Leonard Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Lone Rook. Craft: Night Trapping.

Leonard Faulkner could turn off a street. It was a plain fact about him, as it is about any lineman with a key to a switching station, and he made of it, in the last year of his short life, the working principle of a hunter. He was born in 1955 in New Orleans (Algiers), Louisiana, and died in 1981 from a blow taken in a churchyard, aged twenty-six. He worked as a lineman for the power company and, from 1980, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of modern New Orleans. The family book knows him as The Lone Rook, and it classes him as a Spy, a hunter who works by observation, access and a good reason for being in someone else's street. His craft was Night Trapping, the setting of lamps, closed roads and darkened blocks so that a creature of the night walks into a place that it cannot leave, and his gear was a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He was the younger child of the cotton factor and slayer Milton Faulkner, The Sure Shuttle, and of the typist and slayer Beatrice Seneca, The Bitter Latch, and the brother of the slayer Ethel Faulkner. In 1980 he married the laundry supervisor Frances Fontenot, and they had one son, the slayer Mark Fontenot Faulkner, born in 1981 and dead in 2006. He was born in the little house near the ferry landing at Algiers, a year after his sister, at a time when his mother had been a hunter for fourteen years and his father, a cotton factor who still kept his shoes in a line, had not yet been called, and it was said in the family that he came into the world in a tolerably good humour and was surprised ever after at how little everyone else shared it. Ethel was grave. Leonard was cheerful, restless and a talker, a thin, dark, quick boy with his father's jaw and his mother's eye for a lit window. He could tell from the end of the street whose lamp was on and whose had been left. He was ten in September of 1965, when Hurricane Betsy came up the river and his mother died, and he took the oars of the rowing boat that his father had brought out of the shed in Algiers, while Ethel sat in the bow with a lantern, and the three of them crossed the flooded streets in the dark to bring out a neighbour's family. He remembered the sound of the water against the hull. He said that it was the first time he understood that there was work that could be done by a boy. He was not a scholar and was never meant to be. He left school at seventeen, in 1972, in the last of the Vietnam years, with a grade in shop and a certificate of good conduct, and his father, who had hoped for a clerk and found a lad who preferred a pair of pliers, put him to work, through a cousin, as a groundman on a line crew of the power company. A lineman's trade is a hard school, and the best of them is a kind of acrobat with a sense of duty. He climbed in the heat, in the rain and in the dark. He learned to read a pole from the ground, to splice a cable by feel, to throw a switch in a station without a light and to know, from the hum of a transformer, whether it was tired. By twenty-one he was a journeyman. He loved the work, and he loved, above all, what it gave him, which was a hard hat, a belt, a truck with a company name on the door and an unquestioned right to be anywhere in the city at any hour with a ladder. Nobody asks a lineman what he is doing in a back alley at three in the morning. They assume that something has gone out. His father, who had been a trapper of ground by instinct and by drill, died in the autumn of 1978, in a churchyard, and Leonard, who was twenty-three, was left with a house, a sister and a notebook that he did not, for a time, take out of the drawer. Ethel had it. She had the nerve for it, he said, and he had the nerve only for the electricity. But he knew the family's secret, as every child of the house did, and he knew what the work was, and in the evenings, in the kitchen, he asked her what it was that his father had meant by a good place to stand. She said that it was a place from which a creature could be seen and could not leave. He said that he knew a good many of those. She said that she supposed he did. It was not a calling, in the sense of the word that the Ledger uses, which is that a person recognises the work, but it was the beginning of an argument that lasted two years. He met Frances Fontenot in the autumn of 1979, at the loading door of a laundry on the west bank, where he had come in the company truck to see to a line that had come down in a storm. She was a supervisor, at twenty-eight, a thin, watchful woman with strong wrists and a ledger of tags, and he asked where he might find someone to sign for the work. She said that she would sign. He came back the following Tuesday with a sheet of repairs that did not need her signature, and the Tuesday after that with a sandwich. They were married in the spring of 1980, in a church in Algiers, with Ethel standing up with the bride, and a row of cousins at the back who sat with their coats on and who were, as he noticed, entirely at ease with the fact that the best man had a pistol. He took a rented house on the west bank, with a porch and a line for the washing, and was, for six months, a man with nothing to think of but a wife and the grid. The calling came in the autumn of 1980, in the fields after a hunt, when the hounds came back without the huntsman. A hunt club in the cane country beyond the river, which ran a pack after fox on the Saturdays between November and March, in the old manner, with red coats and a horn, had invited the crew of the power company to a day's sport, in return for a service that nobody had liked to charge for, and Leonard, who was a poor horseman and a good walker, went on foot, with a flask. At about three in the afternoon the pack came back across the stubble of a cut field at a dead run, without a whipper-in, and without the huntsman, who had last been seen going into the line of cypress at the far side of the cane. They stood in a trembling knot at the gate and would not go near the trees. A hound that has been bred to run into anything will not, as a rule, refuse a covert. Leonard, who had been in the dark a good deal for a man of twenty-five, went in. He found the huntsman's horse, with the reins down and the stirrups tied up as if by a groom. He found a cap. He found, at the edge of a drainage ditch, a place where the ground was stamped flat in a circle, and he stood in it for a long time, thinking of his father's sentence, and then he went home and told his sister that he was ready to be shown the work. She taught him from the notebook, over the winter, and she was a very fair teacher. He had the craft that was in his blood, the one that his father had practised, and he brought to it a talent that the old man had never had, which was a switch. Night Trapping, in his hands, was an electrical art. He knew that a lit street draws a creature and a dark one holds it, and he knew which fuse would put a single block into the dark and leave its neighbours blazing, so that a thing which had been walking freely on the safe side of a corner found itself, by an act that no one had seen, on a pavement with no light, no door and a wall of lamps in front of it. He drew them as a lineman draws a diagram. He chose a street, a station and a time, and he arranged them like a stage. It was a Spy's method as much as a Trapper's. He was in every neighbourhood in the city on legitimate business, and nobody had ever looked at him twice. He took his first creature in the January of 1981, on a street in Gretna, with a closed road at one end, a darkened block at the other and a silver-edged knife in his hand, and his sister, who had been at the corner for three hours, said afterwards that she had not been needed. He took the name himself. A rook, in the language of the Ledger's Spies, is a bird that is seen in company, and a lone rook is one that has been cut from the flock, and it is thought by the family book to be a good name for a man who works in a crowd and is never of it. He liked it. He liked, too, that it was a chess piece, a thing that moves in straight lines, from edge to edge, with no regard for what stands between. He was twenty-five, and he was very happy. He died in the March of 1981. The Ledger records it as a churchyard, a blow and an hour past midnight, and the family papers give no more, as they gave no more of his father. He had set a trap behind a parish chapel in Gretna, in the usual manner, with a dark block, a lit gate and a closed lane, and it held, but the creature, which had not read his orders either, took a place on the wall that he had not thought of, and he was struck once, as his father had been, and sat down with his back to the wall. Ethel, who had been at the far end of the lane, took the call. His wife, who was twenty-nine and carrying a child, was told by her at the door. The boy was born in the September, and given his father's name for a surname and his mother's for a middle one, and he was, in due time, a slayer in his turn. Leonard Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Lone Rook, the lineman who could put a street in the dark and a creature in the middle of it. In the Slayerverse he stands for the spies of the Red Ledger, the hunters who went where they had a reason to be and who made of a hard hat, a ladder and a switch the best disguise in the city, and who proved that a short life can be a very bright one.