Minnie Putnam

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

Minnie Putnam was born in 1816 in Lexington, Kentucky, and kept a boarding house on Short Street for most of her adult life. She was one of the Putnams of the Newburyport connection, a cousin of the boarding-house keeper Abigail Putnam, and in 1836 she married the storekeeper and vampire slayer Silas Thayer Faulkner, known as The Plain Fowler. She bore him one daughter, Ellen Putnam Faulkner, who became a slayer, buried him in 1855 and died five years later, in 1860, of a fall, at forty-four. She was not a hunter and was not born into either of the great families, but the Faulkners of Kentucky counted her among their own, because for twenty years her dining room was the place where the Red Ledger's western cousins ate, slept, argued and were told the truth in the plainest possible terms. The Lexington Putnams were a branch of the old Massachusetts family that had drifted west in the years after the Revolution, and had kept up with their eastern cousins by letter. Minnie's father, a widower of the dry, exacting, churchgoing sort, had come out from Essex County in 1808 and had opened a house for travellers on Short Street, a large, plain, three-storey brick building with a long dining room and a yard full of horses. The family papers give his name as Nathaniel and do not name her mother, who had died when Minnie was three. She was brought up in the house. She was put to work at six, to carry the plates, and by ten she was taking the orders of twenty hungry drummers and sending them off to the kitchen in a high, clear, carrying voice, in a manner that amused the guests and alarmed the cook. Lexington in those years called itself the Athens of the West. It was a prosperous, leafy, leisurely town, with Transylvania University, a public library, a number of handsome Federal houses, a great market, a hemp and cordage trade and the most famous horse sales in America. It drew visitors from all over the country. Lawyers came for the courts, planters for the sales and students for the lectures, and its hotels and boarding houses were filled, season after season, with a varied and talkative crowd. A child who grew up in one learned how to judge a man at a glance. She learned who paid his bill, who complained about the soup and who drank in the stable. She was a short, plump, dark-haired girl, with quick black eyes, a dimple and a way of putting her hands on her hips when anyone argued. She had been given the run of her father's accounts at twelve, because he trusted her head, and by fifteen she was managing the house. She did the marketing, hired the maids, bargained with the butcher, and kept a large ledger in which she entered the lodgers' names, their rooms, their bills and, in a separate column, a one-word description of each. The words were entries such as punctual, frugal, sly and thirsty, and they were remarkably accurate. In 1833, the year she was seventeen, her cousin Effie Faulkner came out from Newburyport, to lodge with the family and to learn the Western side of the trade, and the two girls became close friends. Effie, who was four years older, was a tall, fair, unhurried young woman, who took charge of the kitchen, and Minnie, who could not bear to be managed, took charge of everything else. They made an effective partnership. The house, in the next three years, was said by its regular visitors to be the best-run in the state. It was in the same year that Silas Thayer Faulkner arrived in Lexington. He was twenty-two, a slim, fair, quiet young man with pale eyes and a slight stoop, who had come up the river from New Orleans and taken a place as a clerk in the market, and he took his dinners at the Putnam house because it was cheap. He was a slayer of the Red Ledger, though she did not know it. She noticed that he ate very little, and that he always sat with his back to the wall, and she put him down in her ledger as watchful. He was the only lodger to whom she gave a second helping without being asked. He said that he was obliged. She said that he was thin. It was the first conversation they had, and it lasted some three years. They were married in 1836, in the Presbyterian church, and he moved into the house on Short Street, where she went on running the lodgers and he ran the store, which he had bought into. It was a happy and busy household. Her father, who was sixty, retired to the front parlour and a newspaper. Effie Faulkner, who had married nobody yet, stayed on. The house was full, and noisy, and smelled of roast mutton and boot polish. Silas told her the truth after a year, as so many of the Faulkner men did, at the kitchen table at midnight, when the lodgers were in bed. She listened, and said that she had known there was something. She had, in fact, put it in the ledger. She showed him the page. It said: watchful, and waits. Her role in the work was one that she understood at once. The Red Ledger's Kentucky hunters were a scattered, itinerant, often exhausted company, and a good many of them passed through Lexington. They needed a bed, a hot meal, a place to leave their gear and someone to whom they could tell what they had seen. Minnie provided all four. She kept two rooms at the back of the second floor, with a separate stair, for the use of the cousins, and she served their meals in the kitchen, where nobody could see. She gave them her ledger, in which, over the years, she had entered a great many strangers who stayed one night and left without paying. She knew who they were. She knew when they had arrived, and what they had worn, and how they had looked at the door. Her daughter Ellen Putnam Faulkner was born in 1839. She was a tall, dark, serious child, who was brought up in the boarding house among the lodgers and the hunters and who took to both in a way that delighted her mother. She learned to read a ledger at eight and a revolver at fifteen, and was called, in her twenties, to be a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. She died in 1869, at thirty, in the line of the work, nine years after her mother. Her husband's death in 1855, of pneumonia, after a long watch on a bridge in the rain, was the great grief of her life. She nursed him for six days. She had known, for nineteen years, that his work could end in a dozen ways, and she had prepared for every one of them but this. She wrote in the ledger, under his name, the single word: waited. She did not cry at the funeral. She went home, and served dinner at six to thirty people, and that night, when the house was quiet, she sat in the kitchen for two hours with her hands flat on the table. She carried on alone, with her daughter, while her cousin Effie, who had long since left for a farm in the hills, wrote to her every week. The house, which had been her father's and was now hers, prospered in a modest way. She did not ask for, or expect, help. She was cheerful with the lodgers, brisk with the maids and quite silent about her own affairs. She was said by those who knew her to have aged twenty years in the five that followed. She died in the spring of 1860, at forty-four, of a fall. She had gone down to the cellar to fetch a ham, at dusk, with a lamp, and had missed her footing on the stair. She was found by the cook, at the bottom, with the lamp still lit and the ham in her hand. The funeral was a large one. Half the horse dealers in Kentucky attended, and the cousins of the Red Ledger stood in a row at the back. Minnie Putnam is remembered in the Faulkner family as the landlady of Short Street, the wife of The Plain Fowler, who kept a ledger with a column for what people were. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of the Red Ledger's boarding houses, the women who counted the plates and watched the door and wrote down, without comment, who had come in and who had not gone out.