Mary Lowry was born in 1793 in Lexington, Kentucky, and kept a dairy on the horse-farm country outside the town for most of her life. She married the riverboat pilot Ezekiel Faulkner in 1816, raised two daughters with him, Rachel and Mary, and died in 1850 of kidney failure, at fifty-seven, a year before her husband. She was not a hunter and was not born to the Faulkner line, but she married into it without hesitation and made a household that could hold a hunter's secrets. Her younger daughter, also Mary, became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, and it was from her mother that she learned the trick of sitting still.
The Lowrys of Lexington were an ordinary Bluegrass farming family, and the family papers record neither Mary's parents' names nor their occupations beyond the fact that they kept cows. Lexington in 1793 was the capital of the western country. It was a town of some four hundred houses, most of them still log, with a courthouse, a market house, a handful of taverns, a newspaper, a library and a university in the making, and it was growing at a pace that astonished visitors. The surrounding country was rich limestone pasture, blue-green in the morning light, and the new settlers, many of them Virginians, were laying out farms, raising horses and turning out whiskey.
Mary grew up on a dairy farm a few miles out of the town. A dairy in those years was a hard, absorbing trade. The cows were milked by hand at dawn and dusk, the milk was strained and set in wide pans in the springhouse, the cream was skimmed, the butter churned and worked and salted and packed, and the cheese pressed and turned and aged in the cellar. Everything depended on cleanliness, timing and temperature, and on an unflagging attention to the cows, who were capricious. Mary, who had her mother's eye and her father's endurance, could milk fifteen cows in an hour and judge a cheese by the sound of a thumb on the rind. By the age of sixteen she was running the dairy.
She met Ezekiel Faulkner in the spring of 1815, at a horse farm near Lexington, where he had gone to collect a cousin who owed him money. He was twenty-two, small, wiry and scowling, a riverboat pilot with a reputation for a short temper, and he took a dislike to the place, the cousin and the cows within a quarter of an hour. Mary, who was carrying a pail across the yard, said that if he was going to be rude to the cows he could do it somewhere else. He said something clever. She said something cleverer. He came back the following Sunday with a bunch of wild roses and an apology that was so awkwardly worded that she forgave him at once. They were married in 1816.
She took to the river life well. The young couple lived in a frame cottage on a bluff above the Ohio at Louisville, where Ezekiel kept an eye on the landing, and Mary, who could not be idle, set up a small dairy in the back with two cows and a goat. She sold milk and butter to the boarding houses along the wharf and cheese to the steamboat stewards, and within a couple of years she had a reputation as the best butter on the river. Their daughter Rachel Lowry Faulkner was born in 1818 and lived until 1902. Their daughter Mary Lowry Faulkner was born in 1819 and lived until 1900, and in the fullness of time became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger.
It was not until 1826 that Mary learned what her husband really did. She had known for some years that he kept unusual hours, and she had noticed the long box under the bed, the silver spoons that disappeared and the odd visitors who arrived after dark, and she had, in her own dry way, refrained from asking. The night he came home from the silent steamboat, white-faced and shaking, he sat at the kitchen table with his hands around a cup of tea and told her everything. She heard him out. Then she said that she had wondered how long it would take, and went to fetch a blanket. From that night she was his partner in the work in every way except the carrying of the gun.
Her part was to keep him steady. Ezekiel was a difficult man, hot-tempered and bitter, and the work made him more so. She was the one person who could calm him. She understood his moods, she knew when to talk and when to be silent, and she had a way of putting a cup of tea in front of him that said everything necessary. The Ledger's cousins, who stayed at the cottage when they passed through, called her the anchor. She also kept the household running through his long absences, managed the dairy, brought up the children and ran, in a small way, a safe house: more than one wounded hunter spent a week in the back bedroom, nursed on cream and cheese.
She taught her younger daughter the discipline of the dairy, which is the discipline of patience. A dairywoman does not hurry a cheese, and she does not leave a cow half-milked, and she does not go to bed until the work is done. When young Mary began to go out with her father, at fifteen, her mother told her that a hunter's work was much like a dairy's, in that it was a matter of routine, attention and never skipping a day. She said that the girl would find that the cows and the vampires had much in common. The girl, who was not sure whether she was being teased, discovered later that it was true.
Mary's health began to fail in 1848. She had had trouble with her kidneys for years, and by the spring of that year she was often in pain. She worked on, stubbornly, for another year and a half, and died in the autumn of 1850 at fifty-seven. Ezekiel, who had been at her bedside, was never the same. He died the following spring.
Mary Lowry is remembered in the Faulkner family as the dairywoman of Louisville, the wife who steadied a bitter man. In the Slayerverse she stands for the partners who kept hunters human, in whose kitchens the long nights were allowed to end.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
