Homer Jewett

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

Homer Jewett was born in 1812 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and worked for thirty years as a carpenter and housewright in the harbour towns of the North Shore. He married the seamstress and vampire slayer Anna Faulkner in 1835, raised two children with her, Abigail Jewett Faulkner and Elias Jewett Faulkner, both of whom became slayers, and died in 1856 of a stroke, at forty-four. He was not born to the Red Ledger and never carried a gun, and the family has always counted him as one of the quiet husbands of its hunting women, a man who had a good deal to do with the hunters and very little to say about it. He made the wooden things on which his wife's work depended, from the handles of her tools to the shutters of her house, and he made them, as a neighbour remarked, as if he expected them to be tested. Marblehead in 1812 was a rocky, crowded fishing town on a granite peninsula north of Salem, with a deep harbour, narrow crooked lanes, and some five thousand inhabitants who had a reputation, throughout New England, for independence, profanity and skill in a boat. Its men fished the Grand Banks in schooners, brought home cod by the hundred thousand pounds and dried it on wooden flakes along the shore, and its women, who ran the town in their absence, were formidable. The war with Britain, which broke out the summer he was born, was a disaster for the place. Its fleet was trapped in port, its fishery was broken, and the famous frigate Constitution, pursued by British ships, took shelter in the harbour for a night, to the lasting pride of the people. His father, a fisherman turned ship's carpenter, joined a privateer, and was absent for two years. His mother, whose name the papers do not record, kept the house together on the proceeds of salt fish and a small loan from a cousin. He grew up among boats. The harbour was his playground, and he was in a dory before he could walk in a straight line. He learned to row, to sail, to bait a trawl and to tell the weather from the colour of the sunset, and he learned to handle a knife. It was the knife that gave him his trade. At nine he had carved, from a piece of driftwood, a model of the Constitution, with her guns, her rigging and her three tall masts, so accurate that a retired captain, seeing it in a shop window, offered him a dollar for it. At twelve he was taken on by a master carpenter of Orne Street, who built boats, fish flakes, wharves and houses, and who had an eye for a boy who could see a thing in three dimensions. He was apprenticed for seven years. He learned the carpenter's craft, and then the shipwright's, and then the housewright's, and he learned, as all carpenters of the coast did, to work in all three. He could frame a house, plank a dory, build a stair and hang a door. He learned to cut a scarf, to bevel a plank, to fit a mast step and to make a chest with a secret drawer. The last was a speciality of the town, which had, in its time of smuggling and privateering, been a great place for hiding valuables, and old Marblehead houses are full of false backs, sliding panels and cupboards that go nowhere. He acquired, without thinking about it, an unusually complete knowledge of how to make a space that was not there. By twenty he was a journeyman, and by twenty-two he had set up for himself, in a shop on the edge of the harbour, making boats in the summer and building houses in the winter. He was a thin, brown, quiet young man with a long nose, a slow smile and large, deft hands, and he had a great gift for patience. He never hurried a joint. He never left a shaving on the floor at the end of the day. The shop was spotless. His customers, who were fishermen and sea captains and storekeepers, said that a thing built by Jewett was built to stay. He met Anna Faulkner in 1834, at a wedding. She was nineteen, a slight, dark, quick-moving seamstress from Newburyport, who had come down the coast to sew a bridal gown for a cousin, and who stood at the back of the church with a box of pins in her pocket, ready to deal with an emergency. There was one. The bride's train caught in the church door, and Anna, without a word, was on her knees in the aisle with a needle before anyone else had moved. Homer, who was in the next pew, watched her. He went to find her afterward, and said that he did not know what had happened, but that he should like to see it again. She said that she hoped he would not. They were married the following year. It took him some time to learn what she did. He knew that she went out at odd hours and came back tired. He knew that her mother, Abigail Putnam, who kept a great boarding house at Newburyport, had a number of visitors at the back door, and that her late father, the printer Jacob Brewster Faulkner, had died on a lonely road. He did not know why. He was told on the night that his daughter was born, in 1837, when the midwife had gone and the house was quiet, and his wife put the child in his arms and said that she had something to say before he named her. She said it. He listened to it all, with the baby asleep on his chest. Then he said that he had supposed it was something of the sort, and that he had been wondering when she would tell him, and that in the meantime he had been making her a better case for her gun. It was the beginning of a large and curious body of work. A seamstress who was also a slayer needed, it emerged, a great many things that a carpenter could supply. She needed a work box with a false bottom, deep enough for a revolver, a bag of silver shot and a packet of consecrated salt. She needed a sewing table with a drawer that locked. She needed a stout pole for a flag and a hook for a lantern, and a set of shutters that could be barred from within, and a ladder that could be let down from a window without noise. Homer built them all. Each was made to look like an ordinary piece of domestic furniture, and each did its work without ever drawing the eye. He made the things for other hunters as well. The Marblehead shop gradually became known to the Red Ledger's North Shore cousins as a place where an odd commission could be quietly executed. A boatbuilder who could fit a hidden locker into a dory, a carpenter who could put a false panel in a ship's cabin, and a neighbour who never asked why: it was a useful combination. He did much of it at cost. He kept no record of any of it, except a small notebook of measurements. His children were born in the first years of the marriage. Abigail Jewett Faulkner was born in 1837 and lived until 1886, and was called, at thirty, to the work of a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. Elias Jewett Faulkner was born in 1841 and lived until 1865, and was also a slayer, and was killed in the last weeks of the Civil War. Homer taught them both to use a plane, to mend a net and to make a box, before any of them knew what else they were destined for. He was a tender, shy and thoughtful father, and he made for each of them, on their twelfth birthdays, a little chest of dovetailed pine, with a lock whose key they were to wear on a string. He did not live to see his son's death. In the summer of 1856, at forty-four, he was working on the roof of a fish house at the harbour's edge, in a high, hot wind, when he put down his adze, sat on a beam and said to the man beside him that he felt peculiar. He fell sideways. A stroke, the doctor said, and there was nothing to be done. He died the following night, with his wife at his bedside. His old friend the Salem carpenter Horace Thayer Faulkner, who had been a cousin by marriage to Anna's family for twenty years, died in the same year, of his heart, and the two were buried within a month of each other, on either side of the same granite ridge. Anna, who was left a widow at forty-one, went on with her work and with the shop. She kept his bench as it was. On it, among his tools, she found, after the funeral, a small, finished box of walnut, lined with flannel, with a lid that closed on a spring and a lock that she could not open. It took her a week. Inside was a note, in his careful hand, which said only: For the gun. Homer Jewett is remembered in the Faulkner family as the carpenter of Marblehead, the husband who built the boxes. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen who married into the hunting families and gave them, out of love and in silence, the things they needed.