Joseph Carter

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Proud Drover. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Joseph Carter was born in 1889 in Los Angeles, California, and lived forty-four years as a railway clerk and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West. The family book knows him as The Proud Drover, a name that came off the loading platform and not out of any book, and it classes him as a Hunter, which in the Faulkner sense means a slayer who fixes on a single quarry and follows it until the business is ended. His craft was Quarry Reading, the discipline of working out where a creature has been, what it wants and where it must go next from the small marks it leaves behind, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was the younger son of the dockworker Andrew Carter and of the schoolteacher and slayer Alice Faulkner, The Silent Beacon, who trained him, and the brother of the slayer Andrew Carter Faulkner. In 1915 he married the nurse Ada Rogers, and they had two daughters, Thelma Faulkner Carter and Lorraine Faulkner Carter, of whom the younger became a slayer. He died in 1933 beneath a collapsed barn during a night hunt, aged forty-four. He descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he was the only Faulkner of his generation who could tell you the weight of a refrigerator car by looking at its waybill. He was born in Los Angeles because his mother went home to his father's people to have him. The Carter house stood behind a livery stable on Main Street, in a pueblo that had turned into a city of fifty thousand people in a single decade, and Alice, who was twenty-three, had come down by coastal steamer from Oregon, with a small boy of one on her hip, to be confined under the eye of her mother-in-law. She did it in a hot week in June, in a room that smelled of horse and carbolic. The baby was a long, thin, solemn infant with a way of staring at the ceiling as though it owed him an explanation. His grandmother, who had expected a Carter and got something she could not place, remarked that he looked like a man waiting for a train. It was the first and least accurate of the family's prophecies about him. He was never in the least inclined to wait. He grew up at Wilmington, among rope, primers and lamp oil, a quick, stubborn, argumentative boy who learned the docks from his father and the evening walk from his mother, and who questioned every rule she laid down on the grounds that if it could not survive a question it was not worth keeping. She answered every one of them. She said afterward that it was the best education she gave him. His elder brother went north to Oregon to learn a druggist's trade, and Joseph, at fifteen, went to the Southern Pacific. It was the largest employer in the state, and the clerks of its freight offices sat in long, high-windowed rooms in the Arcade Station on Fifth Street, copying waybills in indelible pencil under the eye of a chief clerk who lived by a stopwatch and a rule book. He began as an office boy, ran errands, carried bills of lading and learned, in the first year, the whole grammar of the railroad, which is the grammar of where a thing is at a given moment. A car number, a consignor, a consignee, a route, a weight, a time. By twenty he was a rate clerk, and he had, in the words of his chief, the finest mind for a misrouted carload that the division had produced. He could tell from a smudge on a form that a car of oranges had been standing in the sun at Colton for three days. He could tell, from a delay, that a conductor had been drinking. He was transferred in 1913 to the Arizona Eastern at Phoenix, and met his wife there. Ada Rogers, a Phoenix girl of twenty-two and a nurse in her second year at the hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy, had come to the railway office to see about a patient's freight and found a lean, sunburnt clerk of twenty-four with a pencil behind each ear, who looked up and said that she had got the date wrong. She said that she had not. He checked. She had not. He asked her to supper. She said that she was on nights. He said that he would wait. He did, for two years, in a manner that she described as the most exasperatingly patient courtship in the territory, and they were married in 1915, in Los Angeles, in a small Methodist church, to which his mother came with a hat and a gun in her bag. His mother had told him what the family was when he was sixteen, in the kitchen at Wilmington, in the same flat voice in which she corrected exercise books. He had said that he supposed that was why the dock cats were so careful about the third piling. She had told him to wait, and he had waited. The calling, when it came, came through a quarrel, in the winter of 1916, and it was a dreadful one. Silas Hartley, a freight clerk of the Brotherhood, whom everyone at the Los Angeles yards called a brother and a good many called a bore, had misbilled a carload of citrus, and Joseph, who had caught the error, had said so in front of the whole office. It was a small thing and a cruel one. Hartley turned grey, left in silence and was crushed between two cars in the yard that evening, before anyone could speak to him. Joseph, who went to the funeral with his hat in his hand and a stone in his chest, sat up that night in his kitchen, rehearsing an apology. At two in the morning there was a knock. It was Hartley, in the yard coat that he had been buried in, with his hat on, and he said, in a perfectly reasonable voice, that he had come to finish the argument. It was an argument that took eleven days. Joseph, who had nothing but a kitchen knife and a clerk's training, found that he could not fight what had come to the door and that he could, rather to his surprise, read it. It wanted to go back to the yard. It wanted the place where it had been killed, and the oil cart where he had last stood. It went along the line, and Joseph, who knew the line, went with it, from the Alameda Street siding to the roundhouse at Taylor Yard and across the river bridge, in his mother's coat, by the clock. At the end of the eleven days he sent a telegram to Wilmington. It said that the carload had been delivered, and Alice came up on the morning train with a revolver in the flour sack. Quarry Reading was the craft that he made of his clerk's habit. A railway is a machine for fixing the position of everything in its care, and Joseph understood a creature, as he understood a car, by its record, by where it had been, where it was bound and how long it had stood in each place. He wrote the record out. He kept, in a drawer of his desk in the freight office, a tally of every sighting and rumour in the division, filed by district and date, under the heading of damaged goods, and the Ledger's western cousins, who were at first amused, soon came to treat it as a timetable. The name The Proud Drover came from the yardmen. A drover, they said, is a man who gets a stubborn herd to the end of the line, and Joseph, who was too proud to be corrected on a waybill and too proud to leave a loose end on a hunt, did exactly that. He was credited with nineteen vampires in seventeen years. He did not claim a single one that he had not delivered to the end of its journey. His daughters were born in the first years of the marriage, in the small house in Boyle Heights that he bought with his savings. Thelma Faulkner Carter was born in 1917 and lived until 1975, a bright, cheerful, tidy girl who was not called to the work and became a stenographer. Lorraine Faulkner Carter was born in 1918 and lived until 1984, a long-legged, watchful, silent child who sat on his knee at the age of six to be shown a timetable, and who became, in her time, a slayer. Ada nursed through the influenza of that autumn on the isolation ward, with an infant at home in a basket and her husband working the night rounds. She did not, he noted, ever once ask him where he was going. She asked when he would be back, and she wrote it on the kitchen slate. He had been chief rate clerk since 1926, and had hunted for years in the dry orange country east of the city, along the rails to Pomona and Riverside, teaching Lorraine in the evenings to read a trail. In the Depression he kept his place at the desk by making himself a nuisance to nobody. He died in the autumn of 1933, at forty-four, in a hay barn at the edge of an orchard near Pomona. He had followed a quarry there for nine nights, on the strength of a delayed freight and a misrouted crate. It was an old barn, with a sagging roof, and the thing that he had come to find was lying in the loft. He found it, he dealt with it, and the rotten main beam gave way under the weight of the fight and brought the whole structure down. The sheriff's men dug him out in the morning. He had the pistol in his hand, and a waybill in his pocket on which he had written, in his clerk's hand, the destination of the last car. Ada, who came out from the hospital in her nurse's cap, identified him, and took the paper, and said that it was correct. Joseph Carter is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Proud Drover, the railway clerk who delivered every troublesome thing to the end of its line. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trackers of the Red Ledger's western roll, the slayers who found the dark by its records and not its howling, and who proved that a good timetable and a steady nerve are as sound a weapon as any silver.