Jacob Brewster Faulkner was born in 1783 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and lived forty-seven years as a printer and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book calls him The Fallow Bridle, a name that puzzled everyone until they learned that it referred to his fondness for an old grey horse. He belonged to the Soldier type, a hunter who worked in company and under discipline, and his craft was the Dusk Patrol, the circuit walked at nightfall that his family had brought from the Brandywine to the Massachusetts coast. He married Abigail Putnam in 1810, raised two daughters in the harbour towns of New England and died in 1830 in an ambush on a lonely road.
His father, Joseph Faulkner, was born in 1754 and lived until 1830, the same year as his son. He was a blacksmith, a thickset, silent man with burn-scarred forearms who had worked the forges of the Brandywine and who, when Jacob was a baby, moved his household north to Ipswich, where a smith was wanted by the shipyards. His mother, Phebe Brewster, born in 1749 and dead in 1798, kept a shop that sold cloth, tea and needles, and kept an eye on anyone who came through the door. Jacob's elder brother, Nathaniel Brewster Faulkner, born in 1782, became a printer in Pennsylvania. The two boys grew up a year apart, close friends and sometime rivals, in a household that was full of hot metal and fine thread.
Ipswich in the 1780s was a decayed but dignified port on the North Shore, with a long main street of wooden houses, a wide river mouth and a reputation for lace making and for the cleverest clergy in the colony. Its ships, once numerous, had dwindled after the Revolution, but its shipyards were busy, and the smithies that supplied them with anchors, chains, nails and ironwork ran day and night. Jacob spent his boyhood in the noise of it, among the smell of tar, the clang of hammers and the cries of the gulls.
His mother died when he was fifteen, in 1798, and he went to live with a cousin in Newburyport, a bigger and wealthier port, where he was apprenticed to a printer. He learned the craft as his brother had, but with a difference. Nathaniel had loved the precision of the trade, and Jacob loved its noise and its news. He liked to be in the thick of a busy shop, hearing the gossip of the wharves and the talk of the customers, and he liked to be out at night. He was a cheerful, broad-shouldered young man with an easy manner and a wide acquaintance, and he was known in the town as a man who could be relied on to know everything.
His calling came in 1806, when he was twenty-three, after a wake. A neighbour had died, and the mourners were keeping the night in the front room, with the body laid out on a table, candles at the head and foot and the usual cake and cider. Jacob, who had known the man, sat with them. Some time after midnight, the dead man sat up. The mourners scattered. Jacob, who was nearest the door and had his hand on the latch, turned back, which he could never explain, and saw what was looking at him out of the dead man's face. He backed out, shut the door and stood in the street for a long time. The next morning he went to the Faulkner cousins in Salem and told them what he had seen, and they told him what it was. Within the month he had a long gun, a mentor and a circuit.
The Dusk Patrol, as he practised it, was a disciplined routine. Each evening at the hour when the light began to fail, he walked a fixed round through the streets, wharves and lanes of Newburyport, stopping at fixed points, checking certain doors, looking at certain windows and exchanging a word with certain people, the watchman, the lamplighter, the night-soil man, the tavern keeper. The round took two hours, and it never varied, which was the point. Anything out of place showed at once. He added a second round at midnight and a third before dawn, and after a few years there was hardly a dog, a cat or a cart in the town that he did not know by sight. His gear was silver-cast shot and a revolving pistol, made up by a Massachusetts gunsmith on the new pattern, which he wore under his coat and which he had, in his own opinion, rather too much faith in.
In 1810 he married Abigail Putnam, who was born in 1788 and lived until 1854. She was the daughter of a Newburyport chandler and kept a boarding house on Water Street for sailors and shipwrights, a big, quick, clear-headed woman who had no illusions about men. Their marriage was a good one. She knew everything that happened on the waterfront, and he knew everything that happened on the streets behind it, and between them there was very little in the town that escaped notice. Their daughter Effie Faulkner was born in 1812 and lived until 1890, and did not hunt. Their daughter Anna Faulkner was born in 1815 and lived until 1887, and was called to the work as a slayer of the Red Ledger, in the way of her father, on the patrol.
The years of the embargo and the War of 1812 were hard on the port, which lost most of its trade, and on the printing business, which lost a good deal of its custom. Jacob supplemented his income by printing handbills for the privateers and notices for the prize courts. He kept up his patrol through it all. After the war he set up a small printing office of his own on State Street and did well.
He died in 1830, aged forty-seven, on a lonely road north of the town. He had gone out in answer to a message that turned out to have been forged, and was set on by four men at a crossing in the dusk. He shot two of them before he fell. His daughter Anna, who had followed him at a distance, found him. His father Joseph died in the same year, in Pennsylvania, having outlived both sons.
Jacob Brewster Faulkner is remembered as The Fallow Bridle, the printer who walked the same round every evening for twenty-four years. In the Slayerverse he stands for the discipline of the regular patrol, in which the hunter's work was not an adventure but a habit.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
