Lewis Faulkner Sherman

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

Lewis Faulkner Sherman was born in 1811 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lived eighty-three years as a militiaman, a farmer's agent and a citizen of the Connecticut valley. He was the son of the carpenter Asa Sherman and the milliner Nancy Faulkner, who was the youngest child of the slayer Caleb Faulkner, called The Lexington Courier, and the younger brother of the shopkeeper Ida Sherman Faulkner. He never married and had no children of his own. He was not a slayer, and he was the family's most willing defender of the proposition that somebody in every generation ought not to be one. He died in 1894 of pneumonia, at eighty-three, having served for sixty years in the Massachusetts volunteer militia, and having lived long enough to see a telegraph wire carry the news of a war he had helped to fight, and a telephone carry the news of his own cousin's death. His father, Asa Sherman, born in 1781 and dead in 1839, was a carpenter of Springfield who had moved to Northampton to work on the great brick houses going up in the Connecticut valley. His mother, Nancy Faulkner, born in 1779 and dead in 1840, was the milliner whose trunk of family letters is the main surviving record of the Faulkner children's early years. They were married in 1807, and Lewis was the younger of their two children, born two years after his sister in a house on a side street near the Northampton common, in a room that smelled of straw, glue and hot irons. The name Faulkner, which he bore in the middle of his own, came from his mother's side by the usual family custom, though his father was a Sherman and never thought to object. He grew up in the shadow of a capable sister. Ida, who was older by two years, taught him his letters, corrected his sums and stood between him and the rougher boys of the street, and he followed her about the house and the shop with an affectionate and uncritical loyalty that lasted the whole of his life. He was a large, cheerful, round-faced child, with a good appetite, a loud laugh and a tendency to knock over things. His mother called him her ox. His father, who was a patient man, taught him to use a plane, and was told, after a few weeks, that the boy had a fine eye and the coarsest hands in the valley. He turned his attention, in time, to a different employment. The employment was the militia. The Massachusetts militia of the early nineteenth century was an old institution in a state of pleasant decline. Every able-bodied man between eighteen and forty-five was in theory required to enrol and to turn out for drill several days a year, and the drill days, which were known as training days, had become a kind of civic festival, with a parade on the common, a good deal of cider, a dinner, and a number of speeches. Lewis loved them. He loved the drum, the uniforms, the sound of the fife and the sense of belonging to something large. At eighteen he joined the Northampton company, and within a year he was a corporal. He took it more seriously than most. While his comrades treated the training days as a holiday, he drilled, read the manual and practised. He became the best shot in the company. He learned to handle a musket and, later, a rifled piece, to form a line, to march in step, to read a map and to set a picket. He learned the articles of war and the orders of the day, and he could recite, without a book, the sequence of commands for loading and firing. By twenty-five he was a sergeant and the drillmaster of the company. By thirty he was its captain. He came to the Red Ledger through his mother. Nancy Faulkner had been brought up in a house in which the hunting was a fact of life, and though she had not been called herself, she kept the family's letters, and in her last years, when she knew that she was dying, she showed them to her son. He read them, one by one, over a winter, in the workshop after the day's work. They were a record of three generations of slayers, their places and their tallies, in a variety of hands. He asked her why she had not told him sooner. She said that she had hoped that he would find his own way to a quiet life, and that he seemed to have done so, and that she thought it better to tell him before she was no longer there to answer questions. He put the letters back in the trunk. He said that the quiet life was a good thing, and that somebody had to see that it lasted. It was a considered choice. He did not wish to be a slayer, and he was, as his cousins cheerfully acknowledged, quite unsuited to it. He was too large, too open and too fond of company. But he could drill a body of men, and he could keep them in order, and he had a deep attachment to the valley and its people, and so he did what a militiaman can do. He organised. Over the next forty years he made the Northampton company into something more than a parade unit. He taught its men to stand a night watch, to patrol a road, to search a barn and to recognise, in the ordinary way, a thing that was not what it seemed. He did not tell them why. He simply included it in the drill, with the other exercises, and the company, which had always been good at turning out for a fire, became very good at turning out for other things. The hunters of the Red Ledger, in western Massachusetts, found him a convenience. A cousin who was tracking a quarry through the Hampshire hills could call on the militia for a dozen steady men, with lanterns, who would ask no questions and keep their mouths shut. He supplied them. On two or three occasions in the 1840s, and once in 1855, the Northampton company was turned out at night, on an exercise, and drew a cordon round a mill village, while a pair of strangers inside the cordon finished a piece of business. Nobody in the company was told what it was. Everybody, afterward, was given a dinner. He was a tall, heavy, red-faced man, with a bald head, a white moustache and a voice that could be heard across the common, and he looked, in his uniform, like a cheerful emperor. He liked to sing. He liked his dinner. He was fond of children, who followed him in the street, and his house, a large, rambling, untidy one on the edge of the town, was full of dogs. He did not marry, though he was in his time engaged twice, and in each case the lady broke it off on the ground that she could not compete with the company. He said that they had both been perfectly right. In his working life he was an agent, a man who bought and sold on commission for the farmers of the valley, arranging the carriage of their onions, tobacco and broom corn to the railroad and the markets, and keeping their accounts. It was a trade that took him out among the farms, which suited him, and gave him the acquaintance of every family in three counties. It also made him, without his seeking it, the best-informed man in Hampshire. He knew who was in debt, who was ill, whose barn was empty and whose cellar was unaccountably full. He passed a good deal of it, when it seemed relevant, to his cousins. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he was fifty. He was too old for the line, but the state needed officers, and he was commissioned as a captain in a Massachusetts regiment, and served for two years, in the defences of Washington and in the garrison of a Virginia town, drilling recruits. He did it with energy and kindness. A young man who was under Captain Sherman learned to load a musket in nine motions and to write home once a week, both of which saved his life. He was mustered out in 1863, with a bad knee, and went home to Northampton, where he took up his old company again and drilled it until the end of the war. He lived on for thirty-one years. His sister Ida died in 1872, and he took it hard. He went on drilling the company, in a chair, on the common, into his seventies, calling the movements in a cracked but resonant voice, and the town, which had long since ceased to count the years, was oddly proud of him. In the winter of 1894 he caught a chill at a veterans' dinner, and it went to his lungs. He died in his own bed, at eighty-three, with three dogs on the coverlet. The Northampton company turned out for his funeral in full uniform. They marched behind the coffin, in step, with their muskets reversed, and at the grave, as the drum rolled, they stood the watch for an hour, which was not in any order of the day. Lewis Faulkner Sherman is remembered in the Faulkner family as the drillmaster of Northampton, the cousin who kept the valley standing. In the Slayerverse he stands for the militiamen of the Red Ledger's country, the ordinary citizen-soldiers who, without being told, learned how to hold a line against the dark.