Levi Cutler Faulkner

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

Levi Cutler Faulkner was born in 1787 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the elder child of a farmer who hunted vampires, and he spent thirty years as a storekeeper in the valley towns. He never married and left no children. He died in 1842, at fifty-five, of a wasting illness that took most of two years to finish him. His place in the family story is that of the son who was not called to the work when his sister was, and who turned, rather than resent it, to the thing he did best, which was to keep a shop so orderly that for a time it doubled as the Red Ledger's supply depot in the Connecticut valley. His father, Obadiah Faulkner, was born in 1760 and lived until 1823. He was a farmer and a slayer, whom the Ledger calls The Sable Rook, for a black coat he wore and for a habit of perching on a fence rail for hours, watching a field. His mother, Charity Cutler, born in 1759 and dead in 1814, was a farmer's wife with a great capacity for work and a great dislike of being contradicted. The family's younger child, Keziah Cutler Faulkner, was born in 1789 and followed her father into the work, becoming a vampire slayer in her own right. Levi, who was two years older, stayed on the side of the fence on which his mother sat. Springfield, when he was a boy, was the busiest town in the valley. The armoury on the hill supplied the young republic's muskets, the river carried its goods to Hartford and the sea, and the Boston road brought a constant stream of wagons, stagecoaches and drovers. The memory of Shays's Rebellion, when a column of armed farmers had marched on the arsenal in the winter of 1787, the year of Levi's birth, was still fresh. The family farm lay on the flat, rich land along the river just north of the town, where onions, corn and tobacco grew, and Levi spent his childhood in the fields and in the barn, learning to handle a team and to judge a crop. He disliked farming. He disliked the weather, the mud, the dependence on the seasons and the impossibility of ever finishing the work. What he liked was arithmetic, and the pleasure of a neat column of figures that added up. At fourteen he was sent down to the town to work in the store of a merchant on Main Street, and he took to the trade as if it had been invented for him. A country store in those years sold everything: dry goods, hardware, groceries, rum, salt, crockery, patent medicines, powder and shot, and it took payment in cash, produce, labour and credit. The storekeeper had to know the price of a hundred goods, the credit of a hundred families and the state of the markets in Boston and New York. Levi, who had an excellent memory, learned all of it by eighteen. He opened his own store in 1810, at twenty-three, in a rented building in the village of Longmeadow, a few miles south of Springfield, and he ran it for the rest of his working life. The shop was a long, narrow room with a counter down one side, shelves to the ceiling and a rolling ladder, and it was kept in a state of order that was a byword in the town. Every barrel was labelled, every bolt of cloth was folded to the same width and every account was balanced at the end of the week. Levi had a beautiful hand and kept his books in a series of ledgers, which were the envy of the county's other storekeepers. A neighbouring merchant once remarked that the only thing in the valley that was as reliable as Cutler's scale was Cutler's ledger. The ledgers were, in a manner of speaking, the heart of the matter, because the Faulkner family had a particular use for a storekeeper with a meticulous record of purchases. A hunter who needed silver, powder, lead, salt, lamp oil or rope could order it through Levi, and the order would be entered among the routine sales without attracting notice. Cousins from Concord, Northampton and Worcester passed through to collect parcels marked as cloth or hardware. Levi kept a separate, locked ledger for the Red Ledger's business, in which every such transaction was recorded under a code, and a third, private one in which he noted who had asked questions. The codes were based on the price lists of the period and were designed to be read by a clerk who knew nothing about vampires. His sister Keziah, who was a slayer from 1809, was his best customer. She was a shopkeeper herself, in Worcester, and the two corresponded regularly about stock, prices and the movements of strangers, and from time to time she came to the store to consult the locked ledger. Their father Obadiah, who lived until 1823, came in on market days to sit on a barrel by the stove and watch the traffic, like a rook on a rail. Levi used to say that his father could tell more about a district from watching a store door for an afternoon than a constable could learn in a year. He never married. A woman in Longmeadow who had been courted by him for some seasons eventually lost patience and married a miller, and Levi sent her a set of china as a wedding gift, with a note in which every figure was correct. He lived over the shop, took his dinners at the tavern and kept a tidy garden behind the house. On Sundays he taught a class at the meeting house, and on summer evenings he sat on the step and watched the river. His nieces and nephews, who were mostly his sister's cousins, remembered a tall, stooped, courteous man with a pencil behind his ear and a habit of giving peppermints. His illness began in the winter of 1840, with a loss of appetite and a pain in the side, and progressed slowly. He kept the shop open until the last summer, propped on a stool behind the counter with a blanket over his knees, and he closed the ledgers himself, three days before he died. The account books were found to balance to the penny. He was buried in the Longmeadow churchyard. Levi Cutler Faulkner is remembered as the storekeeper of Longmeadow, the man whose ledgers kept a hunting family supplied for thirty years. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quartermasters of the Red Ledger, whose tidy books and reliable scales kept the work going quietly behind the counter.