Naomi Kincaid was born in 1796 in Frankfort, Kentucky, and worked for more than fifty years as a seamstress in the river towns of the state. She married the printer Lewis Thayer Faulkner in 1820, raised a son and a daughter with him, and died in 1873 of heart failure, at seventy-seven, having outlived most of the people who had attended her wedding. She was not a hunter and had no ties to the hunting families before her marriage, but the Faulkner cousins of Kentucky counted her among their most valued allies, because for thirty years she mended their clothes, asked no questions about the tears and never once returned a garment without a note.
Frankfort, where she was born, was the capital of a state only four years old. It lay in a bend of the Kentucky River, under steep limestone bluffs, a small, handsome, rather raw town of brick and frame houses, with a statehouse, a penitentiary, a newspaper office and a number of taverns where the legislature drank. The river was its road, and its landing was busy with the boats that carried hemp, tobacco, whiskey and salt to Louisville and New Orleans. The Kincaids, whom the family papers describe only as a respectable family of the town, lived on a street that ran up from the wharf.
She learned to sew at her mother's knee, as every girl did, but she had a gift that set her apart. At six she could sew a seam that the neighbours could not distinguish from a machine's, had there been such a thing, and at ten she was altering her own dresses. By fourteen she was apprenticed to a mantua-maker, a dressmaker of the old style, who made gowns for the wives of legislators, lawyers and merchants, and at eighteen she set up on her own, with a bow window on Main Street and a sign reading Plain and Fancy Sewing.
A seamstress in that time did everything by hand. She cut from a paper pattern, basted, fitted, stitched and finished, she made gowns, shirts, waistcoats, coats, cloaks, petticoats, sheets and shrouds, and she did it with a needle, a thimble, a pair of shears and a pair of eyes that would be ruined by forty. Naomi had sharp eyes, small, fast hands and a great deal of patience, and she was so exact that her shirts were said to fit as if they had been born on the wearer. She took her pay in coin, in trade and, on one occasion, in a cow.
She met Lewis Thayer Faulkner in 1819, when he came to the shop with a torn coat. He was nineteen, a printer's apprentice at the Frankfort newspaper, tall, thin and ink-stained, and he had come, he said, on behalf of a friend. She looked at the coat, which had been torn by something that she could not quite identify, and said that it was going to need a great deal more than a mending. He said that his friend had had an adventure. She said she thought his friend must have lost it. They were married in 1820, in the spring, at the Presbyterian church.
It was Lewis who told her, a year into the marriage, the truth about his family. He came from a line of hunters, he said: his father had been a slayer of the Red Ledger, known as The Flatboat Falcon, and two of his younger brothers, Caleb and Silas, were growing up on the New Orleans side and were expected to follow the work in their turn. He himself had not been called. He was a printer, and he hoped she would not think the less of him. She said that she had been sewing the family's coats for a year and had long since drawn her own conclusions, and that she would think the less of him only if he did not come home for supper.
From then on she was the Faulkners' seamstress. The hunters of Kentucky and Louisiana, when they passed through Frankfort, left their coats at her shop, torn by claws, blackened by fire, stiff with things she preferred not to think about, and they returned to find them mended so well that the damage could not be seen. She did not ask. She made them pockets where they needed them, deep ones for the silver, flat ones for the knives, long ones for the stakes and small ones for the holy water, and she sewed into the linings a thin layer of oiled silk, which kept the dampness out. A Faulkner coat, cut by Naomi Kincaid, was a recognised thing among the hunters, and the tradition of the pocket, the long inner pocket that could hold a stake, dates from her shop.
Their son Milton Kincaid Faulkner was born in 1823 and lived until 1899. Their daughter Naomi Faulkner was born in 1827 and lived until 1903. Neither was a hunter. Both grew up among bolts of cloth and trays of type, and both were brought up to read, to count and to look closely. Milton followed his father into the printing trade, and the younger Naomi took up her mother's needle.
Her shop taught her, too, a good deal about the town. A seamstress sees people undressed of their pretensions, in the fitting room, and she hears what a customer will say to a woman with pins in her mouth. She knew which legislators were growing stout, which merchants' wives were quietly selling their jewellery, and which young men had suddenly ordered a mourning band without explaining whose. She kept it all to herself, as a matter of trade, and it was that discretion, as much as her stitching, that made the hunters trust her. A coat left with Naomi Kincaid came back mended and unremarked upon, and so did the person who had left it. She counted it the first rule of her craft, and she taught it to her daughter as the last.
She worked through the War of 1812's aftermath, the boom of the steamboat years, the panic of 1837 and the growth of the town from a village to a small city. By the 1850s she had two assistants and a reputation that reached Louisville. The Civil War found her in her sixties, and she spent it sewing shirts for the Kentucky regiments of both sides, which she said were the same shirts. She stopped work at seventy, and in 1873 she died quietly, in her chair by the window.
Naomi Kincaid is remembered in the Faulkner family as the seamstress of Frankfort, the woman who put the pockets in the coats. In the Slayerverse she stands for the craft that made the hunter's work possible, the stitches that held a slayer's gear where it was needed.
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