Silas Thayer Faulkner was born in 1811 at the river landing in western Kentucky where the town of Paducah would later be laid out, and lived forty-four years as a storekeeper and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Plain Fowler, a name that recalls the patient, unadorned way in which he went after quarry, and it classes him as a Soldier, a hunter who works in the open, in company and by plan. His craft was Long-Watch Tracking, the following of a quarry over days and weeks by keeping a steady watch rather than making a chase. He was the youngest son of the boatman and slayer Silas Faulkner, called The Flatboat Falcon, and of the dairywoman Patience Thayer, and he trained under his father. He married the boarding-house keeper Minnie Putnam in 1836, had one daughter, Ellen Putnam Faulkner, who also became a slayer, and died in 1855 of pneumonia, at forty-four.
His father, Silas Faulkner, born in 1772 and dead in 1831, was the man who in 1804 had taken his family down the Mississippi on a flatboat and settled them on the edge of New Orleans, where he hunted the river parishes for the Red Ledger. His mother, Patience Thayer, born in 1774 and dead in 1816, was a Kentucky dairywoman who sold butter in the Vieux Carre. He had three elder siblings. Lewis Thayer Faulkner, born in 1800, was a printer of Louisville. Eliza Faulkner, born in 1805, married Hippolyte Delacroix in 1828. Caleb Thayer Faulkner, born in 1807, was the storekeeper and slayer of the Treme. Silas, the baby of the house, was the only one of the four to be born outside Louisiana since the move, and it happened by an accident of the calendar.
In the spring of 1811 his father had been engaged by the Red Ledger to take a keelboat upriver to the Ohio, on a hunt that was expected to last a season, and his mother, who was seven months gone and who would not be left, went with him. The keelboat was slow and the river was high. They had reached the mouth of the Tennessee, where the Ohio widens below the bluffs, when the child came, and the boat put in to a landing by a trader's cabin, which was the only building within twenty miles. It was the same landing at which, eleven years earlier, the eldest brother Lewis had been born. Patience said that she did not propose to make a habit of it. The child was delivered by a boatman's wife, in the trader's bed, on a day of driving rain, and named for his father. Within a month the family were back aboard, and by the autumn they were home in New Orleans, with a baby who had already travelled eight hundred miles.
Whatever he might have learned of the Kentucky country in those first weeks, he learned nothing of it afterward. He grew up in the Treme, in the house of a father who was more often away than at home, and of a mother who died when he was five, in 1816, in an accident that the family has never described. His elder sister Eliza, who was eleven, took charge of him. She fed him, dressed him and taught him to read, and when she married and left the house, in 1828, it was his brother Caleb who took over. He was a small, sturdy, patient boy with straight fair hair and pale eyes, who was said to be able to sit still longer than any child in the parish.
It was a useful gift. His father, who had by then been hunting for thirty years, took the boy with him on the river when he was ten, and taught him what he knew. Silas Faulkner was a lean, sunburned, quick-tempered man, with a dry sense of humour and a habit of whistling through his teeth when he was thinking, and he was not a gentle teacher. But he was a good one. He took the boy in a skiff, at night, into the swamps of the lower river, and left him on a hummock with a lantern and a pistol, and told him to stay until dawn. The boy stayed. He came back at sunrise, cold, bitten and unharmed, and his father, who had been watching from a cypress a hundred yards away, said that it would do for a first lesson.
His calling came in 1829, at eighteen, in a boarding house. He was at that time clerking in a store on the levee, and he lodged, for the sake of economy, in a house on Rue Bienville kept by a widow from Mobile, who let rooms to clerks and river men. A new lodger arrived one wet evening in March, a thin, elegant, rather pale gentleman with a good trunk and a slight accent, who paid a week in advance. He paid in coin, and the widow, who was careful, took it to the window to look at it, and then took it to Silas, who was the only person in the house who could read the legends. It was a Spanish dollar of the old king's reign, he said, and very fine. It was dated 1701. It was, in fact, older than the house. It was bright as though it had come that morning from the mint.
He told his father that night. The old man listened, put down his pipe, and said that it was not the first time that a coin had been the first sign. The coin was the evidence, and the evidence was always in the pocket. Silas Thayer Faulkner had his calling before midnight, and by morning the gentleman had been visited and the matter had been settled. The widow from Mobile was told that the lodger had left in haste. She was given a week's rent and the coin, which she kept in a jar on the mantel until she died.
Long-Watch Tracking, as he developed it, was a patient craft. He did not believe in the chase. He thought, and taught, that a thing that has lived for centuries has learned how to outrun a pursuer, and that the only way to find it is to sit down somewhere it is bound to come, and to wait for as long as it takes. His method was to choose a point, a landing, a crossroads, a window, and to keep it under watch, for days and nights, in turn with one or two companions, without a fire and without a sound. The quarry would come. It might be a week, it might be a month. His patience was the finest that the Ledger's Louisiana branch had seen, and in twenty-six years he was credited with some forty vampires.
The Plain Fowler alias came from a fowler's craft. A fowler, in the old English sense, is a man who catches birds, and the best of them do not chase a bird. They sit down in the reeds at dawn, under a net, with a decoy, and wait. He used to say that the hardest part of a hunt was the part in which nothing happened, and that the secret was not to mind. His gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, a flask of cold tea and a worn grey blanket, which was said to be still in the family.
His father's death in 1831, in the river, changed his life. He was twenty, and the family's Louisiana work was now his brother Caleb's. He stayed on at the store for two years, and then, finding that the city had become too full of memory, he followed the river upstream. He moved, in 1833, to Lexington in Kentucky, where he had a cousin, and took a place as a clerk in a general store in the market. Within three years he had bought into it. It was a prosperous town, a place of horse farms, hemp, colleges and old money, and its people were friendly to a quiet young man with a good head for figures.
He met Minnie Putnam at her family's boarding house, where he took his dinner. She was twenty, a brisk, plump, merry girl with dark curls and a capacity for getting her own way, who ran the house for her widowed father, and she was one of the Putnams of the Newburyport connection. The family had long been in the trade, and her cousin Abigail kept a great boarding house on the Massachusetts coast. They were married in 1836, in the Presbyterian church, and he moved into the house on Short Street, where she went on running the lodgers and he ran the store. Their daughter Ellen Putnam Faulkner was born in 1839. She was a serious, dark, long-limbed child, with her father's stillness and her mother's energy, and she grew up to become a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. She died in 1869, at thirty, in the line of the work.
He lived a quiet life in Lexington. His brother Lewis, in Louisville, was a day's ride away, and the two met on Sundays. His sister Eliza came up from Louisiana every few years, with her children, and stayed a month. His cousin Effie Faulkner, who had come to the town from Massachusetts and lodged for a time at Minnie's house, became a close friend. He used the store as a watch post, and more than once, in the long, slow evenings, sat behind the counter in the half-dark and waited for the thing that was going to come in.
He died in the winter of 1855, at forty-four, of pneumonia caught on a long watch in a January thaw. It was a watch on a bridge, in the rain, and he had refused to leave it. He came home wet through, and was dead in six days. Minnie, who survived him by five years, buried him in the Lexington cemetery. On his stone she put a line that she said he would have approved: He waited.
Silas Thayer Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Plain Fowler, the storekeeper of Lexington, the watcher who never hurried. In the Slayerverse he stands for the patient hunters of the Red Ledger, the ones who understood that the hardest part of the work is the long hour in which nothing happens.
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