Denise Mather

Soldier slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Sure Cairn. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

On a clear night in the autumn of 1708 Denise Mather stood in the churchyard at Northampton, Massachusetts, with her hand on the cold iron of the bell-rope, and heard something answer the bell. That was the whole of her calling. She was twenty-seven years old, a weaver by trade, and she had gone to the meeting-house yard for the ordinary reason that she had been asked to ring the hour for an old sexton who was ill. The bell had spoken once, low, over the roofs of the town and across the meadows to the river, and out of the graves on the slope behind the church a sound had come back that was not an echo. She stood very still. Then she did what she would do for the next thirty years: she waited, and she watched, and she counted. She had been born in Northampton in 1681, in a frontier town on the west bank of the Connecticut River whose minister, Solomon Stoddard, was the most powerful clergyman in the western part of the colony and was known as the pope of the Connecticut Valley. The town had a stockade, a meeting-house with a great oak frame, and a scattering of houses along the main street that ran to the meadows. It was the sort of place where every household kept a musket, where the militia mustered on the common, and where the memory of the raids of 1675 was strong. The Deerfield attack of February 1704, only a few years before her calling, when some hundred and twelve people were carried north to Canada through the snow, had made the fear real again. Denise, who was twenty-two at the time, had helped hide refugees in her own house. Her trade was weaving. She had learned at a loom in her mother's house, where flax was dressed and spun in the long winters and the woollen yarn from the family's sheep was made up into blankets, coverlets and coarse cloth. By the time she was twenty she had her own loom and a reputation for a hard, even weave that did not fray. In a country where a bolt of imported broadcloth cost the value of a cow, a woman who could weave a serviceable cloth from her own flax was of value, and Denise did not lack for custom. She was a broad-shouldered, quiet woman with strong forearms and very level eyes, who worked without talking and who, when she did speak, said what she meant. The town thought her a little grim. They noted, too, that she could shoot, having been taught by her father to bring down a duck on the wing. The calling turned that ability into something else. She became a vampire slayer and the ledgers assigned her to the archetype they called the Soldier, the hunter whose strength lay in endurance and discipline, in the patient holding of a position, and in the willingness to stand for hours in the cold without shifting. Her craft was Long-Watch Tracking. It meant that she could follow a creature's movements over days and nights by patient observation, sitting in an upper room or a copse with a rifle across her knees, learning the trail it used between one grave and the next, and picking her moment. She kept a notebook in which she recorded the times to the quarter-hour, the direction of the wind and the phase of the moon, and from these she built up maps of the habits of the things she hunted. The town called her The Sure Cairn, a name that seemed to be given her by the hunters rather than by herself, and that referred to the way she stood, immobile as a heap of stones, for a whole night. Her weapon was a long rifle, a heavy grooved-barrel piece of a sort still uncommon in New England in those years and made for her by a German gunsmith who had come up from Pennsylvania, and she loaded it with silver-cast shot poured in a bullet mould of her own. The silver came from a set of spoons she had inherited and later from the melted buckles of the men she had saved. She was not a fast shot, but she rarely missed. The Red Ledger records the tally of her first ten years with a plainness that its clerks reserved for those they admired: a creature in the river meadows of Hatfield in 1710, another beside the Mill River in 1712, a pair near Hadley, and a long entry in which she sat for six nights in a barn loft above a farmer's cattle before the thing came for the cow. It was in 1709 that she married. Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner was a cooper, born in 1685 at Andover, a big soft-spoken man of twenty-four who had come up the valley to buy oak and stayed to court her. He was a Faulkner, of the Red Ledger line, and had grown up in a household where the tally was a matter of course, but he was not a slayer and did not pretend to be. He was a maker of casks, buckets and churns, a man whose hands smelled of oak shavings, and he found in Denise someone whose steadiness matched his own. They were married in the meeting-house that autumn, with Stoddard's blessing, and the Faulkner family sent a cheese and a hogshead. The two of them set up house in Northampton, in a low frame building with a workshop in the yard where the sound of hammer on hoop rang from morning to dusk, and a loom in the front room where Denise worked when she was not out on the meadow. They had two sons. Benjamin Mather Faulkner, born in 1712, grew into a slayer, taught by his mother to sit through a night without moving, and he was called in his turn. Gideon Mather Faulkner, born the following year, in 1713, was not, and became a cooper like his father, with a long and quiet life that ended in 1785. Denise raised them both on the same terms. Both learned to read and to weave a plain coverlet, both learned to shoot, and both were told that the ledger was a family matter and not a topic for the tavern. Benjamin took the watching to heart. He would sit with her in the barn loft on a winter's night, saying nothing for hours, and she said afterward that he was the only person she had ever met who could keep her company in silence. Her relations with the Proctor side were remote and, on the whole, amused. A letter would arrive from Pennsylvania or Yorkshire every few years with news of some Proctor tally, and Denise, who did not care for competition, would read it at the loom and go on working. She did keep her own rule, which was that nothing went into the Red Ledger without a witness and nothing came out. It gave her a reputation for reliability that the Proctors, grudgingly, noticed. A Pennsylvania correspondent wrote once that the Massachusetts Faulkner who stood watch at Northampton was the one hunter they could imagine trusting with their own book. She was fifty-eight when a fever took her, in 1739, after a winter of wet weather and sickness in the valley. Jeremy sat with her through it. She died in the house she had lived in for thirty years, with the loom in the next room and the rifle on its pegs above the door. He outlived her by twenty-three years, and it was a matter of comment in the town that he never had the loom moved. In the Slayerverse chronicle of the Faulkner line she is set down as one of the great watchers of the valley, and the entry in the Red Ledger, in Benjamin's hand, closes with the words that she never once fired at something she had not seen twice.