Benjamin Mather Faulkner

Spy slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Wary Ledger. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

The Red Ledger has few entries in as careful a hand as those of Benjamin Mather Faulkner, and fewer still in which the writer apologises for how little he has to show. Born in 1712 at Andover, Massachusetts, he was a circuit preacher by trade and a vampire slayer by calling, known within the Faulkner family as The Wary Ledger, and he died in 1747, aged thirty-five, of a wasting illness that took most of his last winter. He belongs to that generation of Faulkners who had lived in New England for four score years and no longer thought of themselves as exiles, and yet who still kept, in a chest under a bed, a book begun in Lancashire in 1455 by Hugh Faulkner. Andover in his childhood was a farming town of scattered meetinghouse hamlets, orchards and stone-walled pastures on the Shawsheen River, where the second minister's sermons ran two hours and the militia trained on the common on the last Monday of the month. His father, Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner, was a cooper, who made and hooped the barrels that carried salt fish, molasses, cider and rum out through the harbour towns, and whose shop smelled of oak shavings and hot iron. His mother, Denise Mather, was a weaver who worked wool at a great loom in the front room, and she was also, unknown to the neighbours, the slayer called The Sure Cairn. Benjamin was born the year before his brother Gideon Mather Faulkner, and the two grew up in a house where a kettle of pitch and a rifle in the rafters were equally ordinary objects. Denise was strict about learning. She taught both boys to read from the Bible and the almanac, and let Benjamin borrow the minister's books once it was clear that he was a reader. He went to the grammar school, and later, through the help of a parish patron, studied for a time with a country minister, learning Latin, some Greek and the shape of a sermon. He was slight, dark, with a stoop from long bending over pages, and he had a dry, hesitant manner in company that made him seem cold, though the families whose houses he visited found him a kind and patient guest. In the years of the first stirrings of revival, when Massachusetts congregations argued over whether the heart or the doctrine should come first, he was neither an enthusiast nor a dry rationalist, and this made him welcome in both camps. In 1733 he married Charity Hutchinson, a midwife of Andover, some two years older than himself, and the match was thought sensible rather than romantic. It was also fruitful. Their daughter Hannah Hutchinson Faulkner was born in 1736 and their son Joshua Hutchinson Faulkner in 1739. Charity's work took her at all hours into the birthing rooms of half the county, which meant she knew, sooner than the selectmen, which families were failing and which houses had grown quiet. Benjamin's work took him from meetinghouse to meetinghouse across the north of the province, riding the roads to Haverhill, Newbury and the harbour towns, preaching lectures on weekdays and filling pulpits for ministers who were ill or absent. The two of them, between them, saw a great deal of the country and said nothing of it to anyone. His mother's death in 1739 was the first great loss of his adult life. Denise was buried in the Andover ground under a slate stone with a winged skull, and her rifle went not to Benjamin but, by her own instruction, to be held in the family until one of the children should need it. Benjamin did not yet know that he would. The calling came the following year, in 1740, in a cellar. That autumn the evangelist George Whitefield was drawing crowds across New England, and Benjamin, riding a circuit of unusually crowded meetings, arrived late one evening at a farm to which he had been promised a bed. The house was empty. The fire was cold, the cattle were bawling, and when he went down to the cellar for a light, he found the stores untouched, the barrels sound, the pork unspoiled, the cheeses on their shelf, and the household gone. Nobody had robbed the place. A family of seven had left their supper, their shoes and their prayer book and simply were not there. He stood in the dark with the smell of apples and salt and knew what his mother had been, and what the room meant, and what he now was. His craft was Hawthorn Craft, a discipline of his mother's house that used the thorn tree in its old English way. He cut stakes and hedges of white-thorn from the boundary lines of Andover farms and set them at thresholds and windows, and he taught himself how a hedge may be laid so that it channels a creature into a lane rather than keeping it out. The method was slow and depended on knowing a district thoroughly, and a circuit preacher knew districts better than anyone. He carried a long rifle and silver-cast shot, made from the communion spoons of a disbanded congregation that had given them up for the purpose without asking questions. The archetype in later family reckoning was that of the Spy. He rode as a preacher, listened as a confessor, and wrote everything down in a private cipher of Latin abbreviations, and it was this habit that earned him his alias. The Wary Ledger was a joke first, because his entries were so cautious, hedged with qualifications and never claiming a vampire taken until the remains had been seen and counted twice, but it became a compliment. The ledger keepers of the period record only a handful of kills to his name, and he considered the count the least of his work. His true labour was knowledge. He mapped which farmsteads along the Merrimack road had lost families, which ferry crossings were used by strangers after dark, and which parish burial books showed too many deaths in one winter. When a hunt became necessary he passed the names to the slayers in the harbour towns, and the entries for Salem and Newburyport in the early 1740s include several marked in his handwriting as having been brought to a conclusion by others on his information. This was unglamorous work that the Red Ledger values even now. In his private notes he said that a preacher who kept an accurate memory was worth a militia company. The old rivalry with the White Ledger touched him more through reading than through contact. The Proctor tallies from Pennsylvania reached the Faulkner cousins in letters from time to time, and he compared them, and disapproved of both the boasting in his own house and the coldness in theirs, and noted with some amusement that the two families resembled two wheels on one cart, each convinced the other was the cause of the noise. He was of no mind to settle the matter of the Guest and Towton. He simply refused to make it his own. What he did dwell on, in the notes he left, was the fact of how few of them there were, and how each tally in either ledger represented a household that had been spared. He began to fail in the autumn of 1746, with a cough and a wasting of flesh that Charity, who knew such things, recognised long before the doctor named it. He continued to preach for as long as he could stand. He died in 1747, aged thirty-five, and was buried at Andover beside his mother. Charity outlived him by four years and died in 1751. Their daughter Hannah, who had become a slayer herself, took over his notes, and their son Joshua, who did not, kept the house. The Red Ledger's closing entry for Benjamin Mather Faulkner is short. It gives his name, his years and the words that he counted twice. In the later Slayerverse histories he is remembered as the Faulkner who taught the family to watch a country before it hunted in it.