Joseph Faulkner

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

The forge on the Haverhill road burned for more than fifty years, and for most of them the man at its bellows was Joseph Faulkner. Born in 1754 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, he lived long enough to see the colony he was born in become a state and then a nation, and to see his trade change from the work of a solitary smith into something closer to industry. He was a blacksmith by skill and habit, not a slayer by calling, but he belonged to a family that kept a ledger, and he spent his life making the tools, the hinges and the horseshoes that let the hunters of the Red Ledger do their work. His father, Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner, born in 1726, was a boatman on the Merrimack, working the flat-bottomed gundalows and the river sloops that carried bricks, hay, lumber and salt fish between Haverhill and the sea at Newburyport. It was a life of tide tables, sandbars and long days poling against the current, and Nathaniel came home smelling of tar and river mud. His mother, Eunice Dow, born in 1720, was a herbalist, the woman the neighbours sent for when a child had a fever or a cut would not close. She kept a cellar hung with bunches of yarrow, tansy, boneset and horehound, and she dispensed them in packets and tinctures, together with a good deal of plain advice. Joseph was the elder of two children, the second being his sister Polly Faulkner, born in 1757. As a boy he ran errands for both parents, carrying his mother's remedies to sick households and helping his father to mend nets and caulk seams, and he learned early that every trade has its own vocabulary and its own kind of patience. He was bound to the town blacksmith at fourteen. The shop stood at a fork in the road, low-roofed and black with soot, with a great leather bellows worked by a rope and a hearth in which charcoal was burned to a white glow. The work was endless. There were horseshoes to be forged and fitted, oxen to be shod, ploughshares to be pointed, chains to be welded, hinges, latches, hooks, nails and hoops to be made. Nails alone occupied whole days, each one hammered from a rod, headed and dropped into a keg. Joseph learned to judge the temperature of iron by its colour, dull red, cherry, orange, yellow and white, and to know by the sound of the hammer when the metal was ready to move. He grew large in the arm and shoulder and small in speech, a broad, slow, deliberate man with singed forearms and a good ear for a joke told over the anvil. By the time he was twenty-one he was working at his own forge, and the war was at the door. The Revolution turned smiths into armourers almost overnight. Haverhill's militia needed bayonets straightened, musket locks repaired, gun barrels bored and axes sharpened. Joseph took on this work in addition to the common trade, going without sleep for days during the alarms and standing at the anvil with a lantern at midnight. He was not, in the end, a soldier, but he made a great deal of the iron that an army used, and he was proud of a pair of hinges he had forged for the door of the meetinghouse's powder room. It was in those years that a shopkeeper named Phebe Brewster, older than him by five years, sold him nails by the keg for a big job, and found herself arguing with him over the price of iron. They were married in 1780, and she became the centre of his working life for the next eighteen years. His inheritance from the Faulkner side, the Red Ledger, was not something he had chosen, and he took it as he took most things, without complaint. His father the boatman had been a keeper of its Massachusetts copy, and by the time Joseph was a young man the book had become a kind of family shrine, opened at solstices and read through by candlelight. It recorded the founding vow of Hugh Faulkner, the flight from Lancashire, the long migration to the New England shore, and the count of vampires taken by the house since 1455. It also recorded the old resentments toward the Proctors of Yorkshire, and the unsettled question of the Guest. Joseph's mother added her own knowledge, the plants that could be laid on a wound and the ones that should be kept out of the house, and it was through her that the household found a role for the smith: he made things. Silver-tipped bolts, iron-bound stakes, sturdy hinges and bars for cellar doors, a heavy latch on the door of the shop that could not be opened from the outside without a key. Hunters passing through Haverhill knew that Joseph would repair a broken rifle lock overnight and ask no payment. The couple's sons were born in the first years of the marriage. Nathaniel Brewster Faulkner arrived in 1782, named for his grandfather, and grew into a careful, unassuming man who took no part in the family's darker work and who died in 1827. Jacob Brewster Faulkner, born in 1783, was the second, and the calling came to him in his time, making him a vampire slayer of the next generation. He died in 1830, in the same year as his father. Joseph trained both boys to the anvil, and Jacob, in particular, learned to forge his own silver-tipped bolts, an inheritance that would serve him well. He also taught them that iron and patience were the same substance. Phebe died in 1798, aged forty-nine, of a fever, and Joseph was left a widower at forty-four with two teenage sons and a forge to run. He did not remarry. His father, Nathaniel, had died in 1792, and Eunice in 1791, so that the household of his youth was gone entirely. The silence at the forge deepened after that. He worked as he had always done, but now with a new habit of stopping in the middle of a task and staring at the fire. His sister Polly, who lived nearby, brought him meals and took over the dispensing of his mother's herbs, and the neighbours began to say that the smith had gone quiet. He worked into old age. By the 1820s Haverhill had changed. Shoemaking had begun to fill the small workshops behind the houses, and the river trade had been joined by turnpikes and stage lines that brought new business to a smith. Joseph shod their horses, mended their wheels and hammered out the brackets for the new bridges. He grew stooped, and his hands, once so sure, began to shake at the fine work, but he was still able to draw a red-hot bar from the fire and straighten it in three blows. It was in his seventy-seventh year, by the family's reckoning, that the end came. In 1830, at the age of seventy-six, he was riding out to a farm to look at a lame mare when his own horse stumbled, and he fell heavily on the frozen road. He did not recover. His son Jacob, the slayer, died that same year, and the family buried them within months of each other. The forge passed to a nephew and eventually stopped. But in the Red Ledger, in the margin of an entry from the 1790s, there is a small drawing of an anvil, and beneath it a single line in Jacob's hand: made by my father. Joseph Faulkner is remembered in the Slayerverse as the smith whose iron kept a family of hunters armed, and whose forge stayed lit through three generations of the Faulkners' work.