Thelma Faulkner Carter

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

Thelma Faulkner Carter never married, never hunted and never, in fifty-eight years, lost a page. She was born in 1917 at Los Angeles, California, and lived as a typist in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West, a woman of the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger who served it at a typewriter. She was the elder daughter of the railway clerk and vampire slayer Joseph Carter, The Proud Drover, and of the nurse Ada Rogers, and the sister of the slayer Lorraine Faulkner Carter. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, through her grandmother Alice Faulkner, The Silent Beacon, who had walked the harbour at San Pedro at dusk. Thelma had no husband and no children of her own, and she died in 1975 of a fall, aged fifty-eight. The family remembers her as the one who typed the western cousins' reports, who kept the carbons and who was, to the end of her life, the person to whom a Faulkner in trouble wrote first. Her father, Joseph Carter, was a clerk at the Southern Pacific freight offices in Los Angeles, a lean, dry, handsome man of twenty-eight who had been called a year before his elder brother Andrew, and who was known in the Ledger as The Proud Drover, a name he had earned at the stockyards, where he had walked a herd of frightened steers off a loading ramp and past something that the steers could smell and he could not yet see. He married Ada Rogers, a nurse at the county hospital, in 1916. Thelma was born in the spring of 1917, in a small bungalow near the river yards, in the middle of a rainy week. She was, her mother said, a baby who looked at the page before she looked at the face. At eight months she had learned to turn the leaves of a ledger without tearing them, and was, by her father's assessment, a promising clerk. She had her father for sixteen years, and the years were not equal. In the autumn of 1917, when she was a baby, he went East for the war traffic, to Chicago and then to the yards in Pennsylvania, on a railway administration posting that was supposed to be six months and was, in the event, two years. Ada took the baby, and the second child when it came, and moved in with her own mother in a small house on the Eastside, and the women brought up the two girls on the nursing wage and the army allotment. Joseph came home in 1919, a stranger with a pistol, who had to be introduced to his daughter and who was, in a short time, loved. He took her to the stockyards on Saturdays and set her on a rail to watch the cattle go up the ramp. He taught her to count cars. He died in 1933, when she was sixteen, and it was the year that the Depression stopped being a rumour in Los Angeles and became a thing that took the neighbours' houses. The family papers record that Joseph Carter died at forty-four, a hunter of the Red Ledger, in the course of his duty, and say no more, which is the custom. Ada, who had worked for the county for fifteen years, kept her post. Thelma left the high school before her last term, with a certificate in typewriting and the best speed of her class, a hundred and four words a minute without an error, and took a place as a junior typist in the legal department of an oil company on Spring Street. She gave her mother the whole of her wages in an envelope on Friday, and it was a long time before anyone could persuade her to keep a nickel. She was a particular, silent and sharp-eyed young woman, with her father's long face and her mother's unflinching eye, and she had an air that made the other girls in the pool lower their voices. She did not seem shy. She seemed, rather, to be listening. She could type from dictation at speed and take shorthand in her sleep, and she had a gift, which she did not think remarkable, of remembering exactly what she had typed. A client had once denied saying a certain thing, and she, who had taken it down eleven months before, repeated it to him, word for word, in the lift. The firm, which valued such talent, raised her salary. The Ledger, which also valued it, gave her, in the winter of 1933, the job of its western secretary. It came through her uncle Andrew Carter Faulkner, the druggist of Portland, who wrote to her, in the code that her grandmother Alice had devised, to say that the hunters of the Pacific coast had a correspondence problem. They reported to nobody. They wrote on postcards, on the backs of prescriptions, on the flyleaves of Bibles, and a good deal of what they knew was lost. Could she, he asked, type it up? She could. For forty years she did. She kept, at the back of the bedroom closet, a steel cabinet with five drawers, in which every report from every cousin from Seattle to San Diego was filed under date, place and name, with a carbon, and she kept the index to it in her head. A hunter in Tucson who wanted to know whether the creature in the old brewery had been seen before had only to write to Thelma. She would reply within the week, in a clear, courteous, perfectly spelled letter, with the date, the street and the name of the last hunter who had gone in. The war years filled the city with sailors, soldiers and aircraft workers, and every street in Los Angeles seemed to be moving, and she moved with them, to a position in the script department of a motion-picture studio in Culver City, where the work was lighter and the pay better and the people entirely out of the world. She typed scripts. She typed seventy of them, in all, in the four years that she was there, and was once heard to remark that the vampire pictures were the only ones in which the writers had not been paying attention. Her sister Lorraine, who had been called in 1941, brought her reports at the studio gate, folded in a magazine, on Friday afternoons. She never married. She was asked twice, once in 1939 by a young engineer at the oil company and once, in 1946, by a widowed accountant from Glendale, and refused them both with the same civility, and for the same reason, which was that she had a mother, a cabinet and a conscience. Her mother Ada, who had retired from nursing at sixty, lived with her for the rest of her life, in a small stucco house at Eagle Rock, with a lemon tree, a canary and a typewriter on the dining table. The two women were close and not talkative. Thelma took charge of the household, the garden and the Ledger, and Ada, who had been giving orders in wards for forty years, did what she was told. In the Vietnam years, when the young men of the suburbs were drafted and the draft board in Glendale ran day and night, she moved to a position with an insurance company in downtown, where she stayed until her retirement. She was a senior secretary by then, with a corner desk and a reputation, and she was said to have been, among other things, the only person in the building who could find a policy. She kept on with the Ledger. She typed up her nephew Eugene's first reports, in 1965, without correction, and said that he wrote better than his mother. She died in March of 1975, at fifty-eight, in a fall on the back steps at Eagle Rock, going out to feed the canary. She was alone in the house. The neighbour who found her said that she was lying on her back, with her hand on the rail and her glasses on, and the key in her pocket. Her mother Ada, who was eighty-four, outlived her by nine months, and died in December of that year, in the same house, having refused, as her family put it, to be moved. The steel cabinet went to her sister. It is said to hold, to this day, the whole of the western story of the Red Ledger, from 1933 to 1975, in the best typing in California. Thelma Faulkner Carter is remembered in the Faulkner family as the typist who kept the western record, the elder sister who stayed at her desk so that the others could go out. In the Slayerverse she stands for the secretaries, clerks and keepers of the Red Ledger, the women who never fired a pistol and who made certain that what the hunters learned was written down, filed and found again.