Charity Cooke

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Charity Cooke never held a rifle, never entered a name in the Red Ledger and never claimed to understand the whole of what her husband's cousins did on their night rides through the Merrimack country. What she did was feed them, lodge them, wash their linen, hold the door and keep her counsel, and in a farming parish where most of the Faulkner line's work went on in kitchens rather than in cellars, that was a substantial contribution. Born in 1740 at Andover, Massachusetts, she lived sixty-five years, married a Haverhill farmer, bore at least two children who lived to grown age, and died in 1805 of childbed. The Red Ledger notes her only as a loyal hand. Andover in her girlhood was a town of some three thousand people spread over a wide, rolling township of orchards, meadows and pasture, with the meetinghouse and common at the centre and outlying farms reached by rutted lanes. The Shawsheen ran through it and turned a few mills. Families kept cows, pigs and a flock of sheep, and grew corn, rye, flax and apples. Spinning wheels and looms hummed in every parlour. Winter closed the roads for weeks, and spring came late and wet, with mud to the axle. The town was godly, thrifty and watchful, and its children were taught to say their catechism, mend their own clothes and hold their tongues in company. Her father, Hezekiah Cooke, born in 1719, was a wheelwright with a shop on the road to Reading, where he made cart wheels, wheelbarrows, spinning wheels and the occasional chair. He was a steady, silent man whose hands were always stained with tar and linseed oil. Her mother, Martha Whittier, born in 1714, was a farmer's wife in the strict sense of the phrase, running the dairy, the henyard and the household accounts while her husband worked the bench. The Whittier connection tied Charity to the wider Faulkner kin by blood, though the Cooke household was not itself a slayer house, and it was through the Whittiers that the family's knowledge of the Red Ledger had first reached the Cookes. Martha died in 1756, when Charity was sixteen. The girl took over the dairy that summer, and by her own later account learned in a single season how to run a household and how little grief can be spared time. She was an only child. That fact shaped her more than any other, for it left her at sixteen as the second woman in her father's house, and when she was twenty-two her father let her go with a better grace than most fathers manage. The man she married was Isaac Ingersoll, born in 1740 at Haverhill, a farmer of about her own age whom she met at a raising, one of those barn-frame days when the whole district turned out to lift the beams. The wedding took place in 1762, at Andover, in the parlour of her father's house, with a minister of the parish presiding and the neighbours crowded into the passage. The bride wore a gown made over from her mother's best, and the groom, by all reports, spent the day looking at his boots. Haverhill lay a few miles up the Merrimack, and the young couple settled on a small farm on the river intervale, with a barn, a low framed house and an orchard planted by Isaac's father. It was rich ground and easily flooded. Isaac grew hay, corn and flax and kept a dozen head of cattle, and in the spring, when the river rose, he and Charity moved the stock up the hill and waited for the water to go down. She churned, spun, wove, salted pork, dried apples and put up cider, and she kept the poultry and a kitchen garden of beans, onions and pumpkins. In the winter she made candles and soap. It was a life with a rhythm as fixed as a psalm and just as unrelenting. What tied her household to the wider work of the Faulkners was kinship. Among the Haverhill cousins was Lucy Hale Faulkner, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger's Merrimack company, and the Ingersoll farm sat on a stretch of river that Lucy and her brother the boatman often used. The Ingersolls were never slayers themselves, but their barn and cellar were, at intervals, put to use: a place to store a rifle, a room to sleep in, a supper at three in the morning for people who did not say where they had been. Charity understood the arrangement without discussing it. She kept a pot on the hob and never asked. It was said in the family that she could tell from the state of a cousin's boots what sort of night it had been. Her children were born in the first years of the marriage. Mercy Faulkner Ingersoll came in 1763 and Hezekiah Faulkner in 1764, named for his grandfather the wheelwright, and neither was called to the work. By the custom of the Red Ledger's families, the Faulkner name was carried in the children's names even where the household surname was not, and the Ingersoll farm always made a point of it. Charity raised them to be handy, literate and discreet, teaching them their letters at the kitchen table and their duties in the dairy, and she took care to see that neither ever went hungry or wanted a decent coat. They were sober, hard-working, unspectacular children, exactly what she had hoped for. The wars with France on the frontier had passed by the time her children were grown, but the Revolution put the household under strain. Haverhill sent men to Lexington and to the siege of Boston, and the farms were stripped of hands. Isaac went out with the militia on short tours, and Charity ran the farm, shot a fox in the henyard, hired what labour she could find and paid in kind when money failed. Paper currency lost its value and prices rose. Even so, the household held together. In 1785 Isaac died of the plague, the fever that ran that year through the river towns, and she was left a widow of forty-five with a farm and a grown son. She did not marry again. She lived on the Haverhill farm with her son's help for another twenty years, growing old in the same house, keeping the same hours and welcoming the same cousins. The work of the ledger continued around her, and she supplied its material needs. Her last years were quiet, and the neighbours reckoned her a stout, plain, kindly woman who never wasted a word. In 1805, when a granddaughter's lying-in went badly, Charity nursed her through it, caught the childbed fever that had taken the young mother's strength, and died of it herself at sixty-five. The farm passed to her son. Charity Cooke belongs to the Slayerverse chiefly as one of the many quiet hands without whom the Faulkner ledger could not have been kept.