James Wrigley Faulkner

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

James Wrigley Faulkner spent most of his working life standing between two shores. He was a ferryman on the tidal waters north of Boston, a man whose trade was the crossing rather than either bank, and the Faulkner ledgers describe him with an affection that they rarely spend on relatives who never took up a stake. He was born in 1669 at the frontier plantation of Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of a Lancashire chandler and a Lancashire dressmaker who had, for reasons the family never set down in full, taken their household across the ocean to a settlement barely six years old. He died in 1722, aged fifty-three, of the plague, in the Massachusetts he had chosen for himself. His father was Josiah Wrigley, a chandler, and his mother was Edith Faulkner, a dressmaker whose second life as a vampire slayer earned her the ledger alias The Meek Ledger. James belonged through her to the House of Faulkner, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, and the family's surname passed to him through the women of the line, which is why the Wrigley he was born to sits in the middle of his name. His elder sister, Olive Wrigley, born in 1667, remained in Bolton in Lancashire for the years of the crossing and grew up to become a slayer herself. James knew her at first as a stranger and later as the most faithful of correspondents. Worcester in 1669 was hardly a town at all. It was a scatter of clearings along a river valley in the interior of the colony, an outpost of log houses, garrison walls and half-cleared fields where the settlers depended on a fragile peace with the Nipmuc people whose land it was. The peace did not hold. In 1675, when James was six, King Philip's War swept through the interior, and the plantation was abandoned, its houses burned by the raiders. The Wrigley household fled east along the Bay Road with what they could carry, and James's earliest clear memory was of being carried on his father's shoulders through a smoke-stained dawn while his mother walked ahead with a heavy bundle she would not let anyone else touch. It held, he learned much later, the hawthorn stakes and a half-written ledger. The family went back to Lancashire soon afterward, and James spent the rest of his childhood in Bolton among fustian weavers and the smell of tallow, beside a sister two years his senior, who taught him to whistle through a blade of grass and to keep still when their mother's basket was heavier than it should be. But the Bay Colony had marked him, and by the time he was in his teens he was restless, quiet on the subject of England, and given to asking his mother what the coast of Massachusetts looked like from the sea. When he was nearly twenty, with his father's blessing and a small sum from his mother, he took ship again to New England. Edith Faulkner stood on the quay at Liverpool until the ship was out of sight. She wrote to him regularly for the rest of her life. He settled in a port town on the tidal river north of Boston and learned the ferryman's trade the hard way, first as a hand on the flat-bottomed boats that carried people, horses, cattle and firewood across the channel, then as the owner of a boat of his own. The work was cold and slow and honest. A ferryman knew the tides, the shoals, the moods of the weather and every family that crossed, and he learned to read a passenger's face from the far shore. James was good at it. He was a broad, sandy-haired man with big forearms, a low laugh and an almost supernatural patience with horses that panicked on the gangway. His fare was a penny a head and a few pence for a horse, and on the strength of it he bought a small house with a garden and a landing stage. The witchcraft panic that gripped the colony in 1692 found him at twenty-three, working the crossing when the accusations began to fly from town to town. Andover, Salem and Ipswich filled with fear. Constables and magistrates rode the roads with warrants; accused men and women were carried to jail across the same water James crossed daily. He carried some of them. He never spoke about it afterward except once, to his sister in a letter that survives in the family papers, in which he wrote that he had ferried a woman of sixty to the gaol at Salem and that she had spent the whole crossing praying for her accusers by name. He added that the Faulkner ledger, which he knew better than most people of the colony, held nothing whatever to do with witches, only with the things that really did come at night, and that the magistrates had confused the two. It was one of the most bitter sentences he ever wrote. James never married and had no children, and the ledger's marginal notes give no reason for either. He is remembered by later relatives as the sort of man who was always about to court somebody and never quite did. His household was his boat, his landing and the passing trade of the river, and his hospitality was legendary: no traveller waiting for a slack tide was left without a bowl of chowder and a place by the fire. He never took the calling and never trained to hunt, but he was a valued scout for the Massachusetts branch of the family. He knew, better than anyone in the district, who had crossed on what night, and which stranger had paid in coin that seemed to weigh strangely and had refused to look at the lantern. More than one slayer of the House of Faulkner found a vampire's trail by asking James what he had ferried at dusk. His relations with the Proctors were remote. The Yorkshire ledger meant little to a man who spent his days watching tides, and he told cousins that any family that could keep a feud alive for two hundred years over one lost vampire had too much time and too little to do. Still, when word reached him of a Proctor cousin newly arrived in the Pennsylvania settlements, he sent a barrel of salted fish with a note that read only, "From the other ledger, with regards." The Proctor sent back a brace of hams. James Wrigley Faulkner died in 1722, aged fifty-three, of the plague, which came up the coast in the wake of a ship from the Caribbean and, in that terrible season, emptied houses along the shore. The physicians of the day argued about what to call it, but the family's ledger records the word plague, and so does the burial register. His boat passed to a neighbour's son, and his letters to Olive, and hers to him, were bound together by a niece and kept in the Red Ledger's chest. The Slayerverse counts him among the Faulkners who served the work from the water's edge, a ferryman who never carried a stake but carried many hunters, and their secrets, safely to the other side.