Patience Faulkner

Hunter slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Wild Yoke. Craft: Quarry Reading.

In the hill pastures north of Andover, Massachusetts, they called her The Wild Yoke, and the name was not a compliment until it turned into one. Patience Faulkner was born in that town in 1724, made her living as a dairywoman, and after a night in the early spring of 1757 became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger house, a Hunter whose craft, Quarry Reading, let her look at a patch of trampled snow, a frayed fence rail or a heifer's nervous eye and say where the thing she was after had passed and in which direction it meant to go. She carried a long rifle and a pouch of silver-cast shot, and she went on carrying them for twenty-seven years, until a plague took her in 1784, at the age of sixty. She was born into a household of wood shavings. Her father, Denys Faulkner, born in 1702 and dead in 1742, was a wheelwright, and in the ledgers he is also the hunter known as the Flint Latch, a slayer who worked the Merrimack towns for two decades in the years of her early childhood and who made his living at a bench by day and in the woods by night. He had a half-brother, Hezekiah Cooke, who was also a wheelwright and who kept the family's wagons rolling, so that Patience's earliest memories were of felloes, spokes and iron tires being fitted in an outdoor fire. Her mother, Lydia Whittier, born in 1705 and dead in 1747, kept a shop on the main road, with a counter of tea, powder, salt fish, thread and horn buttons, and she had a habit, unusual for the time, of bringing her small daughter behind the counter to weigh out the sugar loaf. Patience had a younger brother, John Faulkner, born in 1727, who was quiet and dark-browed and who became the second point in the triangle of her life. Her father's death in 1742, when she was eighteen, is entered in the Red Ledger in the ordinary way, with a line and a date and the word taken beside his last tally. His daughter was not told the manner of it until she was much older. The household leaned on her mother's shop after that, and Lydia's health failed slowly until her death in 1747. By then Patience had taken up dairying in the only way open to a young woman with no dowry, as a hired hand on a farm belonging to a cousin on the Shawsheen, where she milked twenty cows before breakfast, worked the churn and the cheese press, and walked the pastures at dusk with a stick to bring the herd in. The country at that hour was full of small signals: a hare that would not run, a cow that pulled against her rope, a smear on a gatepost that was not mud. She learned to read them the way other girls learned to read a psalter, and she did not yet know the name of what she was learning. In 1756 she married Caleb Bartlett, a blacksmith of Andover, born in 1729, whose forge stood at the end of the mill street. He was a big, patient, cheerful man with burn scars on his forearms and a fondness for practical jokes, and he saw in the dairywoman something that his neighbours did not, a person of great steadiness. They married in the meetinghouse in the spring, took a small house near the smithy and were given a cow by her cousin. It was a rough, ordinary, loving household, and it might have remained one had her brother not come to the door in the autumn of that year in a very ugly mood. The quarrel is remembered in the family only in outline. John Faulkner, twenty-nine years old and restless, had fallen in with a company of men who had no patience for the old family rules, and he wished to sell the last acres of their father's lot. Patience refused. They spoke sharply across the table, and he left in a rage. In the deep of winter he was found dead in a snowdrift on the Bradford road, and she did not forgive herself, though the Faulkners had taught her early that a brother's temper was a brother's own. Her daughter Sarah Bartlett Faulkner was born in 1757, in the first thaw, and Patience, still weak from the birth and from grief, was sitting up one night by the kitchen fire with the baby when someone knocked on the shutter and said her name in her brother's voice. He had come back from the grave, and in the manner of the thing he had come to finish the argument. The Ledger's account of that night is one of the fullest in the eighteenth-century volume. She did not scream. She took her husband's old fowling piece from its pegs, found that it was loaded with a dry charge that would do nothing, and put it down again. What she picked up instead was a heavy iron trivet from the hearth, and when the shutter gave way she struck the thing that had been John across the face and drove it back into the yard. Caleb woke, took a hammer, and together they held the door until dawn, and the thing that had been her brother did not survive the light. The next morning she carried him to the churchyard on a handbarrow and buried him properly, this time with a stake of ash through the breast and a copper pin in each hand, in a grave the parish sexton dug without asking why. That was her calling, and it came to her not in the woods but in her own kitchen. She turned to her father's people for training and found them cautious, then curious. There was no mentor, since the Flint Latch was long dead and the older hunters were scattered, so she taught herself, by walking her father's old circuits with her husband's long rifle and a mould of silver shot cast from a set of her mother's spoons. Caleb, who could shape iron and bore a barrel true, rifled a piece for her that could hit a man-sized target at a hundred yards in poor light. She learned the craft of Quarry Reading by degrees, a matter of studying the sap on a broken branch, the smell on a sheep's fleece, the way the cattle bunched at one side of a pasture. The neighbours gossiped about a dairywoman who stalked off into the woods at all hours with a gun on her shoulder and a face like a closed door, and someone named her The Wild Yoke, for the yoke of a farm animal that goes its own way against the team. Patience adopted the name and wore it with a wry pride. She hunted through the last years of the French wars on the frontier and the first years of the Revolution, taking a modest number of vampires around Andover, Haverhill, Methuen and the New Hampshire line, and her entries in the Red Ledger are plain: date, place, a description of the quarry and a single word of outcome. She was suspicious of the Proctors, who kept the White Ledger to the south and west, and she said in her own hand in one margin that she would believe in the Guest when a Proctor produced him and not before. Her second child, Caleb Bartlett Faulkner, was born in 1758, and grew up to be a slayer in his own right, taught in the old way in the pastures and by the forge fire. She raised both children to be wary and useful, and Sarah, who never took the calling, lived to old age until 1826. The plague that came upriver in 1784 took her in a fortnight. Caleb Bartlett survived her by a year, dying in 1785, and their son carried on the hunt until his own death in 1797. She lies in Andover's south burying ground. Later keepers of the Slayerverse remember her as the dairywoman whose calling began at a kitchen shutter and who never let the quarrel with her brother go out of her rifle sights.