Obadiah Peabody Faulkner

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

Obadiah Peabody Faulkner was born in 1705 in Andover, Massachusetts, the elder child of Jeremy Faulkner, a cloth merchant, and Joyce Peabody, a dressmaker. He was a wheelwright by trade and lived his whole life within a day's cart ride of the meetinghouse where he was baptised. Among the Faulkners of the eighteenth century he is an odd figure to find in the Red Ledger's margins, because he was not a vampire slayer and never claimed to be. He was the brother who stayed home, kept the shop and the accounts in order, and built the wheels that carried the family's work over bad roads. The Andover of his boyhood was a scattered farming town of orchards, stone walls and shingled saltbox houses, its people still cautious about anything that smelled of witchcraft, since the trials of 1692 had fallen hard on the town within the memory of every adult he knew. Winters were long and the Shawsheen and Merrimack rivers froze deep enough to bear an ox-team. The Faulkners lived above and behind the cloth shop his father kept, where bolts of broadcloth, osnaburg and homespun stood in racks and his mother's dressmaking table sat by the front window for the light. Money was a muddle of Massachusetts paper bills that lost value year by year, Spanish silver, and plain barter, and the boy learned early that a wheel mended for a neighbour was as good as coin if the neighbour owned a cow. Jeremy Faulkner was known in the ledgers as The Proud Rook, and the household was shaped by his double life. Obadiah grew up knowing that his father rode out at odd hours with a long rifle and came home with mud on his boots and nothing to say at supper. He was not curious in the way his sister was. Deborah Peabody Faulkner, born in 1707, followed their father into the work; Obadiah watched, and chose the shop floor. Family memory has him as a broad, patient boy with large hands, quicker with a spokeshave than with a book, who understood early that a house which hunts needs a house behind it. His mother, Joyce, seems to have noticed this before anyone and quietly arranged his apprenticeship to a wheelwright at the edge of town. The trade he learned was among the most exacting in the colony. A cartwheel was built from three kinds of wood: elm for the nave or hub, oak for the spokes, and ash for the felloes that made up the rim. The spokes were driven into mortises cut by hand, the felloes dowelled together, and the whole thing wrapped in a hot iron tyre that shrank onto the wood as it cooled and locked it together. He learned to read timber, to season it for years, to dish a wheel so it would stand up to a loaded wagon on a rutted road. He served his time in Andover and was working on his own account by the early 1720s, at a rented shed beside a stream where he could quench the tyres. He was said to be honest to a fault and slow to forgive shoddy work in others. In 1725, at the age of twenty, he married Ruth Putnam, a seamstress born in 1704. The match joined a wheel-shop to a needle, and it suited both. Ruth had a clear, dry way of speaking and a talent for keeping a bargain; she did piecework for the merchants of Salem and Boston as well as for the neighbours, and between them they built a small, dependable income. Their first son, Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner, was born in 1726, and a second, Samuel Putnam Faulkner, in 1730. Neither boy became a slayer, and the ledgers note it without complaint. Both learned the family trade instead: Nathaniel went to the wheelwright's bench, and Samuel drifted toward the harbour towns, where a man who could work wood and iron was always wanted. The Faulkner tally of those years was kept largely by Jeremy and then Deborah, and Obadiah's role in it was practical. Slayers of this period were ordinary people with rifles, silver-cast shot and local knowledge, and their trouble was often logistical: a horse that went lame, a cart that broke an axle on a night road, a chest of gear that had to be moved from one town to another without a nosy constable looking inside. Obadiah built and mended the carts. He is remembered for a light two-wheeled chaise with a false floor under the seat, wide enough to carry a long rifle and a keg of silver-cast shot, and for a habit of always keeping one strong spare wheel in the shed, no questions asked, for any family member who arrived at night. He kept his mouth shut, which in that trade counted for a great deal. In 1730 his father died, and three years later Deborah was killed in an ambush on a lonely road, aged twenty-six. These were the hardest years of his life. He built her coffin himself, so the family tradition says, and would let no one else plane the boards. Joyce Peabody outlived her daughter by only four years, dying in 1737. Afterwards Obadiah drew closer to his own household and away from the hunting side of the family, and he was suspicious for the rest of his life of the young cousins who came to him wanting fast wheels and asking no questions about the weight. Yet he never turned any away, and the shop stayed a way-station for Faulkners passing through Essex County. The wars with France on the frontier reached him in the 1740s and 1750s as they reached every colonial household: the muster days, the news from Louisbourg in 1745, the men gone north and west with the militia, the price of iron and timber climbing as the army bought wagons. Obadiah was too old for the ranks by then, but he sold and repaired for the provincial forces, and his wheels carried wagons on the roads toward the Connecticut valley. Ruth died in 1759, and he was a widower for the last eight years of his life. He took the loss quietly, worked on into his sixties, and was said to be seen most mornings sitting on an upturned felloe outside the shop with a mug of cider, watching the wagons go by and checking their wheels by ear. Obadiah Peabody Faulkner died in 1767, of old age, at sixty-two. His sons carried on the shop for a time, and Nathaniel lived to 1792 and Samuel to 1779. The Red Ledger has no tally under his name, and that is entirely as it should be; a note in a later hand records him instead as the man who kept the wheels turning, which the family regarded as a debt of its own kind. Within the wider Slayerverse he stands as the reminder that the Faulkner rivalry with the Proctors ran on the work of people who never fired a shot, and that a tally of vampires taken rested on a shop, a stream, a good piece of ash wood and a wife with a needle.