Henry Howe

Spouse of Ellen Putnam Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Henry Howe was born in 1842 in Frankfort, Kentucky, and lived sixty-six years as a boatman on the Kentucky and Ohio rivers. He married the boarding-house keeper and vampire slayer Ellen Putnam Faulkner in 1861, raised two daughters with her, Ida Howe and Sarah Howe, and died in 1908 of pneumonia, at sixty-six, having outlived his wife by thirty-nine years and his elder daughter by two. He was not a hunter and was not born to the Faulkner line, but the Red Ledger's Kentucky cousins counted him among their own, because for the better part of half a century he was the man who brought the freight, the news and, on certain nights, the hunters themselves down the river by water. He was a slow-spoken, broad-backed, good-natured man, who sang when he poled and was known at every landing between Frankfort and the mouth of the Ohio. Frankfort in the year of his birth was the smallest of the great river towns, a capital with a hundred streets' worth of civic pride and the trade of a large village. It lay in a bend of the Kentucky River, under high limestone bluffs, with a statehouse of white marble, a penitentiary that was the showpiece of the reformers and a long, muddy public landing where the packets from Louisville and the keelboats from the upper country tied up side by side. The river was navigable for some two hundred miles, thanks to a system of locks and dams that the state had built in the thirties and forties, and its traffic was bulky and unromantic: hemp, tobacco, whiskey, salt, coal, timber rafts floated down from the mountains and, on the way up, every sort of manufactured article that the hill farms could not make. Henry's father, whose name the papers do not give, was a lock-keeper at one of the lower dams, and the boy was brought up in a stone lock-house beside the water, with the sound of sluices in his sleep and a long pole in his hands from the time he could stand. He took to it without any fuss. By eight he could work the wicket gates. By twelve he was tending the lock alone when his father was ill. By fifteen, in 1857, he had found a place as a deckhand on a small stern-wheel packet that ran between Frankfort and Louisville with hemp and whiskey, and by seventeen he was the boat's second mate. He was not ambitious, exactly. He liked the work, and he liked the people, and he liked being on water that was going somewhere. He said later that a man who has been raised beside a lock learns to wait for the level to rise, and that it makes him an unusually agreeable companion, because he has nowhere he must be by noon. He met Ellen Putnam Faulkner in the spring of 1860, when the packet landed a load of flour at Frankfort for the Putnam boarding house at Lexington and the second mate was sent with the wagon to see it delivered. It was the morning of Minnie Putnam's funeral. Minnie, the landlady of Short Street, had died that winter of a fall, and the house was full of black crape and cold ham, and the young man from the river, who knew nothing of the family, found himself lending a hand, in a borrowed arm-band, to a tall, dark, straight-backed young woman of twenty who was arguing with the undertaker about the price of a hearse. She was the dead woman's daughter. She did not cry in public. She checked the coffin lid, the horses and the route, and thanked him for the arm-band, and he drove back to the river thinking that he had never seen anyone who looked so much like a person holding up a wall. He did not go back for some weeks. When he did, he had a pretext, which was a load of barrelled apples, and found the house at Short Street very much changed. Ellen was running it. She was twenty, and she had her mother's dining room, her father's ledger and a great many lodgers who had to be told, patiently, that the old order still stood. She took him in to supper. He was unused to a house with so many people in it, and sat silent, and was observed, she said afterwards, to be the only man at the table who was looking at the clock on the wall and not at the food. She asked him why. He said that he was trying to work out how long it would take to get back to the river. She said that it was the first time anyone had said so, and that she was glad of it, because most of her lodgers could not wait to get away from the river and most of the hunters could not wait to get to it. She was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, and she told him the truth of it within a month. She did not dress it up. She said that she went out, sometimes, at night, with a pistol and a bag, that she had a cousin named Fanny who was learning the same trade, and that she could not promise to be back for breakfast. He said that he would not have expected her to. He said that a man who works a lock knows what it is to have a duty that arrives at its own hour and will not be put off. She looked at him for a good while. They were married in 1861, in the Presbyterian church at Lexington, in a grey dress that she had worn for her mother's funeral the year before, since she said she had no other that was fit. It was an unusual household. Ellen, who had the boarding house and the hunts, stayed at Short Street, and Henry, who had the river, came and went with it. He had, in effect, a second home on the packet, and it was a good one, with a stove, a bunk and a locker that he kept, from the first, filled with things that a hunter might want: a dark lantern, a coil of rope, a tin of tallow, a spare coat. When she had to be at a landing upstream or downstream in a hurry, he took her. He landed her at half a dozen places in the county that no map marked, waited, sometimes all night, with the boat under a bank and the lamps dark, and took her home again in the grey of the morning. He never asked what she had done. He asked whether she was cold, and had the kettle on. Their daughters came in the first years of the marriage. Ida Howe was born in 1862 and lived until 1906, and she became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in her turn, a tall, dark, silent child who took after her mother and who was, at six, able to sit on the bow of the packet for an hour without a word. Sarah Howe was born in 1866 and lived until 1923, and she did not hunt. She was sunnier, broader and more talkative, with her father's singing voice, and she grew up to keep house, and to keep the family's letters in a biscuit tin, and to be the one among the sisters who remembered the birthdays. The war came to Frankfort in the autumn of 1862. In September the Confederate army under Braxton Bragg came up through Kentucky, occupied the capital, swore in a Confederate governor on the steps of the statehouse and went away again within a fortnight, having been outflanked by the Union army at Perryville. Henry, who was twenty and had his boat at the landing, took the packet up the river to a hiding place among the willows of a bend above the town, and kept it there for eleven days, with a few sacks of flour and a good deal of patience, to prevent its being taken for the Confederate commissariat. He came back to find the landing empty and the statehouse flag changed back. He carried Union stores for the rest of the war, and Ellen's hunters, where he could, as before. She died in the autumn of 1869, in the line of the work, at thirty. He was on the river when it happened, six hours downstream, with a load of coal, and he did not reach her until the next afternoon. He stood in the front room of the house at Short Street with his hat in his hand, and the family remembers that he said nothing at all for a long time, and then asked whether the girls had been fed. They had. He took them home to Frankfort the next morning, and raised them himself, in a rented house above the landing, with the help of a widow who came in by the day and a great many cousins. He did not remarry. He gave up the long runs to Louisville and took a shore job at the Frankfort wharf, as a wharfmaster, and then, when the girls were grown, went back to the river and worked it for another twenty years, on the upper stretches, as a pilot. He taught Ida what he could, which was the river, and he saw her taken up, in her twenties, by the Ledger's women. He was proud of her, and frightened, and said so, which was more than most fathers of hunters did. When she died in 1906, at forty-four, it was Sarah who sat with him in the kitchen, and who stayed with him for the two years that remained. He died in the winter of 1908, of pneumonia, at sixty-six, in the house at Frankfort, with the river frozen at the edges. He was buried in the old cemetery on the hill above the town, where the graves look down on the water, and the boatmen of three counties came to the funeral, and the packet's bell, tolled from the landing, was heard as far as the statehouse. Henry Howe is remembered in the Faulkner family as the boatman of Frankfort, the husband who kept a lamp dark under the bank and a kettle warm at the stern. In the Slayerverse he stands for the carriers of the Red Ledger, the ordinary river-men and wagoners who did not hunt and who, without their steady hands at the tiller, would have left the hunters stranded at the water's edge.