Betsey Eaton

Hunter slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Gentle Bell. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Betsey Eaton learned to read a herd before she learned to read a page, and she later maintained that the first skill had done more for her than the second. She was born in 1752 in Salem Town, Massachusetts, but she made her life inland, among cows, and it was there in 1785, at a crossroads where a tinker's cart stood abandoned with the horse still warm, that she was called to the work for which the Red Ledger remembers her. Known there as The Gentle Bell, she was a dairywoman, a vampire slayer and, by her marriage in 1776 to the carpenter Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner, the second lamp in a household that kept two. Salem Town in the early 1750s was one of the busiest harbours in New England. Its wharves were lined with schooners loading dried cod and lumber for the West Indies and unloading molasses, salt and sugar; its streets rang with the hammers of shipwrights and coopers, and its merchants were building the tall, square houses that the town would later be famous for. It was also, in the popular imagination, the place of the witch trials sixty years before, and older residents still lowered their voices when they passed the site of the hangings on Gallows Hill. Betsey grew up in the smaller, poorer streets behind the waterfront, in a household that lived on the edge of the merchant economy, selling produce and doing washing and mending. The family tradition is that she preferred not to speak of her parents or her own early childhood. What the ledger does preserve is her habit of walking out to the salt marshes and the farms beyond the town as a girl, and of being, from an early age, at ease with animals. She went into dairy service young. A farmer's wife near Salem took her on at twelve to help with the milking and butter making, and Betsey proved to have a quiet gift. Cows that kicked other hands stood still for hers. She learned the arts of the dairy in their full dreary detail: the skimming of cream from wide pans, the churning that could take an hour or a whole morning depending on the weather, the working of butter with wooden paddles to press out the buttermilk, the salting and packing in firkins, the making of cheese in presses weighted with stones. It was hard, cold, wet work, done before dawn, and it gave her red hands and a straight back. She also learned, quite without meaning to, how to notice small changes: which cow was restless before the storm, which was off her feed, which had stopped giving milk for no visible reason. The Revolution swept through Salem early. In 1774 the General Court was ordered to meet there under General Gage, and a defiant Provincial Congress formed instead; in February of 1775 the redcoats marched into town looking for cannon and were turned back at the North Bridge without a shot. Betsey was a young woman of twenty-three in that winter and remembered the drawbridge standoff all her life, mostly for the moment when the townspeople sang psalms in the cold. Salem's harbours soon sent out privateers, and the wharves filled with prize goods. But the war unsettled the town's poor, and Betsey, restless, took a place on a farm inland and began to walk west along the roads toward Worcester County. She met Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner at a barn raising on the Leicester road, where he was a carpenter with a raised frame to finish and she was among the women who fed the crew. It was an easy meeting. He was tall and quiet and she was quieter still, and they sat on the sill of the finished doorway that evening and said almost nothing to each other, which they both found restful. They were married in 1776, when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-seven, and she brought a churn, six cows and a reputation for never having spoiled a batch of butter. Ebenezer had been called that same year, and she learned of it early, since he came home from the market with the news in his face. She listened to the whole account, said that she would keep the kitchen dry, and went out to see to the cows. The household grew. Jacob Eaton Faulkner arrived in 1777, a solemn baby who became a solemn boy and then a shopkeeper, without the calling, and lived until 1823. Mary Eaton Faulkner followed in 1781, a watchful child who took after her father and, in the fullness of time, was called herself; she also died in 1823. Betsey raised them with a sturdy, practical gentleness. She took no interest in fuss, taught both children to milk before they were six, and insisted that they know what to do when a cow would not settle. The family lived in a small, snug house on a Worcester County farm whose main room was dominated by the hearth and a great oak dresser, and where the kitchen door was always unbolted for neighbours, and, increasingly, for visitors of the family's other kind. Her own calling came in 1785, when she was thirty-three. She was driving to a market crossroads at dawn with a wagon of butter when she found a tinker's cart standing in the road with the horse still warm and the tinker drained. She did not scream. She stood and considered the ground, the cart, the angle of the man's body, and the way the animal lay, and what she understood from that scene was so complete that it startled her: which way the killer had gone, how long ago, how tired it was, and where, within a mile, it would likely be lying up. This became her craft, the one the ledger names Quarry Reading, a knack for reconstructing a hunt from tracks, droppings, disturbed stock and the small behaviour of animals. She followed the trail on foot that same morning, took her husband's long rifle, and brought the thing down in a woodlot with silver-cast shot before the sun was high. The name The Gentle Bell came from her cowbell, which she hung on her belt on night patrols, so that a person hearing it in the dark would think of a cow moving and not a hunter. The bell was also, in a curious way, a mark of her manner. She had a low, unhurried voice, and she never tried to frighten anyone. She worked alongside Ebenezer, and their entries in the ledger sit side by side, in his neat and her slanted hand. In her sixteen years as a slayer she recorded a modest number of vampires taken, mostly in the barns and woodlots of the county, and several dozen more she chose to drive off rather than kill. She had little interest in the contest with the Proctors and once remarked that she had never met a Yorkist and did not intend to start counting them. She died in 1801, aged forty-nine, of a fever caught in a plague house. She had gone into a farm where a family lay sick and a vampire had been feeding on them in the confusion of the illness. She killed the creature and nursed the survivors for days, and then took the sickness herself and died within the fortnight. Ebenezer, who lived on until 1814, buried her under an apple tree behind the house. In the Slayerverse she is the model of the patient, unhurried tracker, a dairywoman who read the countryside like a ledger.