Lorraine Faulkner Carter

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Slow Rook. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Lorraine Faulkner Carter was born in 1918 at Los Angeles, California, and lived sixty-six years as a telephone operator and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West. The family book knows her as The Slow Rook, a name that recalls the heaviest piece on the board, which moves in straight lines and takes its time, and it classes her as a Soldier, a hunter who meets the enemy directly and relies on discipline, order and a steady nerve. Her craft was Quarry Reading, the art of learning what a creature has done from the marks it leaves, and of working out from them where it will be. Her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She was called in 1941, after a winter fever that took everyone in a household except one. She was the younger daughter of the railway clerk and slayer Joseph Carter, The Proud Drover, and of the nurse Ada Rogers, and the sister of Thelma Faulkner Carter. In 1940 she married the newspaper compositor Charles Rogers, and they raised two children, Mildred Rogers Faulkner and Eugene Faulkner, who became a slayer; both are living. She died in 1984 of a long illness, aged sixty-six. She was born in the spring of 1918, in the same small bungalow near the river yards where her sister had been born the year before, at a moment when her father was already packing for the East. Joseph Carter had a railway posting to Chicago and then to the Pennsylvania yards, and did not see his second daughter until she was a year old, a fact that he mentioned, in later years, as the one regret of his life. Ada, a county hospital nurse, delivered her herself, with the help of a neighbour and a bottle of carbolic, on a Sunday morning, and was back on the ward within the month. The baby was big, slow and calm, and did not fuss. She watched the world go past with an expression of patient interest, and it was said by her grandmother that she took in everything and gave out nothing, which in the family was held to be the beginning of a very good hunter. Her father came home in 1919, and was for fourteen years her teacher. He was a quiet, funny man who took the girls out to the yards on Saturdays, and it was Lorraine, not Thelma, who stood on the loading rail watching the steers, and asked what they were afraid of. He told her that they were afraid of what they could smell. She asked what they could smell. He said that it was the right question, and gave her an answer that she remembered for sixty years, which was that an animal reads the ground with its nose and a hunter ought to read it with her eyes. He took her, at twelve, out along the Arroyo Seco at dawn, to look at a line of prints in the mud, and taught her to tell a dog from a coyote from a man, and a man who walked from a man who was being carried. He died in 1933, when she was fifteen, and she was never the same, in the sense that she became, from that winter, a very determined young woman. She went to the high school, took the commercial course and in 1936 was hired as a switchboard operator by the telephone company, at an exchange on South Figueroa, at a wage that seemed to her, after two years of her mother's economies, regal. She was a good operator. She had a low, level, unhurried voice, which callers found reassuring and which she used on three hundred calls a shift, and a gift for hearing what lay behind a call. She could tell from a breath on the line whether a man was drunk, hurt or lying. She said that it was no different from reading tracks, except that the ground was a wire. She married in 1940. Charles Rogers was a compositor on a Los Angeles daily, a stout, bald, ink-stained young man of twenty-seven, of no relation, or none that either family could prove, to her mother's people, who had come out from Ohio on a printers' union card and lived in a boarding house on Hope Street. He set the headlines for the night edition. She met him at a lunch counter near the Times building, where he had been reading a proof upside down, and she asked whether he was always so careless with the news. He said that he had read it right the first time. It was, he explained, the only way a compositor could read, from the back, in lead. They were married at the Methodist church on Wilshire, with her mother in grey and her sister Thelma in the front pew with a notebook, and settled in a small stucco house in Highland Park. The calling came in the winter of 1941. It was a fever, a foul one, with a cough that went to the chest, and it went through a household on a lane in Boyle Heights in the week after Christmas. A widow named Ybarra and her four grown children had taken to their beds together. Ada, who knew the family from the hospital, was sent for, and Lorraine, who had the day off, went with her to carry the basin. Ada nursed them for four nights. By the fifth morning all of them were dead save the youngest, a boy of nineteen who had been sitting up in the kitchen throughout, awake and perfectly calm, and who said that he did not feel the cold. He did not look at Ada. He looked at Lorraine. He was, in a way that she could not explain, not breathing as the household had breathed, and not as a living man ought. She felt the hair rise on her arms. She stood, put down the basin and said, in her low, level, operator's voice, that he would oblige her by staying exactly where he was. He did not. He went out through the back, over the fence, and she followed, in her good shoes, through the yards, across a trolley line and down the dry bed of a ditch, reading as she went the marks that he left. She had never been taught, and she knew them at once. A snapped twig, a rubbed wall, a dog that had not barked. She found him at dawn in the cellar of a boarded-up tamale factory, two miles away, with the sun coming up, and she stood at the head of the steps and let it come down the stair. It is not recorded what he said. She went home, took off her shoes and sat in the kitchen till her husband came in from the night shift, and told him. Charles listened to the end, put the kettle on and said that he had always wondered about the Sundays. She was trained by a retired railway detective of the Ledger who lived at Pasadena, and by her mother's cousins, and by the work, over a number of years, in the Soldier's manner, which is to say with a good deal of drill. She learned the patrol, the hold and the fixed hour. She learned to place her feet, to shoot to a count and to stand, in the dark, for four hours at a time without a cough. Quarry Reading was her own addition. She spent her days off along the washes, the rail embankments and the old oil-field roads, reading the ground. She could tell from the scatter of a few dead birds in an orchard which way the thing had gone, from the pattern of a lit window what hour it had been seen, and from a gap in a row of orange trees how long it had lived there. She was slow, thorough and wrong about as often as a clock. The cousins, who were quicker, called her The Slow Rook, and she took the name as a compliment. Her children, Mildred Rogers Faulkner, who was born in 1943 and is living, and Eugene Faulkner, born in 1946 and also living, grew up first in the Highland Park house, and from 1945 in Denver, under the tick of the compositor's clock. Mildred, a bright, brisk girl, became a laundry supervisor and had no part in the work. Eugene, a grave child with his mother's eyes, followed her out to the washes at ten, and in the Vietnam years, when the draft board pursued him with a letter and a sense of humour, took up the work in earnest. His mother taught him what she had taught herself. The war years, the Korean War and the long nights of the fifties had been her time, and she handed him the case of silver rounds in 1966, in the kitchen, without a word, and he put it in a drawer and did not think of himself as a hunter until 1980. He took it. She said that it was very much heavier than it looked. She went on at the exchange until 1979, long after the operators had been replaced by dials, as a supervisor in the training room, and she lost Charles in the same year, in a car accident on a wet road outside Denver, on the way home from the night shift. She had been ill for some time. She did not say so. The illness, which the family papers call long, took five years in the end, and she spent them in the house at Highland Park, in a chair by the window, reading the street. She said that she could tell from the sound of a car whether it was a neighbour. She died in the autumn of 1984, at sixty-six, with her sister's typing in a pile on the table, and her son, Eugene, who had driven down from the north, sitting at her side. Lorraine Faulkner Carter is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Slow Rook, the telephone operator who read a creature's trail where others read nothing and who never once hurried. In the Slayerverse she stands for the soldiers of the Red Ledger in the West, the patient hunters who held their ground, took their time and relied on discipline, silver and a steady eye.