Caleb Bartlett

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

Caleb Bartlett was born in 1729 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and nothing about his beginnings suggested that he would end up in the ledgers of a family that was not his own. The town records give no father and no mother for him, only a baptism and a name, and the family's later accounts say merely that he was brought up in a corner of the parish where children of uncertain parentage were taken in by whoever had a bed and a chore to spare. He was, in the language of the time, put out to work at a young age, and he was passed from a farm household to a miller's and then, at about twelve, to the forge of a Northampton blacksmith who wanted a boy to work the bellows. That blacksmith was the making of him. He was a hard, fair man who fed his apprentices well and beat them rarely, and he taught Caleb the whole of the trade over seven years. Northampton in the 1730s and 1740s was the market and meetinghouse centre of the upper Connecticut valley, a town of about a thousand souls that lived by cattle, grain and the river. The forge stood near the road that ran down to the ferry, and it never lacked custom. Farmers brought ploughshares, hoes, chains and hinges; the militia brought muskets and bayonets; travellers brought lame horses; and the town brought its ceaseless run of small repairs. The blacksmith's day began in the dark, with the fire raked up and the bellows pumped, and it ended in the dark, with the hammers stilled and the floor swept of scale. In a hard winter the forge was the warmest room in the town and a place where old men sat and talked. Caleb, a lean, black-haired boy with scarred forearms and a rare smile, listened to all of it, and learned more about the valley from that forge floor than most men learn from a lifetime of church. He came into his own trade by his early twenties and set up his own smithy, on a rented lot near the mill brook, with a leather apron, a set of second-hand tools and a loan from the old master that he paid off within three years. He was known for reliable ironwork, for fair prices and for a curious side line in which he cast small objects in unusual metals, a habit that would become important later. Neighbours who asked him about it were told that he made buttons and shoe buckles for the market. In the wars with France on the frontier he made bayonets, hatchets and spear points by the hundred, and his smithy ran day and night when the alarm came up the river. It was through that trade that he met the woman he married. Patience Faulkner, born in 1724, was five years his senior, a dairywoman with a farm on the edge of the parish and a reputation for cheese that reached well beyond the county. She was also, though Caleb learned this only slowly, a vampire slayer of the Faulkner line, and the daughter of the wheelwright Denys Faulkner. She came to the smithy one evening in the mid-1750s with a broken hinge on a cellar door and an odd request: could he cast her a supply of shot in silver? He asked no questions that night. He simply made the shot, refused payment, and gave her the hinge mended. She returned a week later with a cheese by way of thanks, and a month after that they were talking. By his own account he worked out the rest of it for himself, in a gradual dawning, over about a year. They married in 1756 and lived on the Faulkner side of the parish, in a house that combined her dairy with his forge. It was an odd household, and the neighbours said as much. She made butter and cheese by day and vanished by night, and he hammered and quenched by day and kept the fire in at all hours, and by unspoken agreement neither asked the other where the night's work had gone. What Caleb did understand was his part in it. He was the armourer. He cast the silver shot, tempered the blades, mended the locks and hinges, made the bars and latches for the cellar doors, and forged the small hooked tools that Patience carried in her apron. Her hunting was possible in part because of his craftsmanship, and in the Red Ledger the credit for many tallies belongs, in a sense, to a blacksmith who was never in the field. Two children came of the marriage. Sarah Bartlett Faulkner, born in 1757, was a dark, capable, sensible girl who took after her mother in the dairy and was not a slayer. Caleb Bartlett Faulkner, born in 1758, was the second, a quiet boy who grew into a slayer and carried his father's given name and his mother's family name together, in the custom of the Faulkner line by which the surname passes through the daughters. Their father taught the boy the forge as a matter of course, and it was in that smoky workshop that the young man learned the lesson that a hunter who could mend his own gear was worth two who could not. Caleb watched his son grow into the work with the pride of a man who had married into a secret and helped it flourish. The rivalry with the Proctor line touched him only lightly and from a distance. The Faulkners of Massachusetts corresponded with their Yorkist counterparts in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the quarrel over the Guest, the vampire that escaped at Towton in 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, came up in those letters as it always did. Caleb had no view on the matter and said so. In his experience a fire was a fire, no matter whose ledger it warmed, and he made a point of supplying silver shot to a travelling Proctor cousin who once passed through Northampton, a courtesy that Patience gently approved and the Red Ledger's keepers did not need to know about. The Revolution came to his forge in the 1770s. He turned out musket parts, bayonets, camp kettles and horseshoes for the Massachusetts militia, and, at a moment when powder and lead were desperately short, he ran a small operation melting down old pewter and window weights to make ball. He was too old, at forty-six, to march in 1775, but his son Caleb Bartlett Faulkner was seventeen and eager, and his household sent its share to the war. The strain told on him. The family's ledger notes that he never quite recovered the vigour of his earlier years. His wife Patience died in 1784, after some months of decline, and Caleb was left alone in the house they had made together. He died a year later, in 1785, aged fifty-six, after a fall from a horse. It was a bad break, complicated by an old injury, and he lingered for a few days before dying. His daughter Sarah nursed him to the end, and his son, then twenty-seven, carried him to the churchyard beside his wife. No alias, no craft and no tally stand beside Caleb Bartlett's name, because he was never a hunter, and the ledgers have no column for the maker of the tools. In the Slayerverse he is remembered by the slayers who came after him as the man who stood at the fire while others walked in the dark, and the forge on the mill brook was for a generation the place where the Faulkners of Northampton sent to get things made right.