Silas Goodwin was born in 1768 in Salem Town, Massachusetts, and made his living for nearly sixty years as a wheelwright, building and mending the wooden wheels on which the carts, coaches and gun carriages of Essex County rolled. He was not born a Faulkner and belonged to no slayer house, but he married into the Red Ledger family in 1788, raised two children with a Faulkner woman and lived long enough to see his son become one of the family's most careful vampire slayers. He died in 1844 at the age of seventy-six, an old man in a town that had changed more in his lifetime than in the preceding century.
The Goodwins of Salem were artisans of the plain, industrious kind, who owned a shop, a shed and a stack of seasoned oak and had never owned anything else. Silas learned the trade in the yard of a master wheelwright near the North River, where the smell of steamed ash and hot iron hung in the air from dawn until dusk. A cartwheel was a demanding piece of work. The hub was turned from elm, because elm would not split when the spokes were driven into it. The spokes were cleft from oak and shaved true with a drawknife. The felloes, the curved sections of the rim, were cut from ash and fitted so that their joints fell between the spokes. Then the whole wheel was dressed with an iron tyre that the smith heated red and dropped over the rim so that, cooling, it shrank and drew the wood tight. Silas became so good at the last step that he was said to be able to judge the heat of the iron by the colour of the dust it raised from the ground.
Salem in the 1780s was a port recovering from war. Its ships, which had been privateers during the Revolution, were turning back to trade, and the first vessels were setting out for the East Indies that would make the town's fortune. Wheelwrights were in demand, for the wharves needed drays and the country roads needed wagons, and a young man with good hands and a clean reputation could expect to find work. Silas was such a man. He was broad, slow-spoken, patient and a little deaf in one ear from years of hammering, and he had a habit of running a thumb along any curved surface as if testing it for a flaw.
He met Rachel Osgood Faulkner in his early twenties. She was three years older than he was, born in 1765, the daughter of a Marblehead militiaman and a seamstress, and sister to a schoolteacher, Lucy Osgood Faulkner, who kept a small school on the harbour. Rachel was a Faulkner by family custom, and the Red Ledger household that surrounded her was a close one. The two were married in 1788, in the same year that the new Constitution was being debated in the Massachusetts convention, and the wedding supper was held at the Osgood house in Marblehead, with the schoolmistress sister seeing to the seating and the Whittier cousins bringing a cold ham. Silas understood, from the first months, that there was a second life running beneath his wife's family, a world of ledgers and night errands that nobody explained to him in full. What he saw was that the Faulkners never locked their shutters without looking twice, that there was a chest in the attic that no child was allowed to touch, and that visiting cousins sometimes arrived at midnight and left before breakfast.
He did not press the matter. He had been raised to think that a man minded his own trade, and he was wise enough to see that his wife was uncommonly good at keeping secrets kindly. In time she told him a part of what he needed to know, and he accepted it as he might have accepted the news that a cousin was a sea captain, with a nod and a cup of tea. What mattered to him was that the family was decent, that the work was done by people who paid their debts, and that when there was a wheel to be made for one of their wagons he made it without charging more than cost.
Their first child, Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, was born in 1791 and lived until 1869, long enough to be a grandmother many times over and to write down some of the family's stories for her own grandchildren. Their second child, Ezekiel Faulkner, was born in 1792, took his mother's name according to the custom, and in his turn was called to the hunter's work. He became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, a riverboat pilot who carried the work west to the Ohio landings, and he lived until 1851. Silas supplied him with the tools of a less unusual trade: a pair of light wheels for a cart in which a man could carry a long box without attracting attention, and a fixed lock on the shed where the wagon was kept. Nobody in the neighbourhood asked why a wheelwright's son went out at dusk. Everyone assumed that he was courting.
Through the long decades of his marriage, Silas watched his town grow from a port of fishermen and sea captains into a city of merchants, shipowners and mill owners. He saw the Embargo of 1807 lay up the ships and ruin half his customers, and he saw the War of 1812 bring the privateers back, along with a great many gun carriages that needed new wheels. He lost his wife in 1829, after forty-one years, and mourned her openly, which his neighbours thought unusual in a man of his stock. He remained in the house on the edge of the town, working at his bench until his hands gave out in the late 1830s, and then sitting at the window with a pipe, watching the carts roll by on wheels that he could identify by the sound.
He died in 1844, aged seventy-six, after a last illness that lasted about a month. His daughter nursed him, and his son came up from the waterfront to sit with him through the nights. A Salem newspaper printed a few lines on the death of a respected artisan. The Faulkner family recorded it differently, in the book of remembrance that sits beside the Red Ledger, with the entry: Silas Goodwin, wheelwright, who never asked a question he did not need answered and never failed to answer the door.
Silas Goodwin is remembered in the Faulkner line as the craftsman husband who kept the carts rolling and the secrets kept. His workshop was sold after his death, but the family still passes down a spoke shave that belonged to him, worn smooth by his hand. In the Slayerverse he is a model of the outsider who marries into a hunting family and becomes its quiet support, a man whose trade, discretion and loyalty were, in their own way, as necessary to the long contest of the Red and White Ledgers as any silver-cast shot.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
