Phebe Brewster

Spouse of Joseph Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Phebe Brewster was born in 1749 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a Merrimack River town of meetinghouse spires, ropewalks and brick-yards, and she spent nearly every one of her forty-nine years within sight of its water. She was a shopkeeper by trade and by temperament, and she married into the Faulkner family in 1780, taking as her husband the blacksmith Joseph Faulkner. The Faulkners, the Lancastrian house that keeps the Red Ledger, were not a family that announced its business to neighbours. Phebe learned it slowly, at her own counter, and made herself useful to it without ever carrying a rifle. The Haverhill of her girlhood was a working town before it was a pretty one. The river brought in West Indies molasses and rum on shallow-draft sloops, and carried out barrel staves, hoops, salted fish and cordwood. Farms lay behind the wharves in long strips running back from the water, and the road to Newbury and Boston was rutted in spring and iron-hard in January. Phebe grew up among the small transactions that keep such a place alive: a tally of eggs against a length of calico, a shilling of credit carried from one harvest to the next, a barrel of flour lent between neighbours and remembered for twenty years. Money in the colony was a tangle of pounds, shillings and pence, of Spanish dollars and clipped silver, and every shopkeeper had to be part accountant and part diplomat. Phebe was good at both. She could carry a column of figures in her head and knew, without being told, which customers would pay in October and which would need to be asked twice. She opened her shop in a front room near the landing, with a counter cut down from a ship's hatch cover and shelves that she painted herself. It sold thread, pins, tea when tea could be had, brown sugar, tallow candles, buttons, ribbon, gunflints and the dozen small necessities of a farming household. It was also, in the way of country shops, a kind of exchange for news. Boatmen brought word of the river, farm wives brought word of their neighbours, and travellers bound up the valley to Dunstable and beyond told her what they had seen on the road. Phebe listened more than she spoke. She was a tall, spare woman with a level gaze and a habit of wiping the counter while people talked, so that they felt heard without feeling watched. It was a useful habit in a family whose real work depended on knowing which rumours were only rumours. The Revolution came to her as it came to most Massachusetts shopkeepers, as a squeeze on stock and a crisis of trust. When the boycott of British goods began, her shelves thinned; when the war followed, coin vanished and the paper currency of the Continental Congress and the province lost value month by month, until a hard-won pound of sugar cost a pocketful of bills nobody wanted. Haverhill sent men to the militia and to the army camps around Boston, and the town's women kept the farms, the ferries and the shops going. Phebe kept hers open through the worst of it, taking barter where she had to, keeping a private book of debts that she never entirely called in, and once hiding a keg of powder under a false floor of flour barrels for a militia company that could not afford to store it in the meetinghouse. She was twenty-six when the fighting began and in her early thirties when the town ran shortest of everything, and she came out of those years with a reputation as someone whose word held when the currency did not. It was in the middle of that war that she met Joseph Faulkner, five years her junior, a blacksmith born in the same town in 1754. Joseph was the son of the boatman Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner and the herbalist Eunice Dow, and he had a smith's forearms and a smith's patience. He came into her shop to buy nails in bulk for a job and stayed to argue with her about the price of iron. Courtship, such as it was, consisted of a long series of errands. He mended her shop door hinge and would not be paid for it; she began setting aside the good needles and the sound horseshoe nails for him. They were married in 1780, when she was thirty-one and he twenty-six, an age gap that the town remarked upon briefly and then forgot. The wedding was held in the meetinghouse, with the usual publishing of banns beforehand and a plain supper afterwards at which Joseph's mother, Eunice, distributed little bundles of dried herbs to the guests as luck-tokens. The Faulkner side of the marriage was not something Joseph explained on the wedding day. It came out over the first winter, in pieces. There were the family's ledgers, the Red Ledger above all, kept by the house for generations and now, in a Massachusetts kitchen, consulted by candlelight. There was the old grievance with the Proctors, and the still older matter of a creature the ledgers called only the Guest. There were relatives who visited at odd seasons and left again, and a shared habit of sitting with their backs to walls. Phebe was neither shocked nor entirely surprised. A woman who has kept a shop through a war has heard a great many stories that turned out to be true. What she made of the Faulkner business was practical: she set herself to be the household's steady centre, the one who kept its accounts honest, its cellars stocked and its comings and goings unremarkable. When a Faulkner cousin turned up wet through at midnight, she knew, without asking, that there would be a need for dry clothing and no questions until morning. Her forge-side household was a busy one. Joseph worked at his anvil by the road with a leather apron and a hooded fire, shoeing horses, hooping barrels, mending ploughshares and hanging gates, while Phebe minded the shop and the account books. Their first son, Nathaniel Brewster Faulkner, was born in 1782, named for his paternal grandfather, and a second, Jacob Brewster Faulkner, followed in 1783. Nathaniel grew into a quiet, careful boy who was never called to the family's harder trade, and he died in 1827. Jacob was different from the start, restless and watchful, and the calling found him in his time, making him the family's vampire slayer of the next generation and dying in 1830. Phebe did not live to see either grown man in full. She raised them with the same even hand she used at the counter, teaching both to read a column of figures and to keep an honest book, and telling Jacob in particular that a tally was worth nothing if it was padded. She managed the practical side of the family's secret without ever being mistaken for a slayer. She wrapped supplies in the coarse brown paper of the shop, sold silver thimbles and spoons at a fair price to people who did not ask why she kept an eye out for such things, and stored a long rifle behind the flour for whichever Faulkner cousin next came through. She kept a small ledger of her own, in her own hand, of favours given and returned. It was not the Red Ledger, and no one ever confused the two, but the habit of careful record that runs through the family owed something to her. Phebe Brewster died in 1798, aged forty-nine, of a fever that went through Haverhill that year and took a number of the town's older householders with it. She had worked at her counter until the week before, and the shop was left orderly, with the day-book balanced to the last penny. She was buried in the town burying ground, and Joseph, who lived another thirty-two years and died in 1830 after a fall from a horse, never remarried. In the family's memory she is remembered less as a figure in the Red Ledger than as the woman whose kitchen and shopfront made the house's work possible. Within the wider Slayerverse she stands for the unarmed half of the tradition, the people who kept accounts, kept doors and kept the peace so that others could hunt.