Charity Hutchinson

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

Charity Hutchinson was born in 1710 in Andover, Massachusetts, worked as a midwife, and in 1733 married Benjamin Mather Faulkner, a circuit preacher who was also a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. She died in 1751, at forty-one, after a fall from a horse. Her life ran through the years of the Great Awakening, and she spent much of it alone with two children while her husband rode from parish to parish with a Bible in one saddlebag and a rifle in the other. Andover of her girlhood was a town of some four hundred households, spread over farmland along the Shawsheen and Merrimack rivers. It had a strong Congregational meetinghouse, a reputation for sober piety and a memory of the witch trials that made its people watchful about anything strange. Her family were farmers and craftspeople, and Charity grew up in a house where prayer came before breakfast and work came after it. She was a quick, watchful child with a talent for calming frightened animals and people, and at fourteen she was sent to help the local midwife, a widow who had delivered most of the town. Over the next six years she learned the trade as it was practised in New England in the 1720s: the birthing stool, the linen cloths, the caudle of warm spiced ale, the delicate manoeuvres for a breech child, and the hard business of knowing when to send for the minister instead of the doctor. Benjamin Mather Faulkner, born in 1712, was a distant cousin of the Andover Faulkners and a young man of unusual fervour. He had been raised in the Puritan tradition, educated in the classics and the Scriptures, and set on a ministerial career, but he was too restless for a fixed pulpit. He wanted to go where the people were, and he took to the road on horseback, preaching in barns, fields and village greens from the coast to the Connecticut valley. He was also called to the other work, a fact he told nobody. It suited him: a preacher on the road could be out at dusk, in strange villages, without explanation, and could hear of trouble in a parish before the parish knew what to call it. When he met Charity, he was preaching a week's revival in Andover and she was delivering a child in a house he was asked to visit. They were married in 1733, when she was twenty-three and he twenty-one. Their marriage was a partnership, though a strained one. Benjamin's circuit ran for weeks at a time, and Charity held the household together in a small house on the edge of Andover, with a garden, a cow, a few hens and a loom in the corner. She kept her midwife's satchel by the door, and she took on as many births as she could manage. She had a great capacity for solitude and a sense that God had assigned her this particular labour, and she seldom complained. Benjamin wrote to her from the road, brief letters full of sermon texts and weather, and folded into them, in a private shorthand she understood, were reports of what he had found. The letters were the thread of the marriage. Two children came from it. Hannah Hutchinson Faulkner, born in 1736, showed the calling early and became a slayer, and Joshua Hutchinson Faulkner, born in 1739, did not. Charity raised them largely alone. She taught Hannah to read from the Bible and the almanac, to shoot a fowling piece and to walk quietly, and she taught Joshua to write a fair hand and to cast a sum. Family tradition remembers her as a gentle disciplinarian, one who never raised her voice and never needed to. When Hannah's calling arrived, in her teens, it was Charity who sat up with her through the night and explained what the world had become. She did it, so the story goes, in the same steady, low voice she used with women in labour: breathe, and it will pass, and then we will decide what to do. The 1740s were a difficult decade for a preacher's household. The Great Awakening reached Massachusetts in 1740 with the visit of George Whitefield, and the colony split between those who welcomed the revival and those who deplored it. Benjamin was a New Light man, an itinerant preacher who spoke plainly and drew crowds, and his sermons in the open air reached thousands. The established ministers disliked him. Some parishes barred him from their pulpits, and he was once threatened with arrest for preaching without licence. Charity supported him steadily and was proud of him, and her own midwife's work made her a figure of some standing in the town; a woman who had delivered half the congregation was not easily crossed. The revival gave Benjamin cover for his hunting, and gave the Faulkners a larger view of the world than the farms of Essex County. In 1747 Benjamin was killed on the road at the age of thirty-five. The ledger's entry for that year records that he died in the course of the work, and Charity was told, so far as she was told anything, that he had been caught on a lonely stretch of road between two parishes. Her grief was private. She put on black, kept her practice and told the children that their father had died in the Lord's service, which was true in a sense that only the family understood. Hannah was eleven, and Joshua eight. Charity took on more births to make up the income and refused an offer from the church to take up a collection for her. She died four years later, in 1751, when a horse she was riding to a confinement in the dark stumbled, and she fell. She was forty-one. It was the ordinary hazard of her trade; she had been thrown before, and had walked home with a sprained wrist, and this time she did not get up. The neighbours who found her carried her home on a door. The Hutchinson name, which she had carried through her children's middle names, went on. Hannah lived until 1807, a slayer of some note, and Joshua until 1787. Charity Hutchinson is remembered in the Red Ledger's household notes as the woman who kept the door of a preacher's house open for fourteen years while her husband rode away from it. She never fired a shot in the family's cause, but the Faulkners regarded her as one of their own in every sense that counted. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hidden work of those who waited, and delivered, and held on.