Hezekiah Cooke

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

Hezekiah Cooke was a wheelwright of Andover, Massachusetts, born in 1719 and dead in 1789, and for seventy years he supplied the wheels on which a good part of the Merrimack valley rolled. He was a man of the Faulkner blood who never carried the name, a fact that troubled him less than it troubled his half-brothers, and he became known in the family ledgers as the person who kept the hunters mobile. His life ran from the last years of Queen Anne's reign, through the French wars on the frontier, to the first winters of the new federal republic, and the wood shavings on his shop floor recorded most of it. He was born in the spring of 1719 in a rented house near the North Parish meetinghouse. His father, Denys Cooke, born in 1676 and dead in 1736, was a saddler, a quiet, careful man who smelled permanently of neatsfoot oil and wax thread. His mother, Hannah Faulkner, born in 1678 and dead in 1751, was a farmer's widow who had kept the Faulkner name for the children of her first marriage, and when she wed the saddler she declined, with a firmness the town remembered, to surrender it. Hezekiah therefore grew up in a household with two surnames at the table. His elder half-brothers Denys Faulkner, born in 1702, and Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, were both vampire hunters of the Red Ledger, while Ezekiel Faulkner Cooke, born in 1704, took a hyphen of sorts and no calling at all. Hezekiah was the youngest, and the only one who was Cooke by birth. The old Faulkner farm supplied him with an education in hard work; the saddler's bench gave him the habit of patience with leather, iron and grain. Andover in his boyhood was a farming town of long fields, orchards and stone walls, with a meetinghouse that filled twice each Sabbath and a burying ground that filled rather more slowly than the older folk expected. Cider was the common drink, salt cod and Indian pudding the common meal, and a hard frost in October could decide whether a family ate well in February. Roads were ruts in summer and troughs of frozen mud in winter, which is precisely why the wheelwright's trade mattered. Every cart, wagon, chaise and gun carriage in the parish depended on hubs of elm, spokes of oak and felloes of ash, shrunk under a hot iron tire that had to be fitted in a single crackling minute. Hezekiah was bound as an apprentice at fourteen to a master wheelwright on the Shawsheen road, a Mr. Abbot, and learned to season timber for three years before cutting it, to true a wheel by eye, and to keep an honest ledger of his own, for his profession ran on credit, barter and the settling of accounts in the autumn. The family business of slaying touched him only at the edges, and that was by his own choice. His half-brother Denys Faulkner came to the shop in his twenties with a wagon axle that had been snapped, not by a rut but by something that had thrown its whole weight against the cart. Hezekiah asked no questions and made a new axle of white oak strapped with iron. That was the pattern of his service: he rebuilt what the hunters broke. He fashioned a light two-wheeled cart with sprung shafts for Ebenezer, who wanted to reach a farmhouse on the New Hampshire line before dawn without waking the neighbours, and he lined a false floor beneath the seat where a rifle, a mallet and a pouch of cast shot could lie unseen. He never claimed a mark in the Red Ledger for any of it, and the entries that mention him call him simply the wheelwright, the one who never lost a tire. He was, by every account, a plain man to look at, broad in the forearm, short in the leg, with a slight stoop from bending over the felloe bench. His hands were scarred with the tiny white nicks of old chisels. He was thrifty without being mean, fond of long silences, and given to a dry remark that arrived a beat late. Neighbours saw him at the militia musters on the common each spring, where he was more useful mending the carriage wheels of the company's small guns than he was in the ranks. The wars with France on the frontier pulled Massachusetts men north and west again and again through his youth and middle age, and he twice went out with the county regiment in the eastern campaigns, once to repair wagon trains at a fort on the Hudson and once to hold a pair of horses on the road to Louisbourg, coming home both times with fewer opinions of soldiering than when he left. In 1739 Hezekiah Cooke married Martha Whittier, a farmer's wife in the making, the daughter of a family with land above the river. Their courtship was almost entirely conducted over a broken cart wheel, which her father had brought to the shop, and which Hezekiah took an unusually long while to mend. They were married that autumn in the meetinghouse, and their daughter Charity Cooke was born in 1740, the only child they raised. Martha kept hens, a small dairy and a garden of onions and flax, and she ran the ledger at the shop counter far better than her husband did. There was, the family remembered, a low steady contentment about the house on the Shawsheen road, made more precious by its brevity: Martha died in 1756, at forty-two, of a fever that took several women of the parish in a single wet season. Hezekiah did not remarry. He made a coffin himself, of pine he had been saving for something else, and then went back to the bench the next morning because there was an order for four cart wheels due on Thursday. Charity grew up between the shop and the neighbours' kitchens, learning to spoke a wheel before she learned to sew, and in time she married and kept the trade alive through her own sons, so that the Cooke name on Andover cart wheels survived long past the man who first stamped it. Hezekiah taught her, in the odd hours of the evening, the small rules of the family that he had absorbed from his half-brothers without ever taking part in their work: that a dry summer might bring a wolf to a barn that was not a wolf, that silver could be melted from a spoon but not bought at a store, that the Red Ledger was kept by the hunters and would be open to any Faulkner who asked to read it. He passed on the rivalry too, though only as a dry joke. The Proctors, he liked to say, were people from somewhere south whose wagons were never quite as sound as his. The years of the Revolution found him in his fifties and sixties, too old for a musket but not too old for a carriage axle. The Andover shop turned out wheels for supply wagons and for gun carriages destined for the camps around Boston, and he worked with a resolute unshowy diligence, reciting the parish's news to the apprentices as he did. He was seen at the funerals of men he had once seen marching. His half-brother Denys Faulkner had died long before, but stories of that hunter's exploits lived on among the younger family, and Hezekiah took some quiet pride that the wheels beneath those exploits had been his. In the last years he lost the hard bite of his eyesight and gave the shop to a journeyman, though he continued to sit on a nail keg by the door, checking every finished wheel with the flat of his palm and a grunt of approval or complaint. Hezekiah Cooke died in 1789 of the sweating sickness, at the age of seventy, in the same house on the Shawsheen road, with Charity beside him. He was buried in the old south burying ground under a slate stone carved with a small wheel, a spoke short of a full circle by the carver's slip, which the family took to be a joke on the man. The Red Ledger holds no tally beside his name, only a line noting that he supplied the wheels of the house for fifty years and was never paid in full. Later chroniclers of the Slayerverse remember him as the proof that the Faulkner family's work rested as much on carpenters, saddlers and wheelwrights as on the hunters whose names took the credit.