Naomi Adams Faulkner was born in 1774 in Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring before the muskets went off on the town's North Bridge, and she grew up to be a shopkeeper and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book calls her The Slow Lantern, a name that puzzled outsiders, who assumed it was an insult to a woman who never seemed to hurry. It was meant as praise. Naomi took a long time over everything, and what she took a long time over was done right. She died in 1821 at the age of forty-seven after a long night on the marsh, the fourth of her family to be entered in the Ledger as a tally-keeper, and the only one of them who ever kept a general store.
Her father, Caleb Faulkner, was born in 1741 and lived until 1802. He was the man the Ledger calls The Lexington Courier, a printer's apprentice turned messenger who rode south on the night of the nineteenth of April in 1775, carrying the news of the fighting to the towns along the post road. By then Naomi was a baby in a borrowed cradle, and she grew up hearing the ride retold at every family supper with one more horse and one more tavern each year. Her mother, Naomi Adams, born in 1742 and dead in 1783, kept boarding houses wherever Caleb's work took the household, and the girl who was named for her remembered her chiefly as a woman with a bunch of keys at her waist and a voice that could carry across three rooms. Naomi was nine when her mother died.
She had three siblings. Ebenezer Adams Faulkner, born in 1770, became a blacksmith and a slayer on the Brandywine. Silas Faulkner, born in 1772, became a boatman and a slayer and was the brother who would one day take his family down the Mississippi. The youngest, Nancy Faulkner, born in 1779, became a milliner. The four grew up in the orbit of their father's odd trade, in houses that changed every few years, in a province that had become a country around them. Naomi's own memory of those years was a series of staircases, each one steeper than the last, and of a lamp carried ahead of her by her father on the long walk home from a night's hunting.
Caleb trained her himself. She was a slow reader and a slow talker, but she had an extraordinary patience, and he soon saw that she could sit still for hours in a dark field without shifting her feet, a rare skill. The calling came in 1792, when she was eighteen, in the fields outside Northampton after a hunt. A party of huntsmen had gone out with hounds after a stag, as the local squires did, and the hounds came back at dusk without the master of the hunt. Naomi, who had been gathering late hay, walked out with her father's lantern to look for him and found the man in a hollow, drained and cold, with the dogs lying around him whining and unwilling to go near. She stood over the body with the lantern in her hand until her father arrived, and when he asked her afterwards why she had not run, she said that she had wanted to see what would come back for him. It came back, and she was there, and that was her first tally.
Her craft was Beacon Reading, the Faulkner method of interpreting the lights on a road at night, and she practised it in a way all her own. Where her cousin Daniel Faulkner Cole, who used the same discipline, read windows and candles, Naomi read lanterns. A lantern carried along a road tells a good deal to a practised eye: how fast the bearer walks, whether they favour a leg, whether they turn their head, whether they stop too often. She could tell, from the movement of a light half a mile away on a dark night, whether a traveller was hurried, drunk, afraid or something else. She would wait at a window in the shop's upper room, with the shutters cracked and a blanket round her shoulders, and watch the road to Boston for hours. Her gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, which she kept under the counter in a long box marked as a fishing rod.
She opened her shop in Concord in 1798, in a rented room on the main street with a counter, a cask of molasses and three shelves. It was a dry-goods store of the ordinary New England kind, selling tea, thread, tin, pins, tobacco, rum and crackers, and taking butter and eggs in trade from the farm wives. It was a good vantage point. Everyone in the town came through the door sooner or later, and Naomi, who was slow to speak and quick to listen, knew the district's business better than the minister. She spoke rarely of hunting, but when a customer mentioned a stranger in the barn, a sick cow that had lost its blood or a child who would not go out after dark, she wrote it on a slate behind the counter and went to look.
In 1801, at the age of twenty-seven, she married Benjamin Thayer, a teamster from Deerfield, born in 1777. He drove heavy wagons of timber and flour between the valley and the coast, a dependable man with a slow smile and a great deal of patience himself. Her friends had wondered whether any man would stay the course with so watchful a woman, but Benjamin, who was gone on the road for days at a time, found that she was a good wife to come home to, and she found that he was a good husband to worry about. Their daughter Ada Faulkner was born in 1803, took her mother's name by the family custom and was called to the work in her turn, becoming a vampire slayer who lived until 1878. Their son Horace Thayer Faulkner, born in 1806, did not hunt and became a storekeeper himself, taking over the Concord shop in time. He died in 1856.
Naomi's last years were busy ones. The War of 1812 brought embargoes and high prices, and the shop's shelves grew thin, but she kept it open and bought on credit from Salem merchants who trusted her name. The hunting never stopped. In the autumn of 1821, after a report of something moving through the low meadows by the Concord River, she went out on a cold night with her rifle and her lantern and spent hours crouched among the reeds, in wet to the waist. She came back at dawn with the thing done and the fever already on her. She lived three more weeks and died in that year, aged forty-seven. Benjamin sat beside her to the end.
Naomi Adams Faulkner is remembered as The Slow Lantern, the shopkeeper of Concord, the third of the Lexington Courier's children to enter the Ledger. In the Slayerverse she is a reminder that in the long contest between the Red and White Ledgers, patience counted for as much as speed, and that some of the best hunters were those who simply waited for the light to move.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
