Hippolyte Foster Faulkner

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

Hippolyte Foster Faulkner was born in 1867 in Mobile, Louisiana, and lived sixty-three years as a machinist in the foundries, ice works and railway shops of Louisiana. He was the second child of the river pilot and vampire slayer Augustus Faulkner, The Levee Warden, and of the herbalist Sarah Foster, and the brother of the slayer Sarah Faulkner, of Clara Faulkner and of Andrew Faulkner. In 1887 he married the nurse and slayer Martha Hutchinson, The Fallow Beacon, and they raised one son, Augustus Hutchinson Faulkner. He died in 1930 of a stroke, aged sixty-three. He was not a hunter, and in a family of pilots, herbalists and watchers he was the one who made things. But for forty years he cut, turned and fitted the small, plain, exact pieces of metal that the Red Ledger's Louisiana hunters carried, and the family remembers him as the machinist who could make a part that did not exist, and who asked, of every one, only what it would be asked to bear. He was born in Mobile because his father was working there. In the winter of 1867 Augustus Faulkner, who had stayed on the river after the surrender because the river was the only steady trade in a broken country, took a berth as pilot on a Gulf coasting packet that ran from New Orleans to the Mobile bay and the Pascagoula, and his wife, who did not like to be left, went with him on the first run of the season with three children in a basket and a box of dried herbs. She had not expected to be confined on the coast. The child came a few days after the packet tied up, in a rented room in a boarding house on Royal Street, in a town that was still half under the ruin of the war, with cotton bales on the wharf and Union pickets at the corner. Augustus, who was on the water, heard of it from a passing tug. He said that it was a great satisfaction to know that the family had a son born in a port that he did not have to steer into. Sarah Foster, with a newborn on her arm, took the next packet home. Hippolyte was named for the old farmer on the Lafourche who had once given his mother a place to sleep. He grew up in the rooms on Dumaine Street at the edge of the French Market, in the smell of his mother's herbs, in a household that was never quiet. His elder sister was a dark, watchful girl who took to their father's gun-case. He took to the dustbin. At four he had pulled apart the clock on the kitchen mantel. At six he put it together again. At eight he had built, from a wringer, two bicycle wheels and a length of stovepipe, a contrivance for lifting buckets onto the roof, and at ten he was found in the back yard of a gunsmith's on Chartres Street, with a pocketful of springs, being lectured by the gunsmith on the subject of theft. The man paused in the middle of the lecture to look at what the child was holding. Then he offered him a job sweeping the shop. It was the gunsmith, an old Bavarian named Kessler, who taught him to file, to turn and to harden, and at fourteen he went into the machine shop of a foundry on Tchoupitoulas Street, where they made boilers, sugar-mill rollers and steamboat engine parts, as an apprentice. It was a world of belts, lathes and the smell of hot oil, and he was in it, as he said, like a fish. He was a tall, thin, dry, slow-spoken boy, with clever hands and long black-stained fingers, and he was so slow because he thought before he cut. By eighteen he was a journeyman. By twenty he was the man in the shop to whom the others brought the thing that would not fit. It was his sister Sarah who brought him the first job for the Ledger. She came in, in the spring of 1885, with a revolver whose cylinder had begun to bind, and a bad temper, and asked if he could mend it without asking where it had been. He took it to a bench. He stripped it in ten minutes, found a burr on the pawl, filed it and handed it back, and said that it was a pity that she had not brought the other one too. She looked at him. Then she told him, in a low voice, that there was another one. He said that he had suspected that there might be a family business, and that he had supposed that somebody in it would sooner or later need something made. It was, she said, the first time in her life that she had ever told the truth to a person who was not more alarmed than she was. He met his wife that autumn, in the charity ward of the hospital where his mother's herbs were sometimes sent and where a young nurse from the Garden District, small, brisk and yellow-haired, had sat a night with a dying patient and been asked by him to close the shutters. Martha Hutchinson, of the old Massachusetts Hutchinsons who had sent a branch to the Gulf, was eighteen. She was learning her trade and something else, and she came to the machinist's shop on a Saturday with a broken stake, to ask whether it might be mended. It was a stake of ash, tipped with silver, that had split in the hand. He looked at it, and at her, and then at the lamp by her elbow, and said that it could not be mended but that he would make her another, and a better. He made three. He presented them in a small leather roll, and she put them in her bag and did not say a word. It was a fortnight before she said that she had never been given anything so exactly to the point. They were married in 1887, in the church of the Treme, when he was twenty and she was nineteen, with his sister Clara, who was nineteen, standing up for the bride. The first year was spent in Baton Rouge, where he had gone to work in the machine shop of the ice works and the railway foundry, and where their son Augustus Hutchinson Faulkner was born in the spring of 1888. They came back to the city in 1899. He took a place at the railway shops, and Martha a post at the Charity Hospital, and they took a double cottage in the Irish Channel, a few streets from the river. He worked the lathe for thirty years. He made, in the evenings, in a small shed at the bottom of the garden, the things that the hunters of the Red Ledger sent to him, hinged cases, silver-cutting dies, a spring for a pistol that had lost its temper, a collapsible lamp with a shutter that could be closed in a single movement. He did not keep a record. He kept, instead, a drawer of patterns, each one a piece of tin cut to shape and stamped with a small fleur-de-lis, and the drawer, when it was opened after his death, contained three hundred and forty of them. The city changed around him. The Storyville district, which opened behind Basin Street in 1897 and filled in a few years with brass bands and brothels and the young men who had come from the country to play in them, sent him a steady trade of hunters who needed a thing mended in the small hours and did not wish to be seen in a shop. He sat up with them in the shed. The Great War brought him three years of overtime, turning shell casings, and he was so worn by the end of it that his wife took the lathe-key out of his pocket and hid it. The great flood of 1927, which poured down the river through a dozen crevasses and was kept off the city only by the dynamiting of a levee below it, found him at sixty, working twenty hours a day for a week on a pump that the parish had bought second-hand, and that he had rebuilt from a pair of ferry engines. The pump ran for eleven days, at one end of Jackson Avenue, and was said by the engineer of the drainage board to have saved four blocks. Hippolyte, who was told of it, asked whether the bearings had held. He was a stooped, courteous, unhurried man in his sixties, with a long nose, a grey moustache and black crescents under the nails that no soap would shift, and he went on working after his retirement from the shops at sixty-one. In the winter of 1930, on a cold January morning, he sat down at the bench in the shed to file a part for a hunter's lantern, and had a stroke. He did not speak again. He died at sixty-three on the fourth day, in his own bed, with Martha holding his hand and his son at the foot of it. She followed him within weeks. She was buried beside him in the Faulkner tomb in the cemetery of the Treme. The half-finished lantern was completed, to his drawing, by a machinist from the railway shops, who said that it was the only part that he had ever made that was easier than the one he copied. Hippolyte Foster Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the machinist of the Irish Channel, the man who made the hunters' tools and never asked where they had been. In the Slayerverse he stands for the smiths and mechanics of the old houses, the ones who stayed at the bench and proved that a cold night's work with a file, done exactly and done for love, is as much a part of the defence of a city as any stake.