James Faulkner Wheeler

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

James Faulkner Wheeler was born in 1818 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and lived forty-five years as a Methodist circuit preacher and, for the last two of them, an army chaplain. He was the younger son of the circuit rider Amos Wheeler and the herbalist Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, and the brother of the wheelwright Arthur Faulkner. He never married. He was not a hunter, but he inherited his father's gift for travelling, his father's habit of looking at the ceiling when he was thinking, and his father's unofficial role as the Red Ledger's pulpit, and for twenty years he preached, in the hill towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut, sermons on watchfulness that were said by the hunters to be the best in New England. He died in 1863 of a fall from a horse, as his father had, at forty-five, in a Virginia camp, on a wet morning in the third year of the war. His father, Amos Wheeler, born in 1792 and dead in 1847, was a tall, earnest, red-haired man of Newbury who had been converted at sixteen and had ridden a circuit of twenty preaching places for thirty years. His mother, Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, born in 1791 and dead in 1869, was a herbalist from a Salem family, the sister of the riverboat pilot and slayer Ezekiel Faulkner. The couple had married in 1813 and had travelled the circuit together, in a covered gig, with a medicine chest under the seat, and James was born, three years after his brother Arthur, in a rented room at Ipswich, in the week that the circuit brought his father to the town. He was a large, pink, cheerful baby, with a great deal of red-gold hair, who was baptised the following Sunday, in the meeting house, by his father, and cried throughout. He was brought up on the road. His earliest memories were of his father's saddlebags, his mother's medicine chest and the smell of wet wool. He slept in other people's spare rooms. He ate at other people's tables. He grew up in the habit of being the new child in every Sunday school, which gave him a considerable talent for making friends, and a considerable distaste for being alone. Arthur, who was three years older and quiet, was his great protector, and taught him to fish and to tie his shoes. The two brothers were devoted, and very unlike. Arthur was thin and watchful and said little. James was large and loud and could not stop. He was a born preacher. At six he was found standing on a hay wagon in a farmyard, in front of a dozen hens, delivering an address on the virtues of obedience. At eight he could recite the whole of the book of Jonah. At twelve he preached, in a barn, to a congregation of nineteen, at his father's invitation, and was told afterward by a deacon that he had a great future and a great deal to learn. He had a fine, strong tenor, a mobile face and a talent for telling a story, and he knew, without being taught, how to pause. By seventeen he was an exhorter. At twenty-one he was admitted on trial to the New England Conference, and was assigned a circuit of his own in the Berkshire hills. The Methodist circuit, in the 1840s, was not the pioneer adventure that it had been in his father's day. The New England Methodists had, by then, churches, parsonages and something approaching a regular order. But the circuit rider's life was still hard. James rode a hundred miles a fortnight, preached twelve times a week, baptised, married and buried, and collected his salary, when he could, in cheese, firewood and a yearly pair of mittens. He was paid two hundred dollars. He was cheerful about it. He said that a man who could not live on two hundred dollars a year had no business preaching about the lilies of the field. What the Ledger valued in him was the pulpit. He preached, it was agreed, the finest sermons on the subject of watchfulness that the hunters had ever heard. It was his favourite text. He took it from a dozen places in scripture, the parable of the ten virgins, the injunction to the disciples in the garden, the warning that the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night and, most of all, from the first epistle of Peter, be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. He would stand in the pulpit of a little frame church, in a hill town, on a Sunday morning, and say it slowly, looking at the ceiling. The congregations, who did not know why the sermon was so moving, went home uneasy and locked their doors. He did not know the Red Ledger at first. It was his mother who told him, in the winter of 1841, in the parsonage at Pittsfield, where she had come on a visit. She did it gently, over a pot of her own herb tea. He listened to it with his mouth open. When she had finished, he said that he had often wondered about his uncle Ezekiel, and that it did explain a great deal. He asked her what he could do. She said that he could go on preaching. He said that it did not seem very much. She said that it was what his father had done for thirty years, and that more than one vampire had been tracked down through a pastoral visit. He kept his ears open. A circuit preacher was as good a source of intelligence as a midwife, and better than most. He called at every house in his district, at every hour, and was given the news. He heard about the sick cow, the stranger at the mill and the family that had left in the night. He heard about the child who would not go out after dusk, and the grave in the churchyard that had been found empty, and he wrote it down, at night, in a small book, and passed it to his brother. Arthur, who was at Worcester, sent it on to the hunters. It was a simple system, and it worked very well. He was a large, red-faced, sandy-haired man, with a great laugh, a great appetite and a great gift for friendship, and he was popular wherever he went. He was a famous eater, and the women of his circuit vied to feed him. He was also known for his absent-mindedness. He lost his hat on an average of once a month. He once arrived at a funeral on the wrong day. He once preached, for twenty minutes, on the sin of sloth, to a congregation that had come to be married. They forgave him, because he forgave them. He never married. He said that his heart had been given to a circuit of twenty-two preaching places, and that it would be unjust to divide it. The truth was that he had been in love, at twenty-six, with a schoolteacher in Pittsfield, who had taken a position in Ohio, and that he had never had the courage to write to her. He kept her letters, which were few, in his saddlebag. When the war came in 1861, he was forty-three. His Conference, which had sent a number of its ministers to the army, asked for chaplains, and he volunteered, to the surprise of his brother, who said that he would be thrown off a horse before the first battle. He was appointed chaplain of a Massachusetts regiment, and went out to Virginia in the autumn. He was in camp at the Rappahannock, in the winter of 1862, and in the fighting at Fredericksburg, where he worked among the wounded for three days and nights. He wrote letters home for the dying. He said prayers for the wounded, buried the dead and sang hymns in the evening, in a rich, tired tenor, round the fires. The men, who loved him, called him Parson Jim. He was thrown from his horse on a wet morning in April 1863, on the road to the camp, when the animal, which had been frightened by a passing gun carriage, slipped in the mud. He fell on a stone. He lived for two days. His brother Arthur, who had come down to Virginia by the first train, sat with him. He said, with some difficulty, that it was a very appropriate way to go, and that his father would be amused. Then he asked that somebody should finish the hymn they had been singing. He was buried in the regimental cemetery, and later moved to Massachusetts, where he lies beside his father. On his stone, at Arthur's suggestion, is cut the text from Peter. James Faulkner Wheeler is remembered in the Faulkner family as the preacher of the Berkshire circuit, the chaplain of the Massachusetts regiment, the man who preached watchfulness. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ministers of the Red Ledger's country, who stood in the pulpit, said the words and sent their congregations home with a reason to keep the lamp lit.