Michael Sullivan

Spouse of Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

"Behind" is the most important word in a kitchen, Michael Sullivan will tell you, because it means that someone with a hot pan is about to come past you and you must not move, and he has applied the rule for thirty-five years to everything from a Saturday service to a marriage. He was born in 1975 at Seattle, Washington, and is living today in Seattle, where he works as a line cook. He is a man of the Faulkner bloodline that keeps the Red Ledger, which lists him as unaffiliated, and he is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. His parents are not named in the Ledger, which records only that his father was a longshoreman and that the blood of the Faulkners came into his family, like a coin in a coat lining, through a great-grandmother who died before anyone thought to ask. In 1993 he married the hospital cook and slayer Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner, The Slow Bell, and they have one son, Eugene Sullivan Faulkner, born in 1996, who is a slayer in his turn. The family remembers him as the man who made the thermos, laid the plate and never asked for the story. He was born in the grey first week of January 1975 in a hospital on First Hill, in a city of wet streets, ferries and canneries, the third of four children in a house on a steep street in Ballard, a few blocks from the locks, where his father unloaded ships on the night shift and his mother ran a household by telephone. The port cities of the West were in those years places of rain and rope and fish, and the child grew up in the smell of them, with a sandwich in a waxed bag and a bicycle with a bad brake. He was an Irish-American boy of the red-haired, freckled, cheerful kind who is quick to be forgiven, and he took, from the first, a close interest in anyone who was cooking. He was given the job of turning the bacon at six. At eight he was permitted to flip an egg, and he did it with such concentration, with his tongue out, that his mother, who was not a sentimental woman, took a photograph. The family left Seattle when he was eight, in the winter of 1983, because his mother's brother Declan ran a barbecue outfit in Aurora, east of Denver, and needed a pair of hands. The longshoreman's work had been thin that year, and the offer came with a rented house, a school and a job on the smoker. It was not a city Michael would have chosen. He had been born on the sea and was brought to a plain a mile high, under a very large sky, where the wind came off the mountains and the tap water tasted of rock. But he was a child who made the best of a thing. He took to the smoker as an apprentice takes to a master, and by twelve he could judge a brisket by the feel of the bark and the colour of the smoke, and by fifteen he was running the pit at the weekend stock-show stalls. His uncle said that he was the only boy he had ever met who was born with a tolerance for heat. It was in the January of 1992, in a long tent of food stalls at the National Western Stock Show, that he met Lorraine Kowalski Faulkner. He was seventeen and had been put at the grill, in the range next to the one given to the hospital kitchen that had been asked to cater for the veterans' luncheon. She was twenty, a large, steady, dark-eyed girl in a hairnet who did not speak for the first three days and who, on the fourth, cooked a perfect steak and slid it, without a word, on to his plate. He asked her to supper, which she refused, and so he cooked her one. It was a lamb chop. She ate all of it and said that the seasoning was wrong, and that she would like to know how he had done the crust. They were married the next year, in 1993, in the Catholic church where her parents had married, with her mother Beatrice, who remarked on his age, in tears, and her father Eugene, who did not, in a tie. He was eighteen. Her family has never been in doubt as to who ran the household, and Michael, who is cheerful and easy, has never been in doubt that he was right to marry the person who did. He was told what the Faulkners were on the wedding day, by Eugene, in the vestry, in a few sentences and with a dry, level kindness. He had a mind that was used to taking orders in a hurry, and he heard the whole thing through in the manner of a man receiving a ticket. He asked, when it was over, whether the family ate at a regular time. Eugene said that it did not, as a rule. Michael said that in that case he supposed they would need a good thermos. It was the first thing he did for the Ledger, and he did it the next morning, a pint steel flask, wrapped in a towel and filled with sweet black coffee, and he left it on the kitchen table beside his new wife's pistol, which was the wedding present from her father and which she had put in the drawer where the cutlery should have been. Eugene Sullivan Faulkner was born in the autumn of 1996, at the hospital where his mother worked, and was a big, quiet, dark-haired baby who watched the pots. In the summer of 1997 Michael was at home in Denver, in the evening, with a pot on the stove, the baby having been left for the week with Beatrice's people near Phoenix, when the telephone rang at six in the morning and it was Lorraine's father, who said in his level voice that she was all right, that she was in Raton and that she would be a few days late. Michael said that he would keep the stove on. When she came home, a week later, she told him the whole of it in order, with the times, at the kitchen table. He said that she should eat something. She said that she was not hungry. He said that he knew, and that it did not matter. He had made a pot of the stew that Beatrice had taught him, and he set a plate in front of her without a word and sat opposite, and she wept, which she had not done in six years, into the gravy. It has been the rule of the house since. After every night that she goes out he makes something, and she eats it, and he does not ask about the road. His service to the Ledger is an ordinary one, and he thinks it the best. He keeps the car. He fills the flask at four in the afternoon. He packs the flares in the order in which she will need them, he knows the hour at which a given sun goes down on a given road and he has never once been asked to explain why a line cook should be able to tell, to the minute, when the light will fail. He reads a menu by its shape, and the cousins read a route by its shape, and he found, when he first sat down at his wife's kitchen table with her notebook of the routes she had trapped, that the notes were laid out like a prep list. He has sometimes thought that a trap is a recipe in which the main ingredient does not know that it is being cooked. He says so, and Lorraine, who is not often amused, laughs. In the years of the long contract at a Denver steakhouse, from 1999 to 2018, he was a line cook on the hot station, a short, red-haired, broad-shouldered man with forearms like a sailor's and a small burn on the back of one hand that he has had since the stock show. In the week of the attacks of September 2001 he cooked through a staff meal for a kitchen of eleven who had no appetite, and sent out nothing to the dining room until noon, and on the following Monday opened as usual. He was a good colleague and a better teacher, and taught, in twenty years, some forty young cooks how to hold a knife. The restaurant closed in 2018 when the building was sold, a week before his mother, who had gone back to Seattle after his father's death, took ill in her old house in Ballard. He took the first train west. He nursed her for nine months, in the front room, with the window open on the street and the smell of the locks and the sea, and she died that winter, at eighty-one, in her own bed, having told him that she had never been so well fed. He kept the house. He took a job on the line at a fish restaurant near the ship canal, and has been there since. In the pandemic years he cooked takeaway in a mask, from a kitchen with no customers, for the nurses and the longshoremen who had no one else to cook for them, and put in the bags, without being asked, a second portion, wrapped in foil, which he never charged for. He and Lorraine have kept their two houses ever since, a marriage of train tickets and a telephone call after service, and Eugene, who is called, goes between them. Michael, who is fifty-one, says that the thing about a kitchen is that it is the same kitchen wherever you are. Michael Sullivan is remembered in the Faulkner family as the line cook who filled the flask, laid the plate and never once asked what was on the road, the Seattle-born husband of The Slow Bell. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the cooks, carriers and keepers of the table, who fed the hunters before and after the work and who proved that a hot meal at the end of a bad night is as good a weapon as any gun.