Mark Kowalski Faulkner

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

Mark Kowalski Faulkner was born in 1973 at Denver, Colorado, and is living today in Denver, where he works as an oil-field roughneck, a floor hand on the drilling rigs of the Rockies and the plains. He is a man of the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but he was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. He is the younger child of the electrician and slayer Eugene Faulkner, The Pale Scythe, and of the librarian Beatrice Kowalski, and the brother of the slayer Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, The Slow Bell. In 1997 he married the pharmacy technician Crystal Kelly, and they have two daughters, Laura Kelly Faulkner, born in 2000, and Beatrice Faulkner, born in 2002, neither of whom was called. The family remembers him as the one who carries: the large, quiet cousin who drives the van, lifts the heavy end, keeps his own counsel and arrives, without being asked, on the night that his sister's truck will not start. A rig floor at four in the morning in February is, he says, the most honest place that he knows. It is a steel deck forty feet across, wet with drilling mud, lit by floodlights that turn the breath of every man on it into a small white cloud, and it shakes with the engines. The crew is four or five men in hard hats, rubber gloves and mud-caked coveralls, who stand around a hole in the ground the width of a dinner plate and put pipe into it, joint after joint, a mile and a half down. The driller runs the machine. The derrickhand works above. The floor hands, who are the roughnecks, do the heavy part, which is to tong the pipe, to lay it down, to latch and unlatch and chain and clean and to be in the right place when something swings. It is a young man's trade, he says, and he has been in it for thirty years and is not sure that he is young. He was the second child, born in the spring of 1973 in the house on the north side of Denver near the railroad, with the lilac hedge at the front, and born, as his mother liked to say, on a Wednesday, which was her day off. He was a large, easy, sunny baby who slept through trains. Lorraine, who was two, regarded him with solemn interest, and a family story, the veracity of which has not been tested, says that she looked into the cradle and announced that he would do. He grew up in her shadow, and was entirely comfortable in it. She was the quiet, brilliant, rather daunting elder sister who could run a kitchen at twelve and a map at fourteen, and he was the cheerful boy who carried her bag. He never resented it. When people asked him at school whether he minded that his sister was the clever one, he said that he thought she was the only one who knew how to count. He had his mother's quietness and no taste whatever for the work. This was clear to everyone, and the family did not mind it. His father, who had waited fourteen years to believe that he was a hunter, was the last person to press a boy to be one. When the notebooks were first shown to him at sixteen, in the van, parked outside a hardware store on a Saturday afternoon, with his father at the wheel and the engine running, Mark listened to the end, looked at his hands and said that he supposed he would be glad to know it. He asked a single question, which was whether the work had ever hurt his father. His father said that it had. Mark said, then, that he would like to learn to drive the van. He was given the keys the following week, and he was, within the year, the best driver in the Denver cousinhood, which he said was only because he was the one who never needed to look at the map. He left school in 1991 and went to work on a rig, at the suggestion of a cousin of his mother's from Pennsylvania who had spent twenty years in the oil patch and who told him that a young man with a back could earn in a week on a drilling floor what a clerk would earn in a month. It was a hard apprenticeship. He started as a roustabout in the Wattenberg field, north of Denver, among the pumpjacks and tank batteries of Weld County, painting, hauling and cleaning, and was taken on as a floor hand at twenty. He worked hitches, fourteen days on and seven off, in the Denver-Julesburg basin, in Wyoming's Powder River country, on the plains of eastern Colorado and, in the years of the boom, on the long cold rigs of North Dakota, where he lived in a trailer, ate in a mess tent and heard the wind. In the week of the attacks of September 2001 he was on a rig near Gillette, Wyoming, and the crew stood on the floor in the early light, with the engines idling, and listened to a truck radio that the driller had hung on the doghouse door. He met Crystal Kelly in the spring of 1996, at a pharmacy counter on South Broadway, where he had gone with a smashed thumb in a rag, having been caught between two lengths of pipe on a rig in Weld County and having driven himself to town. She was twenty-one, a small, sturdy, brown-haired, brisk Irish-American Denver girl, who worked as a technician behind the counter and who looked at the thumb, said that it needed a doctor and not a pharmacy and drove him to the hospital herself, in her own car, in her uniform. He said afterwards that he had been in love by the second traffic light. She said that she had been exasperated by it. They were married in 1997, in the spring, in a Catholic church on the south side of the city, with his sister Lorraine, who was to be called that summer, at the aisle with a look of complete composure, and with their mother weeping in the second pew and their father, who is a man of few words, repeating, throughout the service, that it was a very good wedding. Crystal was told what the family was within the year. She heard it out, at her own kitchen table, with a mug in her hands and a pharmacist's wary calm, and said that she had always thought that the Faulkners had too many locks. She has never, to the best of anyone's knowledge, asked a question that she did not need the answer to. She does the one thing that the Ledger's cousinhood most requires of her, which is that she reads a prescription label with a trained eye, and when a hunter has been cut, or poisoned, or worse, she knows which pharmacist to ring and which counter will not talk. She has patched, over twenty-nine years, nine members of the family, none of whom has been permitted to explain how it happened. Laura Kelly Faulkner was born in 2000, in the winter, at a Denver hospital, and Beatrice Faulkner in 2002, in the spring, in Portland, Oregon, at the house of Crystal's sister, where Crystal had gone for her confinement while Mark was on a rig in Wyoming. Both girls grew up in the house on the south side that they bought in 1999 with a loan, a porch swing and a long back garden. The younger was named for his mother, who held her at the hospital, in a white cardigan, with her glasses on a chain, and who said that she had the look of the Kowalskis, which was a look of preparing to disapprove. Both girls are grown, both with careers of their own, and neither was called. He is, as it happens, rather relieved. He watched his sister become a hunter. He loves her, and he does not want it for his daughters, and the Ledger, which has more than enough hunters, has never made it a matter of obligation. What he does for the Ledger is to carry. When Lorraine goes out at dusk with a map and a flask, it is Mark who has checked the van that afternoon, filled it, shifted the tool-box and driven it to the lay-by, and who sits in it, with the engine off and the lamps out, for as many hours as it takes. When his father, who is in his eighties, needs to be moved from one house to another, it is Mark who does it. In 2008 his mother was diagnosed, and he took leave from the rig, the first time he had done so in seventeen years, and sat with her through the autumn of that year, and in the last week of her life in the winter of 2011 he was in the room, with her hand in his. He says that he has never been so frightened of anything as of the rig, and that it did not compare. The oil business, as he puts it, is a great machine for making young men feel indispensable and for finding out that they are not. He was laid off in the bust of 2015 and again in the pandemic spring of 2020, when the price of a barrel fell below nothing and the rigs were stacked in the yards. He spent that year at home, with a mask, in his own kitchen, learning to cook from his sister, by telephone. In 2021 the rigs came back, and he went with them, a little greyer. He is fifty-three now, a broad, slow-moving, sunburnt, sandy-haired man with big, scarred, gentle hands, a Broncos cap and a voice like a gravel road. He keeps a card from his mother in the glove compartment, on which she wrote, in a round librarian's hand, that he was not to worry, and that he had done very well. Mark Kowalski Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the roughneck who drove the van and held the dark door steady, the quiet Denver son of The Pale Scythe who never wanted the work and never once let his sister go out alone. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the drivers, carriers and lifters of heavy things, who made the hunters' nights possible and who showed that a steady pair of hands on a wheel can be as much a part of the hunt as a pistol.