Sarah Howe

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

Sarah Howe was born in 1866 in Louisville, Kentucky, and lived fifty-seven years as a typist and a keeper of letters in the river towns and horse country of her native state. She was the younger daughter of the boatman Henry Howe and of the boarding-house keeper and vampire slayer Ellen Putnam Faulkner, The Sable Shuttle, and the sister of the slayer Ida Howe. She never married and had no children of her own. She died in 1923 of kidney failure, aged fifty-seven. She was not called to the work, although her mother, her sister and a good many cousins were, and she never claimed a craft, a gun or an alias. But for forty years she typed, filed and remembered for the Red Ledger's Kentucky cousins, and the family remembers her as the sister who stayed at the desk, kept the birthdays, and made certain that every hunter of the river chapter had a clean copy of what she needed to know. She was born in Louisville because her mother was on a boat. In the summer of 1866 Ellen Putnam Faulkner, who kept the boarding house on Short Street in Lexington and expected her second child in the autumn, went down to the Falls with her husband on his packet to see a cousin of the Ledger about a matter of a cellar, and the child, who was as impatient as her sister was slow, came three weeks early, in a hot back bedroom on Main Street, with a river pilot's wife for midwife and the sound of the wharf coming in at the window. Ellen was up in a week. She said that it was a very convenient arrangement, since the second child had made her own introduction to the river and would never be afraid of it. The baby was christened Sarah, for no reason that the family can now reconstruct, in a Presbyterian church near the landing, with the packet's bell rung three times as she was carried out. She was a sunny, broad, talkative child, unlike her dark and silent sister in everything but a steady eye, and she had her father's singing voice and an unfailing appetite. Her earliest memory, which she told all her life, was of sitting on the deck of the packet, in a basket, among hemp bales, while her father sang to a mule. She was three when her mother died, in the autumn of 1869, in the course of the work, at Covington, and she remembered nothing of it except the smell of wet wool and the arrival of a great many cousins. Henry took both girls home to Frankfort the next morning. He rented a house above the landing and raised them himself, with a widow who came in by the day and a chorus of relations, and Sarah grew up, as she said, in the two best places in Kentucky, the kitchen and the river. Ida took the ledger. She was the tall one, the watcher, the child who sat on the bow of the packet for an hour without a word, and from the age of twelve it was understood in the house that she would carry on her mother's work. Sarah was not asked. She took, in the natural course of things, everything else. She kept house for her father when Ida was out on the road. She wrote the letters, since her handwriting was clear and her sister's was not. She kept, in a biscuit tin on the kitchen shelf, every note, postcard and telegram that came into the house, and in time the tin became the most complete record of the Kentucky chapter that the Ledger owned. The cousins called it, in the family way, Sarah's tin, and in later years a hunter passing through Frankfort would put his head in at the door and ask whether she had heard from anyone in Paducah. She learned to type in 1886, at twenty, at a class in Louisville conducted by the widow of a steamboat captain, who had bought two Remington machines at a sale and intended to make a business of it. Sarah took to it at once. She said that it was like singing with her fingers. She had a good ear and a steady rhythm, and in three months she was taking down dictation at a hundred words a minute and could type a whole page without once looking at the keys. She was hired by the state auditor's office at Frankfort, in the old capitol, at a time when a young woman with a machine was still an oddity in a government building, and she worked there for twenty-two years, typing warrants, tax returns and the dry, endless correspondence of a state that had been at war with itself and was still doing the sums. She was liked. She was the only clerk in the building who knew every man's children by name. The Ledger's work she did in the evenings and at night, at a little deal table in the kitchen above the landing, with the window open to the river. She typed the warnings, the lists of lodgings and the notes of sightings that Ida and the other hunters of the Kentucky line brought in, and made copies of everything, three at a time, on thin paper, for the cousins at Paducah, Covington and Lexington. She was particularly good at tables. The Ledger has always loved a table, and Sarah's, made from the hunters' own scrawl, in which a night's watching on a wharf was reduced to a line of figures, were said to be the best in the river chapter. She never said so. She sang while she typed, in a low contralto, and her father, who was by then a wharfmaster and later a pilot, said that he could always tell from the landing whether the news was good or bad by whether she was singing. It was from her desk that she first noticed, in the winter of 1899, that three of the boatmen on the Frankfort reach, who had never met, had reported the same light on the same bend on the same night. It was not a thing that a hunter would have seen, because each hunter had seen only his own report. She put the three slips side by side, and wrote to Ida. Ida came down the next Friday. It was the beginning of a long and troublesome business in the bottoms above Frankfort, which ended in a burned boathouse, and which is told in Ida's own pages. Sarah's part in it was recorded, in Ida's hand, as a single line in the ledger. It said that the discovery was made at a table, by the right person. Ida died in 1906, at forty-four, in the line of the work, and it was Sarah who sat with her father in the kitchen and stayed with him for the two years that remained. She kept the tin and the ledger. He died in the winter of 1908, of pneumonia, at sixty-six, with the river frozen at the edges, and she was left alone in the house above the landing with a typewriter, a biscuit tin, a cat and a large acquaintance. She stayed on. She was fifty, then, and had not married, because nobody had asked her who could sing in tune, she said, and she did not intend to make do. She moved the desk to the front window. The Great War came in 1917, and the state office filled up with women. She trained a dozen of them, in a class in the old capitol, in an afternoon a week, and several of them went on to serve in the Ledger's service. The influenza reached Frankfort in the autumn of 1918, and she nursed it through the street, with a jug of hot barley water and a bell, knocking on doors. She did not take it. She said she had been exposed to worse. She retired from the state in 1921, at fifty-five, with a small pension and a clock, and went on typing for the Ledger at the kitchen table, in a cardigan, until the month she died. She died in the spring of 1923, of kidney failure, at fifty-seven, in the house above the landing. She was buried on the hill above Frankfort, near her father and her sister, where the graves look down on the water. The tin went to a cousin in Paducah, who opened it and found, on top of the letters, a single typed slip that said where the rest were to go, and which was, in its exactness, the last page that she ever wrote. Sarah Howe is remembered in the Faulkner family as the typist of the Frankfort landing, the sister who sang at the desk and kept the tin. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and keepers of the Red Ledger's river chapter, the people who never walked a patrol and who nevertheless saw, at a kitchen table, the pattern that the hunters could not, and who proved that the best hunters of a great family are sometimes the ones who were never asked.