John Hutchinson Faulkner

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

Every family that keeps a ledger needs someone who keeps the fences. John Hutchinson Faulkner, born in 1752 on a farm outside Northampton, Massachusetts, was that person for his generation of Faulkners. He never took up a rifle, was never called, and married no one. What he did was hold a piece of Connecticut Valley intervale for forty years, feed a household, and stand behind a brother who hunted in the dusk. It is an undramatic record, and it explains why the Red Ledger survived in the valley at all. He was the younger of two sons of John Faulkner, a farmer born in 1727, and Abigail Hutchinson, born in 1730, who kept the dairy and the spinning wheel. His brother Jonathan Faulkner, three years older, was to become the vampire slayer known as The Dry Reeve, but in the nursery there was nothing to mark the difference between them beyond temperament. Jonathan was silent and watchful; John was talkative, freckled and fond of animals, and he followed his father about the fields from the moment he could walk. He learned the calendar of the farm before he learned his letters: the March sugaring of maples where the hills allowed it, April ploughing, May planting of corn and flax, the June hay, the August rye, the long October job of husking, and the slaughter and salting that came with the first hard frost. The Connecticut River flooded its meadows almost every spring, leaving behind a black silt that made the valley famous for its onions, its tobacco and its wheat, and the family's few dozen acres of intervale were the most valuable thing they owned. Northampton in his boyhood was still a town of the meetinghouse and the tavern. The great revival of the 1730s and 1740s was a memory kept alive by older members of the congregation, and the minister who came after the dismissal of Jonathan Edwards preached in a more conciliatory register. John sat through the long Sabbath services in a plain pew with his brother and his mother, his feet not reaching the floor at first, and learned the psalms and the catechism from the same primer. He attended the town school for a few winters, enough to write a clear hand and reckon a bushel, and then his father took him out, as all farm fathers did, to work. It was a good life, if a hard one, and the money in it was always thin. Taxes were paid in produce, and cash was scarce enough that the household kept a small hoard of Spanish dollars in a stocking behind the chimney. His mother died in 1769, when he was seventeen, and the boy grew up quickly. The dairy fell to him and to a hired girl from the next farm, and he took to the churn and the cheese press with an unexpected gift. He also took over most of the ploughing, because by that time Jonathan had grown apart from the farm, apprenticed to a housewright and increasingly absent at odd hours. John understood, by degrees, why his brother walked the roads at dusk with a long rifle. Their father took him aside one evening and showed him the family ledger, and John read it slowly, with his finger under the lines. He was not called and never would be, and he took that knowledge without disappointment. His father said only that the ledger needed readers as well as writers, and John, who had a good memory, became one. The Revolution passed over the household without taking him far from the fields. He served with the militia for short stretches, answering the alarm of 1775, marching to the lines outside Boston, and later joining the levies that went north to reinforce the army at Saratoga in 1777. But his real war was the farm, which had to feed itself and, increasingly, feed the army through requisitions of beef, grain and wool. He drove cattle to camp, hauled hay to the commissary and slept, when he could, in the barn with the animals. Money became worthless; taxes climbed; neighbours lost land to creditors. When the war ended, western Massachusetts was in a foul temper. In the winter of 1786 to 1787, when farmers in the hill towns rose under Daniel Shays to close the courts and stop the foreclosures, Northampton's courthouse was one of the places they gathered. John, with a mortgage-shadowed farm and a widowed father to support, sympathised deeply with the grievances, but he did not take up arms. He carried food to a neighbour who had, and that was as far as he went. He never married. There had been a girl in Hadley during the war, but she went west with her family, and afterwards the farm was always the prior claim. His father, John Faulkner, was ageing, his brother was often away, and the work needed a man who was always there. He took the role without complaint. On winter evenings he sat by the fire mending harness and listening to his father tell the old stories, and in later years he became the family's memory, able to recite the names in the ledger back to the New England settlers. When Jonathan came in at night, wet or bloodied, John was the one who put on the kettle, cleaned the wound, and asked no questions until morning. He took a quiet pride in the fact that his brother's rifle balls were cast from silver that he himself had helped to trade for. In 1789 Jonathan died of wounds taken in a cellar hunt, and John was at his bedside. It was the deepest grief of his life, and he never quite got past it. The following year his father died as well, in 1790, and John was left with the farm, the ledger and the empty house. He worked on. He hired a boy for the ploughing, sold surplus cheese and butter in the Northampton market, and gave the corner of the orchard to his brother's memory, planting a row of young apple trees that he called The Reeve's Row. He had no children, and he understood that the farm would pass to a cousin, but that did not seem to trouble him as much as the thought of the ledger being lost. The winter of 1797 to 1798 was long and bitter on the Connecticut, with the river frozen thick enough to carry loaded sledges, and John spent much of it tending cattle in the cold. He caught a cough in December that never quite left. By February it had settled in his chest, and he died in 1798, aged forty-six, of what the neighbours called simply a winter cough. He was buried in the old burying ground beside his parents, with a slate stone bearing his name and dates and nothing more. The ledger was passed to a relation in the next generation, and its careful survival was, in large part, his doing. John Hutchinson Faulkner does not appear in the Red Ledger as a tally-keeper. He appears in the margins, in the hands of others, as the man who kept the house standing. In the wider Slayerverse he is remembered as the brother who stayed, the farmer without a calling whose fields and quiet hospitality kept a slayer fed, clothed and sane.