Obadiah Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sable Rook. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

Obadiah Faulkner, the vampire slayer later known as The Sable Rook, was born in 1760 at Springfield, Massachusetts, on the west bank of the Connecticut River, in a house that smelled of coal smoke, horse hair and boiled linseed. His father, Samuel Putnam Faulkner, was a blacksmith whose forge stood at the back of the lot, and the boy grew up to the ring of hammer on iron from before dawn until the bellows were banked at dusk. His mother, Deborah Lord, was a herbalist, and the front room of the house was hung with drying yarrow, tansy, boneset and wormwood, so that every visitor with a fever, a felon on the thumb or a child that would not stop crying came to her door as readily as to the minister's. Obadiah later said that he had learned two trades before he was ten, the trade of listening to people describe what ailed them and the trade of knowing which tool would answer. Springfield in the 1760s was a river town of some size, a place of ferries, tavern keepers, drovers and Congregational pews assigned by rank, and the Faulkners sat in the fourth bench on the men's side. The family had come to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, part of the Lancashire migration that had carried the Red Ledger out of England, and the old book still came down the line by custom, though the household by Obadiah's day treated it as a piece of family business to be kept quietly and never mentioned to the neighbours. Samuel Putnam Faulkner kept it in a tin-lined chest under the forge bench. Deborah Lord added the entries in a careful, upright hand. Obadiah and his elder sister Naomi Lord Faulkner, born in 1757, were both allowed to look at it on winter Sundays, and Naomi, who would become a slayer herself, read the columns aloud in a flat, unimpressed voice that made the older tallies sound like grocers' accounts. What they read there was the long contest with the Proctor ledger of the north, the tally of vampires taken by each side since the Wars of the Roses, and Obadiah understood early that the Faulkners were expected to keep their column honest and never to leave the Proctor column unchallenged. The Revolution arrived while he was a boy and a young man. Springfield became a depot and, from 1777, the site of the Continental arsenal on the hill above the town, and a blacksmith's son with steady hands was useful to it. Obadiah spent part of his youth carrying iron, sharpening tools and turning up at militia musters on the green with a borrowed musket, and he was present at the muster during the winter of 1779 when word came that his father had died. Samuel Putnam Faulkner was forty-nine. The forge went to a journeyman, the chest under the bench went to Deborah, and Obadiah, at nineteen, turned to the land instead of the anvil. He took a lease on a farm of some forty acres a few miles north of the town and worked it as a farmer, with rye, Indian corn, flax and a small orchard whose cider paid the rent in a good year. He was a spare man with large hands, a long jaw and a habit of standing very still while he listened, and his neighbours knew him as taciturn but fair, a man who returned a borrowed ox in better shape than he had received it. The calling came to him in 1783, beside a river ford. It was an evening in the last weeks of autumn, soon after the peace, when the roads were full of discharged soldiers and wanderers and no one asked too closely who was walking where. Obadiah had gone down to the crossing to look at a cow that had wandered, and found a traveller standing at the far side with the water running around his boots and the light of the last sun full on his face. The stranger did not leave the water. A man on a cold evening ought to have stepped up the bank and onto the road, and this one stood where he was and watched Obadiah come down, and something in the stillness of that watching, the way the current seemed to part around him without dragging at his coat, told the farmer with a certainty he never afterwards explained that he was looking at something that had died some time ago. He did not have a weapon. He had his hands and a fence stake, and he used the stake. The traveller did not survive the night, and Obadiah, shaking in the dark with river mud to his thighs, went home and told his mother. Deborah Lord looked at him for some time and then went to the tin-lined chest and took out the Red Ledger. Naomi trained him. She had been called some years before, and she taught him what a farmer's son had no way of guessing: that slayers are ordinary people, with no gift beyond training, that the calling is a kind of alertness rather than a strength, and that the work is patient and mostly consists of walking and waiting. It was Naomi who gave him the shape of what he would later be known for, the round he called the Dusk Patrol. It was a habit and a craft at once. At the hour when the light went and the fields emptied, when the things that preferred the dark began to stir, he walked the boundaries of his own lease and the roads beyond it, ford by ford and lane by lane, in a fixed order that he changed only when the moon changed, so that over a season he had seen every shadow in three townships and knew which ones did not belong. His gear was a long rifle, well balanced and rifled in the Pennsylvania manner, and a pouch of silver-cast shot that he poured himself in a small mould on the kitchen hearth with the shutters closed. A ball of lead would stop a man. Silver, the family held, would settle the other matter. The ledger has him down as The Sable Rook, a name that arose because he wore a black wool greatcoat cut down from his father's old forge coat and because rooks in a ploughed field stand about in the same patient, watching way that he did. Eleven entries stand against his name between 1783 and the end of the century. The Red Ledger records them without ornament, and the family's own accounts add colour to two: a night in the winter of 1786, when the closing of the courts by the insurgent bands under Daniel Shays filled Springfield with armed men and put the arsenal on the edge of a fight, and Obadiah, who wanted no part in that quarrel, spent three nights on the river road because something that had come up from the harbour towns was feeding among the camps and the sentries could not tell a corpse from a sleeper. He always maintained that he had seen more honest fear in the Shaysite camps than in any battle, and that a frightened crowd was the best cover the dead could hope for. He also had two encounters with a Proctor agent, a peddler out of the Pennsylvania backcountry who was hunting the same trail, and the ledger notes that they parted civilly and each entered the kill on his own side. In 1786 he married Charity Cutler, who was born in 1759 and was a farmer's wife in the fullest sense of the words, having grown up on a farm and married onto another. She had not been called and never was, but she understood exactly what her husband did after supper, and she never once asked him to stop. She kept his supper hot and his shirts mended, made a point of leaving the back door unbarred on the nights he walked, and learned to read a bad silence on his return the way she read the weather. Their first child, Levi Cutler Faulkner, was born in 1787, in the autumn, and their daughter Keziah Cutler Faulkner in 1789. Levi grew up to be a steady, ordinary man, who was never called, and lived until 1842, working the family land and keeping the accounts of the farm with the same care that his mother gave to the household. Keziah was another matter. She followed her father along the fence lines from the age of nine or ten, learned the Dusk Patrol from him, and was called herself as a young woman, taking up the rifle in her turn. She died in 1831, eight years after her father, and he was proud of her, though he was never a man to say so. Charity died in 1814, and the farmhouse became quiet in a way that Obadiah found hard to bear. He did not remarry. His mother had passed away in 1806 and Naomi had gone her own way, and he continued the patrol into his fifties, more slowly, until he was walking only the near fields and leaving the roads to Keziah. He was a regular churchgoer in those later years, sitting by the door, and it was said that he never spoke of the work except to the children. His death came in 1823, at the age of sixty-three, of childbed fever, a disease almost always associated with women and one that took him in an odd way: he had sat up through several nights nursing at a lying-in in a neighbour's house, where a young wife had been delivered with the help of a midwife and had then begun to burn with the fever. He caught it from the same bed linen and died within the week. The neighbours found the manner of it hard to credit, and his daughter did not talk about it afterwards. The Red Ledger holds his name among the steady hunters of the Massachusetts generations, a man who did not chase notoriety and who kept his column tidy. Later Faulkners who studied the old volume remarked that his handwriting was the plainest in the whole book, each line brief and each date exact. In the wider history of the Slayerverse he is remembered as a farmer who kept faith with a hard inheritance through the upheavals of the Revolution and its uneasy peace, a Faulkner of the Lancastrian line who taught his daughter to walk the dusk as he had walked it, and whose silver shot outlasted him in the hands of the children who came after.