Horace Thayer Faulkner

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

Horace Thayer Faulkner was born in 1806 in Salem Town, Massachusetts, and worked for thirty-five years as a carpenter and housewright on the North Shore. He was the younger child of the teamster Benjamin Thayer and the shopkeeper and vampire slayer Naomi Adams Faulkner, known in the Red Ledger as The Slow Lantern, and the younger brother of Ada Faulkner. He never married and had no children. He died in 1856 of heart failure, at fifty, having spent his working life building the houses, sheds, cellars and cupboards in which his family and its friends kept their secrets. He was not a hunter and never claimed to be one, but the hunters of Essex County said that there was hardly a house in the county in which he had not left a door that opened where it should not. His mother, Naomi Adams Faulkner, born in 1774, kept a general store, first in Concord and later in Salem, and was a slayer for most of her adult life. His father, Benjamin Thayer, born in 1777 at Deerfield and dead in 1845, was a freight teamster, a big, easy-tempered man who was away a good part of the year. The family moved in the year of Horace's birth to Salem, where Naomi's shop was in a good position on the road that led down to the wharves, and it was there, in a narrow house with a gambrel roof and a cellar that had been a cooper's workshop, that he was born and brought up. His sister Ada, three years older, had already been taught to read and was teaching him by the time he could walk. Salem in 1806 was at the height of its prosperity. It was the sixth city of the United States, although it was not legally a city, and its trade with the East Indies, China and the Baltic had made a number of its merchants very rich indeed. The harbour was full of ships. The waterfront was a forest of masts. The wharves, the warehouses, the ropewalks, the sail lofts and the shipyards employed a large part of the town, and from every house in the better streets, the brick mansions of Chestnut Street with their fanlights and widow's watches, one could see the tall ships go out. It was also a town that built. Everywhere one looked, carpenters were at work, raising houses in the Federal style, with elliptical fanlights and delicate carved cornices, and the great Salem carpenter and carver Samuel McIntire, who had died in 1811, had left behind a generation of craftsmen who regarded themselves as his heirs. Horace grew up among shavings. He was a quiet, thoughtful child, who preferred a block of wood and a knife to almost any other toy, and at six he had carved a small, accurate boat from a piece of pine. His father, who could not draw a straight line, regarded it with awe. At twelve he was taken as an apprentice by a master housewright of Essex Street, a dry, exacting old man called Pickering, who had worked under a pupil of McIntire and who believed that a joint should be tight enough to hold water. Horace learned the tools: the broad axe, the adze, the framing chisel, the mortising gouge, the moulding plane, the compass saw. He learned the orders of architecture and the proportions of a cornice. He learned to draw a room in plan and in elevation, and to calculate a roof. By nineteen he could frame a house from the sill to the ridgepole, and by twenty-two he was a journeyman with a bench of his own. He was called, in the family's language, to a different work from his sister's. When his mother died in 1821, at forty-seven, after a long night on the marsh, he was fifteen and Ada eighteen, and the long box behind the counter was opened in front of him for the first time. He saw the guns, the silver and the book. He understood at once what it meant. He said nothing about it, then or later. But some months afterward, when a cousin of the Red Ledger stopped at the shop on a rainy night and needed a place to hide a wounded man, Horace took a lantern down to the cellar, pushed aside a rack of barrels, and showed her a small, dry, windowless room behind the wall that he had built that spring, without being asked, with a door that opened from the inside by a wooden peg. The cousin looked at it for a long time. She said that it was the finest thing she had seen. It was the beginning of a craft. A housewright in those years knew the inside of a house as no one else did. He knew where the chimneys ran, where the joists lay, where a wall was thicker than it needed to be, and he knew how to make a space that could not be seen from the room beside it. Horace had the skill and the silence. Over the next thirty years, in Salem, Danvers, Beverly, Marblehead, Ipswich and a dozen other towns, he built for the hunters of the Red Ledger what the family called, in private, the carpenter's rooms: hidden cupboards under stairs, false backs to presses, sliding panels behind the chimney breast, trap doors under the hearth. Each was made to look like an ordinary part of the house. Each had a way out. He never wrote any of it down. There is no list of the houses. It is known only that the cousins, in their letters, referred in a certain tone to a joiner in Salem who could be trusted to do a job properly, and that the joiner's prices were so low that some of them were embarrassed. He charged for wood and time. He charged nothing for silence. When the railroad came to Salem, in 1838, and the lines of fine new houses began to go up on the hill, he did well in the ordinary trade, and used the profit to do more of the other sort at cost. His sister Ada, the slayer, relied on him. When she was called in 1828 she was teaching school in Concord and living in a rented cottage, and within a month he had built into it a cellar room, a hidden locker for the revolver and a bolt on the back door that could be shot from the stairs. He visited her on Sundays. They dined together, argued about the price of timber, and went for a long walk afterward, through the fields in which she hunted, and she told him what she had seen. He listened. He had an acute eye for a building and a surprising eye for a landscape, and more than once he spotted from a distance a detail that she had missed, a barn with a new door, a shed with its window boarded. She took it seriously. Some of her best-known tallies began with a remark from her brother on a Sunday afternoon. He was a tall, stooping, sandy-haired man, with a long face and a slow smile, and a habit, when he was thinking, of rubbing his thumb along the edge of a board. He had his father's size and his mother's patience. He was not a talker, but he was a good companion, and his friends, who were mostly other craftsmen, liked him for the very quality that irritated some of his customers, which was that he would not be hurried. If he said a job would be done in a fortnight, it was done in a fortnight, and every joint was tight. His Salem neighbours used to say that a house by Faulkner would outlast the family that lived in it, and most of them have. His father, Benjamin, who had spent his life on the roads, came home at last in his sixties, and lived with his son in the little house on Essex Street for some years, until his death in 1845. Horace looked after him. The old man's last year was a quiet one, spent on the porch, telling stories of the Connecticut valley to anyone who would listen. He died, as Horace told his sister, in his chair in the sun, with a bad joke on his lips. Horace did not marry. He said, when asked, that he had found no one who could be persuaded to live in a house in which the doors did not all open in the ordinary way. It was a joke, but it was close to the truth. Once, in the 1840s, there was a young woman, a dressmaker, who was fond of him, and who, after some months, discovered the carpenter's room under his own staircase and left the town. He did not try to explain. In the autumn of 1856, while he was working on the roof of a house in Beverly, he felt a sudden pain in his chest, came down the ladder and sat on a pile of shingles. He died there, of heart failure, at fifty, with his plane on his knee. His sister, who had not been told that he was ill, arrived the next morning, and carried him home. He was buried in the old Salem burying ground, beneath a slate stone on which a carver had cut, at her request, a plane and a door. Horace Thayer Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the carpenter of Salem, the man who built the rooms that did not appear on any plan. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen who served the Red Ledger with their hands, and who left behind, in the walls of a hundred houses, a quiet geography of safety.