Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner

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

Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner, the youngest of Josiah Faulkner's children, was born in 1685 at Andover, Massachusetts, in the farmhouse by the Shawsheen, and for the first years of his life the loudest sound he knew was the axe. Andover in the 1680s was still half forest. The town lay between the Merrimack and the Shawsheen, on land that had been bought from the Pennacook a generation before, and every winter the men went into the woods to fell oak, chestnut and white pine for building and firewood. Boys were given a hatchet at seven. Jeremy took to it with such a natural feel for the grain that his father, who did not praise easily, remarked that the child could read timber the way his brother Jeremy read a room. He had two names in the family for a while, since an older brother, Jeremy Faulkner, born in 1682, already carried the first, and the household sorted the matter by calling the elder Jem and the younger Ingersoll, after his mother. His father, Josiah Faulkner, born in 1646, was the son of Anne and had brought the Red Ledger over the Atlantic in the 1670s, and was a slayer known as the Andover Hound. His mother, Phoebe Ingersoll, born in 1645, was a weaver. Phoebe died in 1691, when Jeremy was six, and the memory he kept of her was chiefly a smell of wool and lye and the click of the shuttle. His father died in 1699 when he was fourteen. The elder siblings, Nathaniel Faulkner, born in 1668 and a slayer, and Hannah Faulkner, born in 1678, took over the raising of the youngest. He was seven in 1692, the year of the Andover witchcraft accusations, and he remembered it as a year of odd silence in the town. Neighbours stopped visiting. Church attendance swelled. Men from the meeting-house rode out with warrants and came back with prisoners, and the children were told to stay in the yard. What he took from it was not fear but a lifelong distrust of any conviction announced too loudly, a caution that in later years his wife found endearing and his customers found exasperating. He did not go looking for monsters, and he would not accept one just because a crowd said it was there. At fourteen, after his father's death, he was bound as an apprentice to a cooper in Andover, a master craftsman who made barrels for the salt-fish trade and for the West Indies rum and molasses ships. The trade was a serious one. A cooper had to know the woods, oak for the wet casks and pine for the dry, how to raise a barrel over a fire so that the staves bent without splitting, how to cut a croze and fit a head, how to drive the hoops so that the whole thing held against the sea. He learned to work a drawknife and a jointer and to judge, by tapping a stave, whether the wood was sound. He served his seven years and, at twenty-one, opened his own shop with a loan from his sister. By the standards of a colony where nearly everything was carried in barrels, he was a needed man. He was not a slayer. That was understood early. The calling did not come to him and he did not seek it, and there was a certain relief in the fact. His brother Jeremy, who was called in 1716, would say he envied him. In the Faulkner house of the time, with the Red Ledger kept in a chest and the hunters going in and out, a man who did not hunt was the pillar on which the rest of the structure rested. Jeremy Ingersoll made the family's casks and buckets, but he also made the cases in which its silver and its stakes were carried, the double-walled kegs in which a hunter could smuggle a rifle through a checkpoint, and the barrel-stands from which a watcher could observe a road. His craft was oak, and the ledger's clerks counted it as service. In 1709 he married Denise Mather, a weaver from Northampton who had already been called as a vampire slayer the year before, and a woman whose steadiness matched his. He had gone up the valley to buy oak staves and had stayed for a fortnight, on one pretext and another, until her father invited him to dinner. They married that autumn in the Northampton meeting-house. He was twenty-four and she was twenty-eight, and the neighbours remarked that the cooper was clearly the softer of the pair. They set up their household in Northampton, in a low house with a workshop in the yard, and he built, as a wedding gift to her, a frame for her loom of seasoned oak that never warped. Two sons followed. Benjamin Mather Faulkner was born in 1712, and Gideon Mather Faulkner in 1713. Benjamin was a slayer, and Jeremy Ingersoll watched the boy sit on the hillside with his mother from earliest childhood and did not interfere. Gideon was not, and worked at his father's bench from the age of eight. Jeremy was tender toward both. He was the sort of father who carved wooden animals in the evenings and taught the boys to whistle down a bird, and who, when Benjamin came home from a hunt with a bruised arm, said only that the barrel that has been struck rings the truer for it. The sorrows came in a cluster. Denise died in 1739 of a fever, after thirty years in which he had worked beside her. His brother Jeremy had died in 1730, falling from a roof. Benjamin, his eldest, died in 1747, and the cooper, then sixty-two, made the coffin himself. He was not a bitter man, but the winters after that were quiet. Gideon took over the workshop and Jeremy sat in the yard in the sun, with a pipe, watching the hoops dry. His own death came in 1762, at seventy-seven. He had taken to walking up onto the high pasture above the town, which the older Lancashire-descended families still called the fells, and one wet autumn afternoon he slipped on a stretch of ledge and fell. He was found at dusk by a neighbour's boy. The ledger records it as an accident on the fells and notes that he was a man who had never been out on a hunt in his life and had died on a hillside, which was a better death, said the clerk, than most of his kin had. He descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and their descendants in the Slayerverse remember him as the cooper of the Red Ledger's Massachusetts branch, the man who made the barrels in which the family's history travelled.