Obadiah Faulkner Cole

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

The frames of half the barns in the upper Connecticut valley stood on joints cut by men who had learned from Obadiah Faulkner Cole, and the last of his own barns, a long hip-roofed hay barn at Deerfield, was still standing when his great-grandchildren's children went to school beside it. He was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1723, worked all his life as a carpenter, and died there in 1796 of a fever, aged seventy-three. In between he built, repaired and occasionally rebuilt the town around his relatives, several of whom carried the family's Red Ledger on a hunt that he preferred to observe from the rafters. Deerfield in the year of his birth was a frontier settlement still healing from the raid of 1704, when French and Native forces had burned much of the town and marched a hundred captives north to Canada in deep snow. The generation that grew up afterward inherited a stockaded memory. Houses had thick oak frames and small windows, and a few still carried the scars of hatchet blows on the doorposts, kept by their owners as reminders. The meetinghouse stood at the middle of the street, the Pocumtuck meadows spread flat and fertile toward the river, and beyond them the hills went up dark with hemlock. The main trades were farming, tanning, milling and the carpentry that the town's rebuilding had made permanent. It was the sort of place where a boy could learn to tell timber species by the smell of the sawdust before he could read a psalm. His father, Ephraim Cole, born in 1701 and dead in 1766, was a circuit preacher, one of the itinerant ministers who rode from pulpit to pulpit through the Connecticut valley and the hill towns with a Bible, a satchel of sermons and a horse that knew the road better than he did. He was often away for weeks, a tall, thin, sallow man who believed in the plain style, and the household was governed in his absence by his wife. Rebecca Faulkner, born in 1702 and dead in 1772, was a milliner, who made bonnets, caps, ribbons and trimmed gowns for the women of half a dozen towns. She was of the Faulkner blood, and it was through her that Obadiah's middle name entered his life. She kept a small shop in the front parlour, with a window of bonnets on wooden heads, and in the room behind it she kept something else, a battered red-covered book that came out, by lamplight, when a cousin arrived with news. He learned early that there were two families in the house. His younger brother William Faulkner Cole, born in 1727, felt the pull of the second one more strongly than Obadiah ever did. William was a vampire hunter in the making, quick, watchful, disposed to sit at the edge of adult conversations. Obadiah was interested in how a house stood up. He was apprenticed at fourteen to a master housewright in Deerfield, a formidable man named Sheldon who taught him mortise and tenon, the scribe rule, the broadaxe and the adze, and the cutting of a queen-post truss by eye. The tools were hand-forged and hand-sharpened. Boards were pit-sawn, planed by hand with wooden jack planes, and joined without a single nail if the master could help it. Obadiah found in these tasks a contentment that never left him, and he acquired, before he was twenty, a name for accuracy. In 1742 he married Lucy Osgood, a herbalist from Haverhill, when he was nineteen and she seventeen. She had come upriver with her aunt to sell dried simples at the Deerfield fair, and he had walked her home with a bundle of yarrow under one arm. Her family approved of the carpenter's steady wages more than they cared for the preacher's family, but the marriage held. She was small, sharp-tongued and affectionate, with a laugh that carried across a field, and she took to Deerfield with cheerful determination. The first house they lived in was a lean-to on the back of Rebecca's shop, and the second, built by Obadiah himself in 1746, was a small saltbox on the south road with a central chimney, a kitchen ell and a small window in the loft that looked straight up the valley. A daughter, Rachel Cole, was born in 1745, and a son, Ephraim Faulkner Cole, in 1749, named for the grandfather who was so often on the road. Being a carpenter made Obadiah indispensable in a way that the hunting family valued without saying so. Vampire hunters need places that no one else can find: a false wall behind a chimney, a trapdoor in a granary floor, a stair that appears to go nowhere. He built them. His brother William would arrive with a sketch on the back of a receipt and ask for a room within a room, and Obadiah, muttering, would produce one that a visiting sheriff could stand in and never suspect. He fitted a cellar door with a bar of oak and iron that could be dropped from either side. He made a tall clock whose case concealed a shelf of silver bullets in its weights. In the wars with France, whose campaigns came up the valley again and again in his middle years, he was hired by the provincial government to repair the block-houses and the small forts that ran along the Massachusetts frontier, and he worked at Fort Massachusetts and at the stockades of the northern hill towns. There he learned how much a hunter's lore mattered even to a regiment. The soldiers made their own explanations for what happened in the woods at night, but the carpenter, who had listened to William at the kitchen table, kept his counsel and made the walls thicker. His appearance was that of a workman in a good state of repair: middling height, large forearms, a nose broken once by a swinging beam, and white hair worn in a queue. He was slow to speak and slower to lose his temper, though his opinions on the proper way to hang a door were emphatic. The town remembered him for his fairness in a bargain, and also for the hymn he hummed under his breath through his whole working life, a tune of his father's, in a flat and comfortable key. Lucy died in 1775, in the spring, from a fall from her horse on the way home from a birth she had been attending in a hill farmhouse. Obadiah was fifty-two, and he did not fully recover. He sold the workshop to a journeyman, though he could not stop himself from visiting it, and spent the years of the Revolution making wagon parts for the militia and the roofs of small houses for young couples. Rachel, who had taken up her mother's herb garden, lived until 1819. His son Ephraim Faulkner Cole grew into a farmer and joiner, and there was a small awful coincidence in his end: in the fever season of 1796 both father and son were taken within weeks of one another, Obadiah in his seventy-fourth year and Ephraim at forty-seven. They were buried in the Deerfield burying ground together, under a double slab of slate. The Red Ledger gives the carpenter no tallies. What it does give, in a spare line in a hand of the following century, is the observation that every hunter of the valley in those years slept under a roof that Obadiah Cole had sound. That is how the later Slayerverse chroniclers of the family remember him: as the builder who made the houses that the hunters returned to, and who never once stepped into the woods.