Jonathan Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Dry Reeve. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

On an evening in the autumn of 1767 an eighteen-year-old apprentice named Jonathan Faulkner was walking home along a country road outside Northampton, Massachusetts, when the dogs in every yard he passed fell silent and the cattle in the fields began to press against the far fences. The animals had understood something before the people had. By the time the road bent toward the river he had understood it too, and he never afterward pretended that he had not. That was the calling, and it made him a vampire slayer of the Faulkner line, known in the Red Ledger by the name The Dry Reeve. He was born in 1749 in Northampton, on the Connecticut River in the western part of the province, where the meadows are flat and rich and the hills stand close behind. The town had been shaken a generation earlier by the revivals of Jonathan Edwards, whose preaching had emptied taverns and filled the meetinghouse before the congregation dismissed him in 1750, a year after Jonathan's birth. The memory of that quarrel still sat in the pews when he was a boy, and it left the town a serious, argumentative and literate place. His father, John Faulkner, born in 1727, was a farmer who worked a middling holding of intervale land, raising Indian corn, rye, flax and a few dozen sheep, and paying his taxes and tithes with the grim regularity of a man who had never had spare money. His mother, Abigail Hutchinson, born in 1730, ran the dairy, the spinning wheel and the kitchen garden, and it was from her that the boy took his dry humour and his long, watchful silences. The household grew to two sons. Jonathan was the elder; his brother John Hutchinson Faulkner arrived in 1752 and was to become the steady farmer of the family, a man who never heard the Red Ledger read aloud except as a family curiosity. Jonathan was different. He was a tall, narrow young man with big hands and a face that gave little away, and he had a knack for wood. His father, seeing that the farm could not carry two sons, bound him as an apprentice to a joiner and housewright in the town, where he learned to frame barns, hang doors, cut mortises and turn a stair. He was fond of the smell of green oak and pine shavings, and he kept his tools, chisels and gouges and a stout Dutch plane, in a chest that was later the only piece of furniture he was ever known to guard. The calling, when it came, arrived on a road at dusk, at the hour when the fear left the animals before it left the people. Jonathan had been sent with a cart to fetch boards from a mill upriver, and on the return he met a man walking in the opposite direction with an uneven gait, whom he greeted and who did not answer. The horse would not go forward. He got down, took the bridle, and saw the stranger's shadow lie the wrong way against the light. He said nothing about it in the meetinghouse, but that night he sat up in the loft with a borrowed fowling piece across his knees, and in the morning he went to his father and told him plainly what he had seen. John Faulkner listened to the whole account, then opened the chest under the bed and brought out a thin, much-mended ledger. It was a copy of a copy, a Red Ledger entry book that had come to Massachusetts with the first family emigrants in the 1640s. From that day Jonathan understood that he belonged to something older than the town. There was no mentor. The family had slayers in the colony, but scattered, and the near cousins were far away on the edge of the province. He trained himself, slowly and thoughtfully, in the way a carpenter learns, by making mistakes cheaply. He worked out a routine that became the craft the ledger names Dusk Patrol: a fixed round of the roads and lanes at the hour before full dark, walked on the same nights each week, so that the whole district became a kind of house he kept in order. He learned which barns stood too near the burying ground, which fords were shallow enough to be crossed by things that disliked deep water, and which farmers would take a warning seriously. His weapon was a long rifle, and he cast the balls himself from silver taken in payment for joinery, a thing that cost him a fair part of his wages. Prudent and unfashionable, he never carried a pistol, saying that a man who needed a second shot had aimed the first in the wrong place. His mother died in 1769, when he was twenty, and it was the first great grief of his life. She was thirty-nine. The house on the farm was quieter afterwards. He went on with his apprenticeship and, in time, his own trade as a carpenter, taking commissions in Northampton, Hadley and Hatfield, and using the wandering that work required as cover for his patrols. He was never married. There was talk of a widow in Hatfield and of a miller's daughter, but nothing came of it, and he seemed to accept that a man who kept the dusk hours was ill-suited to keeping a hearth. He had no children, and it was his brother who carried the family name forward on the land. The Revolution found him a man of twenty-six in 1775, and he served in the militia through the campaigns that drew western Massachusetts into the war, marching to the lines around Boston and later to the northern frontier. The army suited his patient habits, but it also showed him how little the war had to do with his real work. On the march he noticed things: a sentry found dead without a wound at a ford, a camp follower who never came near the fires. He told no one at the time and made his entries in the ledger when he was back among the barns of the Connecticut Valley. He came home after the war with a limp from a fever-ridden winter and a great fund of stories he chose not to tell. Jonathan's ledger entries are short and unadorned, the terse tallies of a man who disliked boasting. They record the taking of vampires in a hayloft in Hatfield, in a springhouse near Southampton, and in a tavern cellar at the edge of Springfield, each one dated and each one signed with a small drawing of a reed. Both the Faulkners and the Proctors kept such tallies, and the rivalry between the houses, a contest of ledger entries rather than blood, reached even this quiet corner. A Proctor cousin passing through on the New York road once claimed one of his kills for the White Ledger, and Jonathan, for once, wrote a full page of correction, a rare flash of temper that the family still quotes. He died in 1789, aged forty, of wounds taken in a cellar hunt. The vampire had been lying up under a merchant's house, and Jonathan went down alone because the lower steps were too narrow for two. He killed it, but not before it tore him badly across the chest and arm. He lived long enough to be carried home and to give a last account to his brother, dying quietly a few days later in the same house where his mother had been laid out twenty years before. His father, John Faulkner, outlived him by a year and died in 1790. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the plain, steady Dry Reeve of the Connecticut Valley, a carpenter who kept the roads at dusk and asked nothing for it.