Rachel Lowry Faulkner

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

Rachel Lowry Faulkner was born in 1818 in Lexington, Kentucky, and worked for more than fifty years as a laundress on the Louisville waterfront. She was the elder daughter of the riverboat pilot and vampire slayer Ezekiel Faulkner, known as The Bitter Yoke, and of the dairywoman Mary Lowry, and the elder sister of the slayer Mary Lowry Faulkner. She never married. She was not a hunter and had no wish to be one, and she lived to be eighty-four, which her family regarded as a sort of achievement in a line that rarely reached sixty. She died in 1902 of a sudden collapse, in the cottage on the bluff above the Ohio in which she had been brought up, having outlived her parents, her sister, her brother-in-law and a war, and having washed, by her own reckoning, the linen of some eleven thousand steamboat passengers and every hunter of the Red Ledger who ever passed through Louisville. She was born at her mother's old home, the Lowry dairy farm outside Lexington, in the last week of the winter, in the room where Mary Lowry had been born herself. The young couple, who had been married two years, were living at Louisville, in the frame cottage that Ezekiel had taken on the bluff, but Mary, who was not a woman to do without her own mother at a time like that, had gone home for the confinement, and Ezekiel, who was on the river, had to be told by letter. He arrived ten days after the event, in a bad temper, with a bunch of wild roses, and was forgiven on the spot. The baby, who was a large and placid one, was named for her grandmother and given her mother's middle name. She grew up at Louisville. The cottage was small, two rooms and a loft, with a stone chimney, a little garden and a shed in which her mother kept two cows and a goat, and it looked out over the great brown river and the busy landing, where the steamboats came and went at all hours. She learned to tell the boats by their whistles. She learned to hold a bucket under a cow, to skim a pan, to churn and to count change, and she learned, from her mother, the discipline of steadiness, which was the thing that Mary Lowry valued most. A dairywoman, Mary said, did not hurry and did not leave work half done. Rachel, who was a quiet, round-faced, freckled child, with her father's dark eyebrows and her mother's patience, took it to heart. Her younger sister Mary, born a year later, was quick, dark and restless, and Rachel, who was the elder, grew up as her keeper. She dressed her, fed her, taught her to read from the Bible and pulled her out of the river twice. The two were devoted. They were utterly unlike. Mary wanted to know what lay behind every door, and Rachel wanted to be sure that the doors were shut. When the younger girl began, at fifteen, to go out with her father on his short trips, Rachel stayed at home with her mother, and did not ask where they went. She was nine when she first understood that her father was not like other fathers. A boat had come in on a wet night, and he had gone down to the landing without his supper, and had come back at dawn with a torn sleeve and a face the colour of tallow, and had sat at the kitchen table for an hour without speaking. Her mother, who had put a cup of tea in front of him, had seen the child in the doorway and said, quite kindly, that it was time for bed. Rachel went. She lay awake, in the loft, listening to her father's voice below, low and angry and broken, and understood, in the way that a child does, that the thing he was telling was not a thing that she was going to be told. She did not mind. She made up her mind that night that if she was not to be told it, she would at least see to it that the house was a place in which it could be said. She was twenty when her mother, who had begun by taking in a little washing for the steamboat stewards to make up for the smallness of the dairy's profits, found that there was a good deal more of it than she could manage, and turned it over to her elder daughter. It was the making of Rachel. The Louisville waterfront, in the 1830s, was the busiest inland port in the country, and the steamboats that lay at its wharves, packets, stern-wheelers and side-wheelers, carried a steady stream of passengers, many of them very dirty. The linen of the cabins, the tablecloths of the saloon, the stewards' jackets and the crew's shirts all had to be washed somewhere, and most of the boats had neither the time nor the space to do it on board. A reliable laundress, at the landing, who would collect at dawn and return by noon, was a prize. She was that. She took a small shed beside the cottage, put in a copper, a mangle and a long line of drying rope, and within a year she was doing the washing of a dozen boats. She was a strong, square, deliberate woman, with large red hands and a quiet, steady manner, and she worked from five in the morning until dark. She had a horror of a crooked seam and of a spot left unremoved. The stewards said that there was no cloth in the state that came back looking so like new. She took in help, two girls and then four, and by thirty she was the mistress of the largest hand laundry on the Louisville riverfront. What a laundress knows is another matter. A woman who washes the linen of a great many strangers comes to know a good deal about them. She knows who sleeps badly, who is ill, who has been drinking and who has been fighting. She also knows, because it is written in the cloth, a number of things that nobody else is told. She knows the stain that will not come out. She knows the sheet that has been slept on by someone who did not warm it, and the pillow on which no head has lain, though the bed was clearly used. She knows the collar that is marked not with sweat, but with something else. Rachel, who was a thoughtful woman, noticed such things, and set them down. She kept, in a box under her bed, a small square of cloth from each, with the boat, the date and the cabin written on the edge in indelible ink. She showed the box to her sister in 1844, after Mary had been called, and Mary, who had been a hunter for a month and was still astonished by what she learned, looked through it for an hour. There were forty-one pieces. Nine of them, she said, matched cases that her father had been on. Two matched things that she herself had been trying to place. She asked Rachel why she had never said. Rachel said that it had not occurred to her that anyone would want to know. She said it, Mary observed, in the tone of a woman who had known for years. From then on the laundry was part of the work. The hunters of the Red Ledger who came to Louisville, in the long season of the river, brought their linen to Rachel, and she returned it, with a note, in the folds, of anything that had struck her. A stain that might be rust and might not. A smear of grave earth. A single black hair in a collar. She had an eye for it that was better than most hunters', and they consulted her. Her father, in the last years of his life, used to say that he would sooner have the opinion of his daughter's copper than of most doctors. She nursed her parents. Her mother, Mary Lowry, who had had trouble with her kidneys for years, began to fail in 1848, and Rachel gave up a third of her work to sit with her. She died in the autumn of 1850. Her father, who had been at the bedside, was never the same, and followed his wife the next spring, in a fall from the upper deck of a packet at the landing, in front of half the town. Rachel identified the body. She walked home, took off her bonnet, and washed the dishes. She said afterward that it was the only thing she could think of. She kept the cottage. Her sister, who was married and had two daughters and was hunting all over the state, came by when she could, and Rachel, who was thirty-three, became the fixed point in a moving family. She looked after her nieces when their mother was out. She taught Georgia and Fanny to sew a seam and to tell a good sheet from a bad one, and she sat up, in the long winter nights, with whichever of them had the fever. Charles Eaton, her brother-in-law, who was as steady as she was, and who had no use for talk, came and went with the river, and the two of them, who understood one another perfectly, could sit in the kitchen for an hour without saying a word. The Civil War turned Louisville into a great hospital and depot, and the laundry, which had been busy, became enormous. She took a contract from the army, for the washing of the linen of three general hospitals, and employed sixty women. She did it with her customary exactness. She was, at forty-three, a large grey figure in a blue apron, going up and down the rows of coppers, looking for faults. She was said to be the only person in Louisville who was not frightened of the provost marshal. When Charles Eaton died in 1862, she washed the body. She lived on for forty years after the war, in the cottage, growing slowly older, and the laundry, which her assistants ran, slowly went over to steam. She kept a single copper for her own use. The box of cloth squares, which had grown to four hundred, she gave, in her seventies, to her niece Fanny. She died in the spring of 1902, at eighty-four, of a sudden collapse, in the garden, with a basket of sheets at her feet. They were dry, and folded, and not a crease out of true. Rachel Lowry Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the laundress of Louisville, the steady daughter who kept the house in which things could be said. In the Slayerverse she stands for the ordinary trades of the river that read the evidence of the night in the linen, and gave it back, clean, with a note.