch in a hayloft, Gideon built it in an afternoon. When his sister Betsey wanted a coffin that would open from within, for reasons she did not fully explain, he built that too, and did not ask. Much of what the Faulkners of the western county owed to survival was in the joins of his woodwork. He never married and had no children, a fact noted with some ceremony in a family that measured itself in descendants. The neighbours assumed he was married to the trade, and he did little to correct them. He lived first in his father's house and then in a small one of his own at the north end of the street, built with his own hands and finished with a door that no one else could open without knowing the trick of it. His nieces and nephews were fond of him, and many a Faulkner child took their first hammer from his bench. The wars with France ran through his middle years like a seam. Deerfield lay on the path of the raiders who came down from Canada, and his father was called out repeatedly with the militia. Gideon built for the garrison, repairing gun carriages and stockade posts and making coffins for those who did not come back, which was a great many. Ebenezer died in 1768 and Betsey Whittier long before that, in 1756, but the trade Gideon had learned continued to serve the family through the Revolution, when he made cartridge boxes for the militia and mended the bridges the army broke. He was too old at forty-two to march, and he did not pretend otherwise, but he was seen at Springfield working beside younger men. The Proctor side of the family appears only glancingly in his story. He once built a chest for a Proctor cousin who was passing through with a wagon and who paid, correctly and to the penny, for the work. The cousin remarked on the neatness of the dovetails. Gideon, who took the rivalry lightly, replied that a Lancastrian dovetail was just a Yorkist dovetail with a better conscience. The remark travelled through both families for years, and the Proctors kept a copy of the chest. His death in 1804 is recorded in the family notes as of childbed, an entry that later Faulkners found puzzling in a bachelor of seventy-one. The likeliest reading, given by the descendants who kept his papers, is that he took ill while assisting at a lying-in in the manner his mother had taught him, carrying water and fuel and sitting up with a neighbour's household, and contracted the fever that followed the birth. The Red Ledger's margin honours him with a single line: that he kept the doors of the western Faulkners shut. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the carpenter who proved that a house full of hunters was really a house full of workmen, and that the wood mattered as much as the silver.