Joseph Knight

Spouse of Abigail Jewett Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Joseph Knight was born in 1839 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and lived forty-four years as a printer in the mill towns and harbours of the North Shore, most of them at Newburyport. He married the milliner and vampire slayer Abigail Jewett Faulkner in 1861, raised two daughters with her, Abigail Knight and Alice Faulkner, both of whom became slayers of the Red Ledger, and died in 1883 of a stroke, aged forty-four. He was not a hunter and was not born to the Faulkner line, and he had a lame left leg that would in any case have kept him out of the field. But for twenty-two years he set, printed and folded the cards, warnings and lamp tables that the Ledger's New England cousins used and that his wife's craft required, and the family remembers him as the printer who waited up, a quiet, fair, lopsided man who put a lantern in the window of his shop every night of his married life and never once asked what it was for. Deerfield in 1839 was a small, old, elm-shaded town on the Connecticut River, with a long main street, a grammar school, a number of very fine colonial houses and a long memory. It was the town that had been burned by the French and their allies in the raid of 1704, and every child in it grew up knowing the house in which a door had been hacked through with a tomahawk. His father, a farmer and sometime sawyer whose name the family papers do not give, kept a few acres of tobacco and corn on the meadows, and his mother, a great reader, kept the school library. He was the fourth of five. He was a thoughtful, fair, bookish boy, with a cowlick, and he was clumsy on the ice. At eleven, skating on the river on a winter morning, he went through a patch of rotten ice, caught his left foot between two slabs, and was fished out an hour later by a neighbour with a hay rake. The leg healed short. He limped for the rest of his life, with the slight roll of a man on a ship's deck, and he said that it had given him an excellent excuse to sit down. He was sent, at thirteen, to Greenfield, to be apprenticed in the office of a weekly newspaper. The proprietor, a Quaker with a long upper lip, had set up his press in a loft above a harness shop, and the boy learned the whole of the trade there in seven years. He learned to ink the forms, to wet the paper, to pull a proof and to set a line by feel. He learned how to read the hieroglyphs of the editor's hand and the printer's marks for correction, the dele and the stet, and to recover a dropped forme without swearing. He learned that a printer is a man who works by other people's words and has to keep out of the way of them. It was, he said, the most restful occupation that he had ever come across, since the great problems of the world might be argued about by the editor, but it was the printer who had to decide whether the comma was a comma. At twenty he came east to Newburyport, where a larger newspaper needed a steady compositor and where the wages were a dollar a week higher. He took a room on Water Street, in the house of a Mrs Hale, a widow of severe piety, and became in a matter of months one of the most trusted men in the composing room. He was slow, but he was right. The foreman said that a proof of Knight's needed no reading, and that his only fault was that he could not be hurried. He liked the town. He liked its brick wharves, its shipyards, its long streets of sea captains' houses and the great Atlantic light that came into the composing room through the dirty windows. He liked, as he confessed in a letter to his mother, the way that it smelled of tar. He met Abigail Jewett Faulkner in the spring of 1860, when he was sent to her shop with a proof. He had set her advertisement that morning, and was unhappy with it, since the only display type in the case was a face that he described as looking like a row of gravestones. She looked at the proof. She said that it was the ugliest advertisement she had ever seen, and asked him to do it again. He went back to the office and worked on it all afternoon, and when the paper had gone to press he stayed on, by lamplight, and cut a border out of a bit of old wood type, in the shape of a little bonnet. She put the proof in her window. He called the following Saturday, to see whether it had drawn any customers. She said that it had drawn him. They were married in June 1861, in the church on the green, two months after the firing on Fort Sumter, when the town was full of drums. He was told about the Ledger the night before, in the shop, among the hat blocks, by his bride, in the flat voice that she used for selling a bonnet. She did it without any embroidery. The Faulkners, she said, were of an old line that had been at war with certain creatures since the fifteenth century. Her mother was one of the hunters, her brother Elias would be, and she thought that she would be, in time, although she had not yet been called. He listened, with his hands on his knees. He said that he was obliged to her for telling him, and that he supposed the Ledger would need a good many things printed. She said that it would. He said that it was a great relief, since it was the first time anyone had asked him for anything he knew how to do. The war did not take him. He presented himself at the recruiting office in the first summer, on the green, with the rest of the compositors, and was sent home by an embarrassed sergeant with a note about his leg. He took it badly for a month. Then he saw what it meant. The men of the newspaper were at the front, and the paper was short-handed, and he set type for two. He set the lists of the dead and the wounded, the letters from the regiment, the notices of the sanitary fair and the appeals for lint and socks, and in the evenings, in the back room of the shop over which they lived, with the blinds down, he set another kind of copy altogether. It was a pocket card for the hunters of the North Shore, giving the times of the tides, the nights of the moon and the places where the dark was thinnest, in a type so small that it could be read only by a person who knew what it said. His lamp was the thing the family remembered. Abigail's craft was Beacon Reading, and she was given to setting lights, and she asked him, in 1867, when she was called, to keep one in the window of the shop every night. He did. It was an ordinary brass lamp with a green shade, and it stood on the sill of the front window facing the street, lit at dusk and trimmed at midnight. He never knew how many times it had served. He knew only that on certain nights she would be gone from dusk to dawn, and that when she came in, cold and dusty, she would stand a moment at the window, look at the lamp, and put a hand on the back of his neck. It was, he said, the whole of his share, and it was a great deal. Their daughters were born in the first years of the marriage. Abigail Knight was born in 1862 and lived until 1931, and Alice Faulkner was born in 1866 and lived until 1928. He taught them both their letters, and to set type, and he made each of them, on a winter night when they were ten, a small case of pearl and brass. The elder was given his name, and the younger, to his amusement, was registered under her mother's, because, Abigail said, somebody had to. Both were called to the work, the elder in her teens and the younger in her twenties, and he saw both into it with a patient, worried pride. He said, at the supper table, that it was not a thing that he would have chosen for them, but that it was a thing they were good at, and that he had been married long enough to know the difference. In 1868 he set up a small press of his own, in a shop on State Street, which he ran until the end of his life. It printed, in the front, handbills, tickets, shipping bills, receipts and the notices of the town's three churches, and in the back it printed the Ledger's cards, in very small print and with a number of deliberate misspellings that marked them as the Ledger's. The harbour men brought in their bills of lading. The mill girls brought in their wedding cards. He worked fourteen hours a day, in a leather apron, with his sleeves rolled up, and was known to everyone on the street as the quiet man with the limp. He was a good neighbour. He lent his customers money, and lost a good deal of it, and did not remember to whom. He died in the March of 1883, of a stroke, at the age of forty-four, at the case, with a stick of type in his hand. It was the same way, at the same age, that his wife's father Homer Jewett had died, and Abigail, who had buried one carpenter and did not propose to bury a second, said nothing at the funeral. She set the last stick herself. It was a line from a card for the spring, and it read: tides fair, moon dark, lamp lit. She kept it in the shop until the end. Joseph Knight is remembered in the Faulkner family as the printer of Newburyport, the lame man who kept a lamp. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet husbands of the Red Ledger, the men who could not hunt and did not pretend to, and who held the light in the window and the type in the stick until the hunters came home.