Walter Harlan

Spouse of Abigail Knight, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Walter Harlan never fired a shot at a vampire, but for nearly fifty years he kept the tools of the people who did, and he did it in a machine shop with a lathe, a file and a good eye. He was born in 1857 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lived seventy-four years as a machinist in the mill towns and harbours of New England. In 1884 he married the typist Abigail Knight, who was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, and they had two daughters, Effie Harlan Faulkner, born in 1886, and Catherine Faulkner Harlan, born in 1888. He died in 1931 of a long illness, aged seventy-four. He belonged to the Faulkner bloodline without belonging to the House of Faulkner, which is to say that he came of one of the cadet lines that the Ledger counted as kin but did not list as hunters, and he is remembered in the family as the engineer who made a hunter's kit work. The Northampton of his birth was a prosperous valley town on the Connecticut River, with a long main street of brick and elm, a courthouse, a famous asylum on the hill and, in the villages that ran along the Mill River, a string of factories that made silk thread, cutlery, brushes and sewing machines. His father worked in one of them. The Harlans had come to the valley from the coast a generation earlier, and his mother, whose people were Faulkners of the old Massachusetts line, had brought with her a chest of ledgers that were kept in the attic and not spoken of. Walter was the middle child of five and a thoughtful, tinkering, silent boy. He took apart the clock on the stairs at seven and put it together again at eight, with a spare wheel. He took apart the parish organ's bellows at twelve. He was not thanked, but he was not punished either, because the bellows worked better. He was apprenticed at fourteen to a machine shop in Florence, the mill village just west of the town, where the sewing-machine makers worked. It was a hard school. The shop smelled of cutting oil, hot iron and coal smoke, the belts from the overhead shaft ran from dawn to dusk, and a boy who let his sleeve catch on a pulley could lose an arm. He swept, carried, filed and, at the end of the second year, was trusted with a lathe. He had the hand for it. By seventeen he could turn a spindle to a thousandth of an inch, and by nineteen he was making the gauges that other men used to check their work, which is the mark of a true machinist. The foreman, who was hard to impress, said that Harlan was the only apprentice he had ever had who looked at a blueprint the way a musician looks at a score. The valley was too small for him, and in 1878 he went east. The mills of Lowell and Lawrence and the yards of the Massachusetts coast were hungry for men who could make parts, and he took work first in the Lowell machine shop, which built looms and turbines, and then in the shipyards of Boston, where the new iron steamers needed fittings that nobody had drawn yet. He lodged in a boarding house in the North End with a dozen other young men and sent money home. He was known as a quiet, steady, dry-humoured fellow who did not drink, did not gamble and went to no church but the one that had an organ, which he liked to look at from underneath. He met Abigail Knight in 1883, in the Boston office where she worked. She was twenty-one, a typist, one of the new generation of young women who had taken up the Remington machine, which had only come into general use in the previous decade, and who were rapidly becoming the backbone of every insurance and law office in the city. He had been sent to repair the machine in the corner of a shipping agent's front room. She watched him take it to pieces on the desk, and said that the key for the letter e stuck, and he said that he knew, and she said that she also knew what the trouble was. They were both right. It took him a week to find the worn bearing, and it took her a month to tell him what she really did with her evenings. Abigail Knight was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, called some years earlier in the harbour towns, and she was as unlike a hunter of popular imagination as a person could be. She was small, fair, neat and serious, and she kept her hunting kit in a tin trunk under her bed. She typed the letters of a shipping firm by day and, by night, worked the wharves and the lodging houses of the waterfront for things that came in by sea. Walter, who was told in a low voice on a Sunday walk along the Charles, listened without interrupting, and asked whether she would let him look at her pistols. She handed them over. He turned one of them in his hands for a long minute, said it was a very good weapon, very badly maintained, and offered to fix it. She said that nobody had ever proposed to her that way before, and he said that he had not yet got to the proposal. They were married in 1884, in the spring, in a small Congregational church in Northampton, with his mother in the front pew and the ledgers, for once, taken out of the attic and aired. From then on he was her armourer. He did not go out with her, and nobody ever pressed him to. He stayed at home and did what he could do better than anyone else in the ledger's circle, which was to make, mend and improve the things that hunters carried. He turned her stakes on his own lathe, straight, true and balanced. He cut screw threads for silver. He altered the actions of her revolvers, so that they would not jam in damp. He made a small, flat, hinged case that held a hunter's whole kit and lay flat under a coat, and he made another, much later, for a young Faulkner cousin, who took it across the country. The Ledger's hunters in New England took to sending him their tools. Some of them came by post, in a stocking, with a note. Their daughters were born in the first years of the marriage. Effie Harlan Faulkner was born in 1886 and lived until 1932, and Catherine Faulkner Harlan was born in 1888 and lived until 1962. The daughters were entered in the Red Ledger's roll of births under the family name of their grandmother's line, and in the town records under their father's, which is the reason that the two girls, to the confusion of later genealogists, carry the same two names in a different order. Neither was called. Both grew up in a house that smelled of cutting oil, with a lathe in the cellar, and both could strip and oil a revolver at twelve and were bored by it. Effie became a stenographer, like her mother. Catherine, the younger, became a schoolteacher, and had the quieter life. The family moved several times. They lived at Lowell, and at Salem, where he worked in the yards, and later, in the early years of the new century, at Quincy, where the big shipyard on the Fore River took on men by the hundred. He was a foreman by forty. During the Great War he was fifty-seven and working all hours, with a crew of three hundred, on the turbines of destroyers that were built faster than anyone had thought possible, and he came home each night grey with metal dust and went down to the cellar to work on something of Abigail's. Her hunting had slowed by then. She mentioned to her husband that she was getting tired. He said that he would fix it. He began to fail in his sixties. The long illness of his last years, which the family called his chest, was the machinist's disease of the century, and he bore it as he bore everything, without a word. He took to his chair by the stove in 1929. He died in the autumn of 1931, at seventy-four, and Abigail Knight died the same year, and they were buried together in the valley, at Northampton, under one stone, with a lathe spindle, turned by his own hand, set into it as a marker. Walter Harlan is remembered in the Faulkner family as the machinist who made the Red Ledger's tools, the husband who stayed at home and kept the hunter armed. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen and engineers of the Faulkner line, who never stood on a wharf at night and who, by the truth of their lathes and the honesty of their measurements, were as much a part of every hunt as the people who walked out to meet the dark.