Gideon Mather Faulkner never held a rifle in anger and never wished to, which puts him in an unusual position within a family that measures its history in tallies. Born in 1713 at Springfield, Massachusetts, he lived seventy-two years and died in 1785 of a wasting illness, a farmer to the last, on land along the Connecticut River that his neighbours could have named in their sleep. The Red Ledger enters him only as a brother, a father and a husband, but his farm was the place where a good deal of the Faulkner family's hunting was quietly fed, sheltered and mended, and the ledger keepers eventually allowed that a book of kills says nothing about the people who kept the hunters alive.
Springfield in the early eighteenth century was a frontier town in the old sense. It lay in the broad river valley of western Massachusetts, a long day's ride from Boston, with a meetinghouse, an armoury that would later become famous and a scatter of farms on the flood meadows where tobacco, onions, flax and Indian corn grew in the black silt. The town had been burned in the wars of the previous generation and remembered it. Garrison houses still stood, with their overhanging upper storeys and loopholes, and boys were taught to count the days between the spring floods and the first frosts, and to keep a musket loaded behind the door. Gideon's parents had moved there from the Andover country shortly before he was born, his father Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner following the demand for barrels in a valley that shipped cider, salt pork and flour downriver to the sea. His mother Denise Mather was a weaver, and she was also the slayer called The Sure Cairn.
Gideon was the younger of two sons. His brother Benjamin Mather Faulkner was born in 1712 and grew up to be a circuit preacher and, in time, a hunter of the Red Ledger. Gideon did not go into the pulpit or the field. From an early age, he preferred the company of animals, seeds and weather, and in a household of readers and hunters he was the one who was always in the barn. He was a broad, red-faced, slow-spoken boy who was never in a hurry to answer and rarely wrong when he did. His mother watched him from the loom and did not press him. According to a note in the family's papers, she decided early that a house of hunters needs one child who wants to mend fences, and that the calling, if it wished to find him, would have to find him among the cows.
It never did. As the family understood the matter, the calling comes to whom it comes, and it passed over Gideon completely, though he was no stranger to what it meant. He grew up with a hawthorn hedge along the lane, with a silver-ladle mould in the kitchen drawer, and with an unwritten agreement that nobody asked his mother where she went after dark. When he was old enough he learned to tell, by the smell in a cellar, whether a winter had been kind to the stored cabbages or to something else. He did his share, fetching and carrying, holding lanterns and driving wagons, and he never resented the fact that others were given the glory, mostly because he did not think of it as glory. He thought of it as a neighbour's chore.
In 1736 he married Patience Hale, a milliner, who was six years his senior and had a small shop in the town selling caps, ribbons and gloves to the wives of the valley's merchants and ministers. It was regarded as a slightly daring match, because she was older, she was in trade and she had money of her own, and Gideon's father grumbled that a farmer needed a wife who could churn. Patience churned regardless, in the evenings, after closing the shop. They took over a section of the family land and built a low farmhouse with a central chimney, a lean-to kitchen and a long barn, and there they raised two children. Their daughter Lucy Hale Faulkner was born in 1738 and was called as a slayer when she came of age, and their son Reuben Faulkner was born in 1739 and took over the farm. Reuben did not carry the calling either, which made him, in the family's dry phrase, his father's son.
The farm gave him a quiet centrality. It was a day's ride from the harbour towns and from the Boston road, and the Faulkner hunters passing through the valley had a habit of stopping there. Benjamin, riding his preaching circuit, slept in the barn loft on his way to Deerfield. His niece Lucy trained on the meadow behind the orchard with a wooden musket and a target of straw. Gideon kept the accounts of what these visits consumed in oats, bread and candles, and he was said to have refused all payment. Patience, who understood the sums, quietly wrote them down anyway, on the reverse of her milliner's bills, so that the family could later reckon what the hunting had cost.
The wars with France on the frontier came to the valley more directly than to the east. The 1740s and 1750s brought raiding parties, garrison duty and the sight of ragged families walking south from the northern settlements. Gideon served in the militia, as a farmer of his age was bound to, and stood watch in the guardhouses in the cold. He was not a natural soldier and knew it, but he knew the country. When a party of scouts set out from Springfield, he lent them a hay wagon, four oxen and a good deal of advice about which fords were passable in spring. Some of what he saw on those patrols, the empty farms and the tracks that were not quite right, confirmed what his mother had told him years before, and on two occasions he sent word down the river to his cousins that there were matters worth attending to.
Patience died in 1749, and Gideon, who had not thought to do so, wept openly at the funeral. He did not remarry. His daughter Lucy died young in 1763, at twenty-five, and his son Reuben, who had stood by him through both losses, died in 1784, a year before his father, so that Gideon lived to bury the two children he had raised and to be nursed at the last by a neighbouring family whom the ledger does not name. His own illness came on slowly. He wasted through the summer of 1785, and died in the autumn, after the harvest was in, which he had insisted on supervising from a chair.
The Red Ledger's entry for Gideon Mather Faulkner is one of the shortest in the collection. It gives his dates, his farm and a line added in a later hand: fed the hunters. In the Slayerverse histories he is often cited by those who study the way a slaying family actually survived, as the man whose barn, cellar and hay wagon stood behind every named kill in the western valley, and whose refusal of payment was, in the end, the family's most reliable line of credit.
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