William Faulkner Cole

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Rough Weir. Craft: Dusk Patrol.

William Faulkner Cole was born in 1727 in Andover, Massachusetts, the second son of a household that lived on two incomes and neither of them steady. His father, Ephraim Cole, born in 1701, was a circuit preacher who spent more weeks of the year in a saddle than at his own table, riding out through the Merrimack valley parishes with a Bible, a change of linen and a satchel of sermons that he rewrote on horseback. His mother, Rebecca Faulkner, born in 1702, was a milliner who kept the household solvent. The Faulkner name on her side, and the family custom of passing it forward through daughters, is why William carried it as a middle name and used it in every signature he ever made. He descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and the family kept the Red Ledger of the Lancastrian side in the way that many New England families kept a Bible, quietly and out of sight. Andover in the 1720s and 1730s was a town of stone-walled farms, orchards heavy with russet apples, and a meetinghouse where the whole parish sat according to rank and paid for the privilege. Cider was the common drink, salt cod and pease porridge the common food, and winter arrived with a hard finality that shut the roads for weeks. The Great Awakening reached the district in William's boyhood, and his father was one of the men who carried it, which meant that the boy grew up with a religion of urgent conviction laid over an older family secret that his mother handled with a milliner's economy. She trimmed bonnets at the front window and, on certain evenings, took down a folded oilcloth from behind the bolts of ribbon and read out names that were not those of any customer. William's elder brother, Obadiah Faulkner Cole, born in 1723, was the one who learned the shop trade first and left it earliest. He never felt the pull of the ledger, and the family did not press him. William was a big, slow-spoken, square-handed boy, sunburned in every season, with a habit of standing at the edge of a room and watching the doors. Schooling in Andover was the dame school and then the grammar master, and he had enough Latin to be teased for it and enough arithmetic to be trusted with money. He was placed as a clerk with a storekeeper in the town, learned to weigh out tea and molasses, to reckon in pounds, shillings and pence when the paper currency of the province was sliding in value, and to say no politely to a farmer who wanted credit. By his late twenties he had a store of his own on the main road, a low building with a good cellar and a counter worn pale by other men's elbows. He sold nails, powder and lead, Bohea tea when the merchants at Boston would sell it, and calico in the spring, and he kept his accounts in a neat upright hand that later served him equally well in the Red Ledger. The wars with France on the frontier shaped those years. Andover men marched north and west with the provincial regiments, came home thin and fever-ridden or did not come home, and the store was a place where news arrived early and was argued over late. William did not go himself. Someone had to keep the counter and the accounts, and he told anyone who asked that a storekeeper served the war by keeping powder dry and prices fair. In truth he was waiting, though he did not yet know for what. His neighbours knew him for one odd habit, which was that he closed his shutters early and walked the length of the town at dusk with a rifle over his arm, saying that he was after a fox. The calling came in 1760, when William was thirty-three. A fever that had gone through a household on the far side of the parish had left a young man in a back bedroom, sweating, spent and finally quiet. William had come to help sit the night watch, as neighbours did, and when the fever broke near midnight the patient opened his eyes and asked, quite calmly, whether someone would close the shutters. William saw the stillness in the room change. The request was reasonable, the tone was ordinary, and everything in his body told him that the thing in the bed was no longer the man who had fallen sick. What followed was brief and ugly and was never told in full, and William walked home with the certainty that he had been chosen for something. His mother, then fifty-eight, listened to his account without surprise, went to the shop shelf, took out the oilcloth and laid it on the table in front of him. As a vampire slayer he became known by the alias The Rough Weir, a name given by other hunters for the way he stood against a rush of trouble without giving ground, like a low stone dam in a fast stream. His archetype was the Hunter, and his craft was the Dusk Patrol. By long habit he walked the same circuit each evening at the hour when the light thinned, along the mill road, past the burying ground, out to the barns on the ridge and back by the river, and over the years he learned every sound that circuit made and noticed at once when it changed. It was patient, unglamorous work, and it caught things that a night hunter waiting for a summons would have missed. His gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, moulded in the store's back room over a small fire, with the lead brought in among the ordinary powder orders so that nobody wondered at the quantities. He had no mentor. Ephraim Cole knew nothing of it, and Rebecca could hand him only the ledger and a list of cautions, so he taught himself by trial, which was slower and more dangerous than an apprenticeship would have been. The Red Ledger's entries in his hand are terse and exact, with dates, the place, the hour and a single line of description, and they show fifteen years of steady work rather than famous nights. There was the drover found bled in a ditch, which William traced to a tenant cellar on the Shawsheen road. There was the winter he spent watching a sealed tomb in a neighbouring town after a burial that a sexton had reported wrong. There were small honest failures too, entered without excuse. Rival Proctor hunters worked the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier, far off, and William's contact with their side was mostly through the long-delayed exchange of letters between the two houses, in which each family compared tallies and each politely doubted the other's arithmetic. The old quarrel over the Guest, the creature that got away at Towton in 1461, came up in those letters as it always did, and William wrote back with the same courtesy and the same refusal to concede a point, taking the Faulkner side as a matter of principle and the rivalry as a game worth playing carefully. He never married. It was not for want of chances; a storekeeper with a sound building was an attractive match, and his mother spoke of it more than once. He said he kept hours no wife would tolerate, and he was probably right. His household was the shop, a hired boy, and a widowed cousin who kept his house and did not ask questions. He looked after his parents as they aged. Ephraim Cole died in 1766, worn out by the saddle, and William settled his debts and paid for a plain stone. Rebecca followed in 1772, having outlived her husband by six years and lived long enough to see her younger son carry the ledger in his own hand. The Revolution arrived in his last years. The road past his store carried the militia toward Lexington in April 1775, and he supplied powder and lead to men who paid in promises, while continuing his evening circuit through a district full of armed and jumpy neighbours, which made his work harder because a rifle in the dusk now drew more suspicion than it ever had. That autumn he was hunting a nest that had taken shelter in a big tobacco-drying barn near the ridge road. In the middle of the night the frame, weakened by a wet season and years of neglect, gave way as he was inside, and the barn came down on him. He died there in 1775, aged forty-eight. The vampire he had followed in was found, according to the ledger's later note, pinned beneath the same timber. Cousins carried him home and the town buried him with more attendance than it would have given a mere storekeeper. Obadiah Faulkner Cole, the brother who had wanted no part of the family work, took up the store, and it was Obadiah who is said to have added the last line to William's page in the Red Ledger. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the plain, careful one, a hunter whose skill lay in showing up every evening and paying attention.