Warren Chandler

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

Warren Chandler was born in 1808 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and worked for forty years as a carpenter and builder in the mill towns of the central part of the state. He married Ida Sherman Faulkner, a shopkeeper of the Red Ledger's Massachusetts line, in 1831, and they raised two sons, Asa Faulkner Chandler and Henry Faulkner, both of whom became vampire slayers. He was not a slayer and did not come from a family of hunters, but he married into one and, over forty years, gave it something that it could not do without, which was a roof. He died in 1871 of a fall from a scaffold, at sixty-three, having outlived most of the buildings he had put up for other people and all of those he had put up for the family. His parents are not named in the Faulkner papers. The Chandlers were one of the many families of the Worcester hills who lived by the trades, and the name appears in the town records as carpenters, wheelwrights, coopers and millwrights. Worcester in 1808 was the shire town of a large inland county, a place of some three thousand people, with a courthouse, a jail, four churches, a number of taverns and the headquarters of a great many committees. It stood on the main road between Boston and the Connecticut River, and lived off the traffic. Beyond the town lay the hills, dotted with farms and cut by small, fast streams that had begun, in the last generation, to turn the wheels of factories. A boy who grew up in such a place, in a carpenter's family, learned to recognise the sound of a mill-race at half a mile. He was put to the trade at fourteen. His father's shop was a low, dusty building behind the house, full of planks, benches and half-finished coffins, and his first tasks were to sweep the floor, to fetch the nails and to turn the grindstone. He learned to sharpen a chisel, to plane a board, to saw to a line and to hang a door. By seventeen he could frame a small house. By nineteen he was a journeyman, travelling from job to job, in the New England manner, with a chest of tools on his back, and working for any master who would give him a bench. He worked in Springfield, Hartford and Providence, and learned something in each. He learned that there was always somebody who could do a thing better, and that the way to find him was to ask. He met Ida Sherman Faulkner in 1830, in Northampton, where he had taken a contract to rebuild a shop front. She was twenty-one, the proprietor of a small general store in the same street, a fair, serious, capable young woman with a wide mouth and a level look, and the shop that he was repairing was the one next door to hers. He came to borrow a bucket. She said that he might, if he would return it. He returned it the next morning, with a small wooden stool, made from an offcut, as a thank-you. She said that it was the first time a carpenter had brought her anything he had not been asked to. They were married in 1831, in the spring, in the Northampton meeting house, by a minister who had known her grandmother. It was Ida who told him about the Red Ledger. She did it carefully, on the third night of the honeymoon, in the kitchen of their new house at Worcester, after he had wondered aloud why the cellar door had so many locks. She explained that the Faulkners were a family of hunters, that they had been so for three hundred years, and that she herself was not one, but many of her relations were. He took it in slowly, because he did everything slowly. He asked a few questions, one at a time, in the order in which they occurred to him. Then he went down to the cellar, looked at the locks for a long time, and said that they were not very good. He fitted three new ones the next day. It was the start of a long collaboration. A carpenter who knew what the Red Ledger needed, and who could be trusted, was worth a great deal to a family of hunters. Warren built, in the course of forty years, the things that a hunting household required and could not openly buy. He built strong doors. He built stout shutters with inside bars, and frames for windows that would not admit a hand. He built stair treads that creaked at a particular spot, to give warning, and he built cellar hatches that could not be lifted from outside. He built a great many gun cupboards, of oak and cedar, lined with flannel, in the walls of houses in five counties. All of it was done as part of the ordinary trade, for ordinary customers, and all of it was done well, and what was done for the family was done at cost. He was an energetic, thickset, red-faced man, who hummed when he worked, and whose sawdust-coloured hair was always standing on end. He was popular with the men he employed. He paid them fairly, took their advice and let them laugh at his jokes. He was equally popular with their wives, because he never came home late. He had a large capacity for friendship and a small one for argument, and in a town given to quarrels over theology and politics he stayed on good terms with everyone. His shop at Worcester, which employed a dozen men at its height, was regarded as a model of order. The age was kind to a builder. The Boston and Worcester Railroad opened in 1835, and the town, which had been a day's journey from the coast, was suddenly three hours away. The mills of the Blackstone valley and the machine shops of Worcester itself were expanding, and the need for factories, tenements, schools, churches and counting houses was endless. Warren built a great deal. He built a cotton mill at Millbury, a dozen mill houses in a village on the river, a schoolhouse, a Methodist chapel and a number of handsome brick dwellings on the hill, and he laid the floors of the new railway depot. By 1850 he was well known in the county and reasonably comfortable. His sons were born in the first years of the marriage. Asa Faulkner Chandler was born in 1833 and lived until 1912. Henry Faulkner was born in 1834 and lived until 1914. They took their mother's name in part, by the Faulkner custom, and they were both called, in their turn, to the work of the Red Ledger, becoming vampire slayers in the decade that followed. Warren, who had never expected it, took it in his stride. He said, when the elder son told him, that he had wondered which of them it would be, and that the answer, apparently, was both. He went out to the shop and made each of them a box for his gear. The two boys grew up among the planes and the shavings. They learned to use a square, to cut a joint and to think about a building as a whole. It made them, the Ledger's cousins said, the best hunters of a built-up place that the family had produced, because they knew where a thing could hide in a wall. Asa in particular had his father's eye for a house, and his father's unhurried, methodical temper. Henry was quicker, less patient and considerably more inclined to sing. The father loved them equally, and taught them all he knew. When the Civil War broke out in 1861 he was fifty-three. His sons, who were in their late twenties, were among the first from Worcester to enlist, and he spent the four years that followed building wooden barracks, gun carriages and hospital wards for the government, and answering letters from the front. He sent them boots, socks and a great deal of advice. He saw the regiment off at the depot, in the spring, and saw it return, in the summer of 1865, somewhat thinner. He was at the station with his hat in his hand. He went on working, slowly, after the war. He was a little stooped, and the old quick energy had gone, but he refused to retire. His wife Ida, whom he adored, fell ill that summer, and his sons insisted that he should rest. He said that he would, after one more job. The one more job was a church roof in a village near Worcester, in the autumn of 1871. A scaffold plank, rotted at the end, gave way beneath him, and he fell twenty feet to the stone floor of the nave. He was sixty-three. He died that evening, with his wife at his side, having been able to say, before the end, that the roof truss was perfectly sound. Ida followed him in 1872. He was buried in the cemetery on Worcester's Hope hill. His sons put on his stone a simple carpenter's square and the words Plumb and True. Warren Chandler is remembered in the Faulkner family as the carpenter of Worcester, the husband who put good locks on the cellar. In the Slayerverse he stands for the builders of the Red Ledger, the men who made the houses in which the hunters slept, and who fitted, as a matter of course, every door so that it could not be forced.