Lewis Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Winter Reeve. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Lewis Faulkner was born in 1814 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and lived eighty years as a carpenter and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Winter Reeve, a name that comes from the old English office of the reeve, the steward who counts the flock and walks the boundary of the estate, and from his habit of hunting hardest in the coldest months. He was a Spy, a hunter who learns before he acts, and his craft was Quarry Reading, the study of what a vampire leaves behind, which he learned at the knee of his aunt Sally Faulkner Hale, The Bitter Sentinel. He was the younger child of the printer Gideon Hale Faulkner and the schoolteacher Hannah Dunlap, and the brother of the archivist Cora Faulkner. He never married. He died in 1894 of a fall, at eighty, having hunted through the Civil War and out the other side of it, and having lived long enough to be the last of the North Shore slayers who had known the old Red Ledger cousins face to face. His father, Gideon Hale Faulkner, born in 1787 and dead in 1849, was a printer of the Massachusetts coast. His mother, Hannah Dunlap, born in 1781 and dead in 1836, was a schoolmistress from Newbury who had taught some two thousand children their letters. They were married in 1812, and Lewis was born two years later in Worcester, in the second year that his father worked a journeyman's place at the old Main Street press. The family stayed at Worcester until 1815 and then went back to Newbury, where they lived in a small house at the corner of a lane, near the green, among books, chalk dust and proofs. He was a quiet, solemn, rather watchful boy, and his sister Cora, a year older, looked after him. She read to him. He listened. By the time he could read for himself, he had acquired the habit of looking at a thing for a long while before he said anything about it. It was a habit that shaped the man. He was the child who noticed. At four he knew which of the neighbours' hens had not come back for the night. At six he could say who had passed the house by the sound of the steps. At nine he was sent to fetch a book from the top of the cupboard, and came back with the book and the news that somebody had moved the jar of pickles. His mother, who valued accuracy above almost any other quality, was delighted. His father, who valued it more, taught him to set type, which he did badly, because his hands were too large, and to read proof, which he did very well. He did not take to the press. After two years of trying, he went, at fifteen, to his uncle by marriage, a master carpenter in Newburyport, who took him on as an apprentice, and in the workshop beside the river he found the thing that suited him. A carpenter's trade is a matter of looking at wood. One looks at a board and sees, in its grain, where it will split, where it will warp and where it will hold, and one makes a thing accordingly. It is a craft of quiet attention, of reading a material, and Lewis, who had been reading the world since infancy, took to it at once. By twenty he was a journeyman. By twenty-four he had set up as a housewright on his own account, in a shop on the Newburyport waterfront, building and repairing the clapboard houses, barns and sheds of the town. It was through his aunt Sally that he learned of the Red Ledger. Sally Faulkner Hale, his father's elder sister, had been a slayer for forty years, and she stayed, from time to time, at the house in Newbury. She told him, in the spring of 1836, a few weeks after his mother's death, sitting with him in the kitchen after the funeral. He was twenty-two. She said that there was a reason that the family had so many sudden journeys, late callers and locked cellars, and she gave him the reason plainly, with the kettle on the hob. He said that he had always supposed there was something. She said that she had always supposed that he did. He began to work with her that summer, as a helper. It was not a calling. A helper, in the Ledger's usage, is a member of the family who stands by, carries, watches and reports, and who is not yet or not ever formally entered in the tally. He took to it. He went with her on her rounds, along the coast from Ipswich to Portsmouth, and learned, under her eye, to read what a vampire leaves behind: the scuffed sill, the dead bird, the dry well, the footprint that does not fill with water. Quarry Reading, as she taught it, was a patient study. It required a good eye and a larger patience. He had both. By twenty-four he was taking his first quarry, at her side, and by twenty-six he had taken seven. The Ledger's formal calling did not come to him until 1846, when he was thirty-two. It came on a market day in Newburyport, in the crowd in the square, where he had gone to buy hinges. He saw a face among the stalls, a thin, sallow, clean-shaven man in a black coat, standing by a cart of apples. He had seen it before. He stood quite still, in the middle of the crowd, with the hinges in his hand, and went back in his mind through every face that he had ever noticed, until he found it. It was the face of a man whose funeral he had attended, eleven years before, at Ipswich, a cousin's friend who had died of a fever. He had seen the coffin closed. He looked again, and the man was gone. That was what the Ledger calls the calling, the moment at which a helper who has been looking for years at the edges of the thing finds that he is looking at the thing itself. He said nothing to anyone. He went home, walked the town that night, and on the third night found the man in the black coat in an empty warehouse at the end of a wharf, and settled the matter. He was found in the morning, sitting on a barrel, pale and exhausted and quite calm, with a revolver in his lap. He said that he thought he would do it again. Winter was his season. He had discovered, in his first years, that the cold was an ally. A vampire, which does not warm itself, leaves no mark on snow that a man cannot read, and a long winter night on a frozen marsh, with no leaves and no mist, gave a hunter a clarity that the summer did not. He hunted, therefore, from November to March, with a patience that his cousins found alarming. He would walk the same mile of road for a fortnight, noting every change, and on the fifteenth night would see what he had been looking for. His gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, a dark wool coat with deep pockets and a pair of hobnailed boots. He was credited, in forty-eight years, with some seventy vampires, nearly all of them taken between the first frost and the last. He was a big, slow, sandy man with a square jaw and pale eyes, and he had his mother's exactness and his father's black eyebrows. He rarely spoke. He preferred, in company, to sit by the fire and listen, and he had a slight, dry smile that appeared when somebody said something foolish. He was kind to children and to animals, and severe with himself. He kept his shop clean. He kept his books straight. He never wasted a nail. His sister Cora, who was the great friend of his life, copied his letters. He wrote to her every week, from wherever the hunt had taken him, in a small square hand, and she copied them into her volumes and sent him back notes. It was a collaboration of a peculiar kind. He was the eye in the field and she was the eye on the page, and between them they built up, over thirty years, a picture of the coast that neither could have made alone. When she died, in 1868, he said that he had lost the half of his head that remembered. His father, Gideon, died in 1849, and Lewis, who was thirty-five, came home to sit with him in the last weeks. He sat at the bed, and read aloud the proofs of his aunt's little book on the art of reading a quarry, and his father, who could no longer hold a pencil, corrected them with his eyebrows. The Civil War found him forty-seven. He was too old for the line, and he was too useful where he was. The Red Ledger's New England cousins, a number of whom were young men who enlisted and marched away, left their families, their houses and their unfinished hunts in the charge of the older men, and Lewis, who had a steady hand and a sharp eye, took them all in. He travelled more than he had ever done. He visited a score of households, in a score of towns, and kept the watch where the young men had left it. He was nearly killed twice, in 1862 and 1864, and on each occasion made a joke of it. He worked on into his seventies. The shop was run by two of his apprentices, and he hunted, in the winter, with a cane. His cousins, the Chandler brothers of Worcester, who were by then the senior hunters of the region, consulted him constantly. His old friend and cousin Lewis Faulkner Sherman, the militia captain of Northampton, who was three years his senior, died in the spring of 1894, and Lewis, who went to the funeral, caught a cold on the train. He died in the autumn of the same year, at eighty, after a fall on the stairs of his shop, in the dusk. He was found by an apprentice, at the bottom of the flight, with his lantern still burning in his hand. He had been, the apprentice said, on his way up to the loft to see whether the roof had been shut against the first snow. Lewis Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Winter Reeve, the carpenter of Newburyport, the hunter who counted the flock in the cold. In the Slayerverse he stands for the patient readers of the Red Ledger, the slayers who understood that what a quarry leaves behind is a language, and that a man who learns to read it can hear the dark coming a long way off.