Joshua Hutchinson Faulkner

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

Joshua Hutchinson Faulkner grew up in a house where two of the three adults could kill a vampire and the third could deliver a child in a blizzard, and he turned out to be none of those things. Born in 1739 at Andover, Massachusetts, he was the son of a preacher and a midwife, the younger brother of a slayer, and in due course a circuit preacher himself. The Faulkner Red Ledger lists him in its margins and never in its columns. He carried no gear and made no entries, yet the ledger's keepers of his generation admitted that the Faulkners of the New England hill country would have counted for less without the man who rode among them with a Bible in his saddlebag. Andover in the 1740s was a long, well-ordered farming town on the Shawsheen and Merrimack country north of Boston, its meetinghouse standing on the common and its families drawn up in careful ranks of pew, parish and field. Roads ran to Boston through Reading and Medford, and to the mills and landings of the Merrimack. Corn, rye, flax and cider were the daily business, and the winters were long and iron-hard. The old Puritan habit of scrutiny was still in force: a neighbour's absence from Sabbath meeting was noticed and discussed, and a family that kept odd hours had to have a good reason. For the Faulkners, whose reason was the Red Ledger, this was both a burden and a cover. A house that already looked stern and busy could keep a great many things behind its shutters. His father, Benjamin Mather Faulkner, born in 1712, was a circuit preacher who rode out to scattered congregations and settlements that had no minister of their own, and who was also, in the language of the Red Ledger, the Wary Ledger, a vampire slayer whose caution was proverbial. He died in 1747, when Joshua was eight, and the family's memory of him was mostly a memory of the road: a man who was always leaving, always returning with mud to the knee, and always writing something down. Joshua's mother, Charity Hutchinson, born in 1710, was a midwife who answered calls at every hour and in every weather, and who knew as many households' secrets as any minister. She died in 1751, when he was twelve. The two deaths left Joshua and his elder sister, Hannah Hutchinson Faulkner, born in 1736, to be raised by kin and by the neighbours of the parish, and it was Hannah, eleven years old when their father died and fifteen when their mother did, who took the place of both parents. Hannah was called to the work and Joshua was not. The ledger says so plainly, in the same flat tone it uses for weather. He grew up watching his sister learn a craft he could not share, and there is a family story, probably embroidered, that he asked her once why the calling had passed him by and that she answered that someone had to remember the names of the living. Whatever was said, he took the remark as a commission. He learned to read closely and to speak well, and at an age when other farm boys were being sent to a trade he was sent to a minister of the parish for Latin and divinity, and afterwards, as was the custom, to a neighbouring pastor for the reading of theology. The middle of the eighteenth century was a restless time in New England religion. The revivals of the Great Awakening had left the congregations divided between Old Lights and New Lights, and itinerant preachers were both admired and distrusted. Joshua took up his father's calling in the years after the wars with France on the frontier had begun to press hard on the western settlements. He rode a circuit through the hill towns and along the upper Merrimack, preaching in barns, schoolhouses and unfinished meetinghouses to families who had not seen an ordained man in a year. He carried a Bible, a little medicine, a pocket almanac and a journal, and he wore the same black coat until it was too short at the wrists. Farmers remembered a lean man with a hoarse voice and a habit of asking after the health of the livestock before he asked after the state of a soul. That habit was the real service he did the Faulkner cause. The Red Ledger was only as good as the intelligence that reached it, and a circuit preacher saw more of the scattered settlements than any slayer could. Joshua noticed the farm where the children were sickly and the cattle were found bled in the morning, the parish where an old widow was accused of witchcraft by neighbours who had no better word for what they feared, the family that refused to come to meeting after dark. He did not hunt. He wrote what he saw in letters to his sister, and Hannah went and looked. In one year of the early 1760s three ledger entries in her hand credit information sent from the preacher, and the ledger refers to him in its notes as the Eyes on the Road, a nickname that appears nowhere else and seems to have been the family's own. He was often lonely, and it showed in his letters. He never married and had no children, and the ledger says only that he stayed a bachelor and that his circuit was his household. He boarded with parishioners, slept in other people's best beds and bought his linen from other people's wives, and it is a fair guess that he was fond of more than one family without ever being at home in any. His relations with his sister, though, were close throughout, and when Hannah came to the ledger's meetings he sat with her and kept the minutes. It was he who wrote the sober fair copies of her entries, in a fine, unhurried hand that the later clerks preferred to hers. The Faulkner rivalry with the Proctors reached him through that clerkly work more than through any quarrel. The Yorkists' White Ledger and the Lancastrians' Red Ledger were compared at intervals, and Joshua, as the family's best hand at figures and prose, was often the one who drew up the reply to a Proctor letter. He held to the old family view that the Guest, the vampire who escaped at Towton in 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, had gone free because a Proctor line had failed to hold, and he expressed it in his own polite and unbending way. The Proctors answered in kind. It was a war of paper, and he was rather good at it. The Revolution found him in his thirties, and like most preachers of the region he was pulled into it by his congregations. He preached the cause of the colonies from several pulpits and once, at a muster on the green, delivered a prayer over the militia that people talked about for years. He took no commission and carried no musket. But the war strained the ledger's communications, and it was Joshua who kept the letters moving between his sister's house and the cousins in the harbour towns and farther afield. He died in 1787, aged forty-eight, in an accident on the fells. The word was the family's own for the high, broken country of the northern hills, where the old Lancashire habit of speech had survived among the Faulkners for a century and a half, and the ledger gives no more than the date and the place. His horse was found on the road below and his saddlebags were intact. Hannah collected the journals. In the Faulkner tradition that later fed into the Slayerverse, Joshua is remembered as the ledger's conscience, a man who counted no vampires and was nonetheless a necessary part of the count.