Martha Whittier was a farmer's wife, and the phrase covers a great deal more than it sounds. Born in 1714 at Andover, Massachusetts, she kept a household through the cold decades of the mid eighteenth century, married a wheelwright who also worked a few acres, raised a daughter, and died in 1756, aged forty-two, of the wasting illness that the Andover records called by several names and treated by none. She was not a Faulkner by birth and not a slayer, and no ledger of either family carries her name in its columns of tallies. She appears instead in the margins of the Red Ledger, in the daily accounts of a house where hunters sometimes slept, and it was there that her steadiness was most valued.
Andover in the years of her girlhood was a town of sturdy, sober people. The Shawsheen River turned its mills, the fields lay in long strips of rye, flax and Indian corn behind stone walls, and the meetinghouse on the hill regulated the week, with its Sabbath of two long services, its lecture days and its fast days proclaimed by the governor. Everyone in the town knew everyone else's business, and most knew everyone else's grandparents. Martha's family were farming people of the older stock, with a distant cousinship to the poet's family of the same name, though the connection was more often claimed than proved. The household made its own soap, candles, cheese and cloth. The girls were taught to spin at six, to knit at seven and to keep account of a week's eggs at ten, and a girl who could do all of it, plus read her psalter, was considered ready for a husband by seventeen.
Martha did not marry quickly. She was, by all accounts, a sharp-tongued, quick-handed young woman with a good deal of common sense and a habit of correcting men in public, which put off some of her suitors. She had a square face, freckled hands, and a laugh that carried across a threshing floor. She was known, too, as a young woman with a great deal of curiosity, and it was this, more than any beauty, that drew the attention of Hezekiah Cooke, a wheelwright five years her junior, who had come to the trade from his father's shop and to Andover from a neighbouring town. He is remembered in the neighbourhood as a careful, humorous, unhurried man who liked to argue about the best timber for hubs, and who did not mind a woman winning. They married in 1739, when Martha was twenty-five and Hezekiah twenty.
They lived on a small holding at the edge of the town, with a wheel shop attached to the barn and a few acres of pasture and cornfield that Martha managed in practice while Hezekiah ran the shop. It was not unusual for farm wives in that place to run the land, particularly when a man was occupied with a trade, and Martha took to it with relish. She kept two cows, a flock of hens and a sow. She sold butter and cheese at the Andover market and let the surplus go down to Haverhill and Newburyport on the carts that her husband's wheels carried. She had a good head for the price of things and a way of getting the better of a merchant without seeming to try. Their only child, Charity Cooke, was born in 1740, the year after the wedding, and grew up in the noise of the wheel shop, learning to tell a good spoke from a bad one before she could read.
The link between the Cooke household and the Faulkners was one of neighbourhood. Jeremy Ingersoll Faulkner, the cooper, and Hezekiah shared timber and gossip, and Denise Mather, the weaver, had been a friend of Martha's mother. When Denise's son Benjamin Mather Faulkner began to ride his preaching circuit and the Faulkner family's other work required a place to break a journey, it was the Cooke barn that took in travellers, without any explanation asked. Martha understood enough to know that some of the men who slept in her hay loft with their rifles had come off a bad night, and enough not to ask. She fed them, washed their shirts and put a folded blanket by the door. One of them, a hunter from the harbour, later described her as the only woman in Essex County who could offer a man hot porridge at dawn without inquiring where he had spent the night.
She was a woman of practical religion, dutiful in attendance and sceptical of enthusiasm. When the revivals came through New England in the early 1740s, with their crowds, their weeping and their travelling preachers, she went to hear one and came home unmoved, remarking that the man had a fine voice and a poor grasp of butter prices. She had no patience for those who thought a house could be kept by prayer alone, and she quietly kept her own precautions in the old ways, a branch of thorn above the lintel and salt on the threshold, without troubling to explain them to the minister.
The wars with France on the frontier touched Andover through its men. Militia companies were called out in the middle 1740s and again in the 1750s, and though Hezekiah was never sent far, the town filled with widows and the news of losses at distant forts. The price of grain climbed and the tax rolls grew. Martha kept the farm going through years when half the neighbourhood's labour was under arms, and she took in a widow's boy for two seasons as a hand, teaching him to plough and to milk. It was hard work, and it took its toll. She began to lose weight in the winter of 1754, and by the spring she was tired in a way that sleep did not cure. The local doctor called it a decline and prescribed a tonic that did her no good, and her own opinion, expressed briskly, was that he might as well have prescribed a new pair of legs.
She died in 1756, at forty-two, and was buried in the Andover burial ground on a raw March morning. Hezekiah, who outlived her by thirty-three years, kept the wheel shop going until his own death in 1789, and never quite recovered his humour. Their daughter Charity, sixteen when her mother died, kept the house for her father and lived until 1805. She is recorded as the one who saved her mother's account book, in which butter and eggs were mixed with sundry notes of visitors, dates and bedding, and which later gave the Faulkner archivists some of their most reliable information about where certain hunters had been on particular nights.
Martha Whittier is not remembered in the Red Ledger as one who took a vampire. She is remembered, in a line added a generation later by a family clerk, as a woman who kept a bed and a fire for any of the house who needed them and never asked a question. In the Slayerverse chronicles, her account book is treated as a rare surviving portrait of the domestic side of the hunt, and her sharp tongue, her butter and her unquestioning porridge have earned her a modest place among the people the Faulkner line has most reason to be grateful to.
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