Henry Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Iron Wren. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Henry Faulkner was born in 1834 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lived eighty years as a carpenter and, from the age of twenty-four, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Iron Wren, a name that recalls the smallest and loudest bird of the New England hedge, which is rarely seen and never wrong, and it classes him as a Spy, a hunter who learns before he acts. His craft was Quarry Reading, the study of a quarry's tracks, habits and leavings until its next move can be named, and his gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot. He was the younger son of the carpenter Warren Chandler and the shopkeeper Ida Sherman Faulkner, and the brother of the slayer Asa Faulkner Chandler. He died in 1914 of old age, at eighty, having sung through most of it. He was born in his grandmother's house. Ida Sherman Faulkner, who had borne her first son in Deerfield the year before, went home for the second, to Northampton, where her mother Nancy Faulkner kept a front room with a bow window, a milliner's table and a great many bonnets, and where the confinement was presided over by a neighbour who had delivered half the town. It was a wet February. He came into the world at dawn, in a room full of straw hats, with a cry that the neighbour said was the loudest she had heard in forty years, and he was called Henry Faulkner, without the Chandler, by a decision of his grandmother's that nobody ever disputed. The name followed him. By the time he was old enough to mind it, he had been Henry Faulkner for so long that the rest of the family had forgotten that it was not his whole name. He grew up in Worcester, as his brother did, but he was a very different child. Asa was dark, silent and heavy. Henry was quick, fair and noisy, with a high clear voice, a restless eye and a tendency to be discovered halfway up the nearest tree. He sang. He sang in the shop, in the street and at his father's bench, and he learned every hymn in the Methodist book by eight, and every ballad that came through the Boston road by twelve. His father, who hummed himself, put up with it. He took to carpentry at once, and with more enthusiasm than skill, and by fifteen he had made a fiddle, two chairs and a cradle for a neighbour's twins, all of them sound. He was put to work beside his father, framing houses in the mill villages along the Blackstone, and he learned early what a spy should know, which is that a man on a scaffold hears everything that is said below him. He was called in 1858, at twenty-four, on the day that a stranger died in a barn. It was a hired barn, at the edge of a village near Worcester, and he had been sent to put a new floor in the loft. The stranger, a thin, well-dressed man in a dark coat, had been found on the threshing floor that morning by the farmer, dead, without a mark, in a position that suggested he had lain down to rest. The dogs, of which the farm had four, stood at the barn door in a row and would not go in. The farmer, who was a practical man, sent for the constable and the coroner. Henry, who was supposed to be hammering, sat on the scaffolding and watched the dogs. They did not bark. They did not whine. They looked at the body, the way a dog looks at something it has seen before, and then, all at once, they turned and looked at a place on the threshing floor, about four feet from the dead man's hand, where a few grains of wheat lay in a curve. He spent the afternoon reading the floor. The dust was thick, and in it was a set of tracks, made by a pair of boots that did not match the dead man's, which had come in by the side door, gone to the body, stopped, and gone out again by the same way, at a rate that no man walks. The heel was worn on the outside. The left foot turned in. He followed the tracks across the yard and into the orchard, where they went under a tree and were lost in the grass, and found on the bark, at about the height of a man's hat, a small smear of something that was not sap. He went home that night and told his brother, who heard him in silence, and went upstairs, and came down with a cousin of their mother's in a long grey coat. Quarry Reading, as he developed it, was the art of the tracks and what they say. Henry held that every creature leaves a record, and that a vampire, which has to move among the living, leaves one that is merely harder to read. He learned its habits. He learned which hedge it would go by, which barn it would choose, what hour it would be hungry, what it did with a coat and how it treated a dog. He learned to tell a day-old track from a week-old one, and to read in a patch of ground where a thing had sat, what it had fed on and which way it had gone. He noted it all in a small book in a neat round hand, and the Ledger's cousins, who used the book, called it the wren's almanac. The bird in his name was a small, brown, inconspicuous thing that flits along the bottom of a hedge and whose loud, clear song tells you exactly where it is, and he was, as a spy, the reverse. He sang, and nobody suspected him. It made a peculiar kind of spy. Henry was the most likeable man in any room, and he used it. He went to the taverns of the mill towns with a fiddle under his arm, played a reel for the hands, bought a round, and in an hour knew the name of every man who had been out late that week and what he had said about it. A travelling carpenter, he found, is a figure who can go anywhere and hear anything, and a carpenter who sings can hear it twice. He carried a revolver in a coat that his mother had lined and silver-cast shot in a tool-bag with a false bottom. He gathered intelligence, sorted it and passed it on, and his brother Asa, who had the crew, acted on it. The two of them enlisted together in 1861, in a Worcester regiment, and served four years, and he sang, he said, the whole way from Fredericksburg to the James. He came home in the summer of 1865 with a sergeant's stripes and a hoarse voice. His father's death in 1871 and his mother's in 1872 left him in Worcester, and he took over the carpenter's shop. His wife, whom the family papers do not name, took over his mother's store on the Boston road, and kept it, with the cipher ledger in the drawer under the till, for thirty years. They were said to be the happiest couple in the street, which meant that they were the noisiest. He worked until he was seventy-five, and after that he sat on a bench on the common and taught the small boys of the neighbourhood to read a footprint in the dust, which their mothers thought a peculiar amusement. He died in the winter of 1914, at eighty, of old age, in his bed, in the house behind the shop. The last thing he was heard to do was hum. The last thing he was heard to say, in a clear voice, to a nurse who was trying to settle him, was that there was somebody in the orchard. Henry Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Iron Wren, the carpenter who sang while he worked and read the ground like a page. In the Slayerverse he stands for the spies of the Red Ledger, the hunters who learned a thing before they touched it, and who proved, over a long and cheerful life, that a good listener may also be a good tune.