Joshua Endicott Faulkner

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

Joshua Endicott Faulkner was born in 1782 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the son of a circuit preacher and a schoolteacher who was also a vampire slayer, and he made his living as a carpenter in the canal towns and iron country of the state. He never married and left no children. He died in 1829, at forty-seven, of a wasting illness that took most of a year to finish him. His place in the family story is that of the quiet son of a famous mother: the man who built the house in which The Fallow Drover lived out her last years, and who kept the drawings and the letters that let the Faulkners of the next generation know who she had been. His father, Reuben Endicott, was born in 1754 and lived until 1830. He was a circuit preacher, one of the itinerant Methodist ministers who rode the back country of Pennsylvania in the decades after the Revolution, preaching in barns, cabins and courthouses and staying a night here and a night there. He was away for weeks at a time, travelling some three thousand miles a year on horseback, and he gave the household a spiritual seriousness and an unpredictable income. His mother, Naomi Lord Faulkner, born in 1757 and dead in 1823, was a schoolteacher, and also a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger whom the book calls The Fallow Drover. Her name was given to the way she moved a suspect, slowly and in a straight line, like a drover with a herd, until it had nowhere to turn. Joshua had a younger sister, Deborah Faulkner Endicott, born in 1786, who did not take up the work. Germantown, where he was born, was then a long single-street village a few miles north of Philadelphia, founded by German Mennonites and Quakers in the 1680s and still largely German-speaking. Its houses were built of stone, with deep-set windows, steep roofs and cellars that were said to hold a century's secrets. It had been the site of a battle in 1777, when Washington's army had attacked the British in a fog, and the town still bore the scars, musket balls in the walls, a shattered tree, a mansion where British grenadiers had made a stand. The Faulkners were among the English families who had settled there after the Massachusetts years, and Naomi kept a little school in the front room of a stone house on the Main Street. Joshua grew up among children learning to read. His mother's school was a busy, crowded place, and his earliest memories were of benches, slates, the smell of chalk and the sound of a dozen voices reciting the multiplication table. He was a thoughtful, slow-spoken boy who liked to draw, and his mother noticed early that he had a good eye for proportion. When he was fourteen she apprenticed him to a master carpenter on the Germantown pike, who built houses for the merchants of Philadelphia, and he took up the trade with the same calm attention he gave to everything. He was a well-trained carpenter by twenty, and he spent the next fifteen years moving from job to job in the canal and iron country. The great improvements of the period, the turnpikes, the Schuylkill and Susquehanna canals, the furnaces and forges of Berks and Lancaster counties, needed builders, and Joshua raised locks, lock-keepers' houses, warehouses, mill races, forge sheds and ironmasters' mansions. He was good at timber and better at stone-and-timber work, and he drew his own plans. A few of his drawings survive in the Faulkner archive, small, precise elevations in brown ink on cream paper, each with a scale in perches and feet. He was not a hunter, and he was honest about it. His mother had hoped, for a time, that he would be called to the work, and she had taught him the rudiments of the Fallow Drover's method, but the calling never came, and he accepted it without bitterness. What he did instead was build. When she grew old and her knees gave out, in the last decade of her life, he designed and built her a small house on the edge of Germantown, with a low doorstep, a broad porch and a study on the ground floor with a window from which she could see the street. It was also, though this was not in the plans, a hunter's house, with stout shutters, a bolted cellar and a concealed cupboard behind the chimney breast in which the Red Ledger was kept. Naomi lived in it for six years and died there in 1823. Joshua nursed her through her last winter. After she was gone he took charge of her papers, her letters, her school register and the notes she had kept on the method she had called drover's work, and he made a fair copy of them all in his own hand. The copy was sent to cousins in Massachusetts and Kentucky and was used for decades afterwards as a manual for young hunters. His sister Deborah kept the original. His own illness began in 1828, with a weakness and a loss of weight that the physicians of Philadelphia could not explain. He went on working as long as he could. In the spring of 1829 he took to his bed in his mother's house, and there he died in the autumn, at the age of forty-seven. His father, who was seventy-five and had left the circuit only two years before, preached at the funeral in a cracked voice, on the text that a man should set his house in order. One more detail of his work is worth recording, because it survives in stone. Among the buildings he raised on the Schuylkill canal was a lock-keeper's house near Reading, a small, square structure of local sandstone with a hipped roof and a porch facing the water. It has a cellar with an iron-banded door, a window sill cut deep enough to hold a row of candles and a bricked-up niche in the chimney breast, which was opened in 1911 and found to contain a pair of pistols, a pot of dried herbs and a scrap of paper on which a steady hand had written, in brown ink, the single word Enough. The family believes it was his. His sister Deborah Faulkner Endicott, who outlived him, preserved his drawings in a portfolio that she passed to a cousin's daughter. The portfolio contains forty-one sheets, including the plans for his mother's house, and on the last sheet, in pencil, a sketch of the lock-keeper's house with a figure standing in the doorway who is recognisably Naomi Lord Faulkner. Joshua Endicott Faulkner is remembered as the carpenter son of The Fallow Drover, the man who built a hunter's house and kept a hunter's papers. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people who came after the famous ones and made sure that what they knew was not lost.