Mary Lowry Faulkner was born in 1819 at the river landing in western Kentucky where the town of Paducah would later stand, and lived eighty-one years as a seamstress and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Hollow Rook, a name that recalls the tall, black bird that sits on the top of a dead tree, apparently asleep, and misses nothing, and it classes her as a Spy, a hunter who learns before she acts. Her craft was Falcon's Eye, the discipline of watching a whole field at once and of sitting so still that the field forgets to be careful. She was the younger daughter of the riverboat pilot and slayer Ezekiel Faulkner, The Bitter Yoke, and of the dairywoman Mary Lowry, and she trained under her father. She married the boatman Charles Eaton in 1838, raised two daughters, Georgia Faulkner and Fanny Eaton, the second of whom became a slayer, and died in 1900 of pneumonia, at eighty-one.
She was born on a keelboat that had put in at the landing. Her father, who had taken his wife down the Ohio that spring to visit a cousin, had miscalculated the date by three weeks, and the boat, which was tied up at a trader's wharf on a hot night in the last week of June, was the only roof that the family had. Mary Lowry gave birth in the cabin, with the boat's cook and a Methodist deckhand in attendance, and said afterward that it was the quickest and most ill-tempered labour that she had ever had. The child was named for her, and carried, at a few days old, to the bow, to see the river. Her father said that he had never seen a child so interested in a river. It was a prediction that turned out to be the reverse of the truth. She was interested in the thing that came up out of it.
She grew up at Louisville, in the frame cottage on the bluff, with her sister Rachel, a year older and a great deal more sensible. She was a small, dark, sharp-faced girl, with her father's black brows and a pair of hands that were never still, and she was the most restless child on the landing. She climbed the sheds. She swam the eddies. She followed the drovers to their camps and the pilots to their taverns, and was regularly carried home, by the collar, by one or other of them. Her mother, who had a way of putting a cup of tea in front of a problem, took the view that the girl would grow out of it. Her father, who had a way of seeing which problems would not, took her aside.
It was her mother who taught her to sit still. The child who could not keep her hands quiet for a minute was set, at the age of seven, to watch a pan of milk, without touching it, until the cream rose. It took an hour. It was the worst hour of her life. She fidgeted, scowled, hummed, looked out of the window, and at the end of it found that she had, without noticing, learned to look at a thing. Her mother said that a dairywoman who could not watch a pan could not make cheese. She set her to it every day for a year. By eight she could sit motionless, with her eyes on a point, for half an hour, and see the whole of the room.
It was the beginning of Falcon's Eye. Her father, who had been a hunter for some eight years by then, noticed the change with interest. He took her on short trips, at fifteen, on the river, and at night, and watched her. She had the thing that he lacked. He was a pilot, a man of action and temper, who saw what was in front of him and acted on it, and he was given to error. She was a watcher. She would sit on the bow of a keelboat, at dusk, for an hour, without a word, and at the end of it would say that there was a boat on the far bank that had been there the day before, and had not moved, and had no lights. She was always right. By seventeen she was the best pair of eyes he had.
She married at nineteen. Charles Eaton, a cooper's son from Bardstown and a boatman on the Ohio, whom she met on the wharf while she was arguing with a steward about the price of a hem, was the kindest man she had ever known, and she married him for it. It was a love match, and a very good one. She moved into the cottage, at first, and then into a small house of her own on the same bluff, and took in sewing. She was by then a skilled seamstress. She had been taught by her mother and improved by a neighbour, and she had a fine, fast, exact hand that was in demand. She made shirts for steamboat officers, frocks for the wives of merchants, bonnets and winding sheets. In the course of the work she learned the town.
She learned, too, how to make a pocket. There was a seamstress at Frankfort, Naomi Kincaid, the wife of the printer Lewis Thayer Faulkner, who had been making the Faulkner hunters' coats for twenty years, and whose long inner pockets, built to hold a stake, had become a family tradition. Mary went up to Frankfort in 1840, on the stage, with a bolt of dark twill and a pattern, and spent a week at the shop, in the bow window, learning the trade from its master. Naomi, who was forty-four, took to her at once. She taught her the deep pocket for the silver, the flat one for the knife and the oiled-silk lining. She said that a hunter's coat was a machine for carrying things, and that a good machine was one in which everything was where the hand expected it to be.
She told her husband what she was going to be in 1839, a year after the wedding, and he took it well. She had been taught the work from childhood, and went out with her father as a helper, and she expected, in time, to be called to it. The calling came in 1844, when she was twenty-five, in the fields after a hunt. It was an ordinary fox hunt, in the bluegrass country, near her mother's old home, to which she had been invited by a customer, a planter's wife for whom she had made a riding habit, and for which she had borrowed a horse. The hounds were cast off at dawn. They ran for three hours across the meadows, and about noon the pack came back through a gap in the fence, alone, with their tails down and their hackles up, and the huntsman did not return. Mary, who had pulled up at the top of a rise, sat on the horse, quite still, and watched. She watched the gap. She watched the field beyond it, and the long grass, and the line of trees. And she saw, in the third hour of her watching, a movement in the grass that was not the wind. It was like a thing that had been there all the time, and had just shifted its weight.
She did not go down. She sat on her horse, for the whole of the afternoon, with her eyes on that spot, and at dusk, when the field had gone home and the light was failing, she saw it stand. It was a tall figure in a dark coat, and it looked, she said, exactly like a man who has been waiting for a long time and is not in a hurry. She went home and told her father, and he, who had been a hunter for eighteen years, sat down at the kitchen table and said that he had been wondering when. He took her out the next night.
Falcon's Eye, in her practice, was a Spy's craft. She sat. She chose a point, a window, a hedge, a church tower, and she sat in it for as long as it took, without stirring, and she saw. She had a method for it, which she passed to her daughter, of dividing the field into nine parts and looking at each in turn, and then at all nine together, and she could say, after an hour, which of the nine had changed. Her gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, and a dark dress, made by herself, with so many pockets that she rattled. She was credited with some sixty vampires, taken over fifty years, and of these she shot only a handful. The rest, it was said, were taken by others, on her information.
Her parents died within a year of one another. Her mother, in 1850, of a kidney complaint, and her father, in 1851, in a fall from a packet at the landing, and she buried them both, side by side, in the Louisville cemetery, in her best black. She was thirty-one. She took up her father's work, and his tally, and from then on she was, in the Ledger's Kentucky country, the figure that he had been.
Her daughters were born in the first years of the marriage. Georgia Faulkner was born in 1840 and lived until 1908, and was not called to the work, and married into the House of Delacroix in 1860. Fanny Eaton was born in 1842 and lived until 1909, and became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger like her mother. Mary taught Fanny, in the long evenings of the 1850s, how to sit still, and found that the girl, who was cheerful and talkative, was a great deal harder to teach than she had been.
Her husband's death in 1862 was a blow. She washed her face, put on her gun, and went to the funeral. She hunted through the war, on the roads and river landings of a divided state, and in the Reconstruction years that followed, when the whole country seemed to be full of things that had been hiding in the smoke. She sat on her roof. She sat on a hundred roofs. She gave up at seventy-five, and sat, instead, in a chair by the window of her sister's cottage, looking at the river.
She died in the winter of 1900, at eighty-one, of pneumonia. She had sat on the porch, the previous evening, in the cold, for four hours, watching a boat that she did not like the look of. She was found in the chair the next morning, with a rug over her knees. The boat, it was later established, had been carrying what she thought.
Mary Lowry Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Hollow Rook, the seamstress of Louisville, the hunter who sat still. In the Slayerverse she stands for the watchers of the Red Ledger, the slayers whose patience was a weapon, and who saw the dark because they did not move.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
