Reuben Endicott spent half of every year on a horse. Born in 1754 in Springfield, Massachusetts, he became a circuit preacher, one of the itinerant ministers who carried sermons, baptisms and burial services along the back roads of New England to congregations too small or too scattered to keep a pastor of their own. In 1780 he married Naomi Lord Faulkner, a schoolteacher and a vampire slayer of the Lancastrian house, and thereafter his saddlebags carried more than hymnals. Few people saw as much of the countryside where the Faulkners hunted, and few understood so well why the hunting was needed.
Springfield in the 1750s was a river town at the head of the Connecticut's navigable stretch, a place of wharves, ferries and warehouses where the north-south river traffic met the east-west road from Boston to Albany. Its meetinghouse stood on the main street facing the common, and its burying ground held the graves of the first settlers, who had come in the 1630s and had nearly lost the town to fire and attack in King Philip's War. Reuben grew up in a modest household of the kind that formed the backbone of the place, one that farmed a few acres, did a little trading, and paid its pew rent on time. The family's religion was Congregationalist, but the revival preaching of the 1740s had left the town divided between the older, more formal ministers and the fervent New Lights who spoke of conversion as a wound that had to be felt. Reuben absorbed both. He had a deep respect for scripture and a suspicion of any sermon that did not make the listener uneasy.
His youth was marked by two vocations, one of which he identified early and the other of which had to be found. He knew by his middle teens that he wished to preach, and he walked to Northampton to hear ministers and lay exhorters speak, memorising their cadences. He taught himself to read Greek from a borrowed testament, worked as a clerk in a Springfield warehouse to earn his keep, and was received as a licensed exhorter by a group of ministers before he was twenty. He was a tall, gaunt young man with deep-set eyes and a strong baritone, and people who heard him at the ferry landing or the market said that he sounded as if he was speaking to one person at a time. What he lacked was a congregation. There were no pulpits vacant that would take a young man with no college degree and unconventional views, so he began to ride.
The circuit was a demanding life. In the 1770s and 1780s the hill towns of western Massachusetts and the settlements north along the river were scattered, muddy and often isolated by weather. A preacher on horseback might cover two hundred miles in a round, sleeping in farmhouses, taverns and barns, preaching in kitchens, schoolhouses and the open air, baptising infants in parlours and burying the dead in fields. His pay was a few shillings, a meal and a bed, often less. Reuben carried a Bible, a hymn book, a change of linen, a pistol he never fired and a pocket notebook in which he recorded every household he visited. The war made the work harder. Congregations were divided over the Revolution, men were absent in the army, and roads were half-abandoned. Reuben, who supported the patriot cause without enthusiasm for its rhetoric, preached to soldiers' wives and to the bereaved, and kept a private list of the dead.
He met Naomi Lord Faulkner on one of those roads. Born in 1757, she was the schoolteacher in a hill town on the western edge of the Connecticut Valley, and he stopped at the schoolhouse one autumn afternoon in 1779 to ask for a meal and stayed for a week, snowed in. She had a quick mind, a decided manner and an unusual way of standing near doors, and it did not take him long to discover that she was also a slayer. He found her one evening cleaning a long rifle at the schoolroom stove and, having the nerve of a man who preached to sinners, asked her plainly what she was hunting. She told him, without ornament. He sat silent for some time, then said that he had heard a similar account from a farm wife in Colrain the year before and had put it down to grief. They were married in 1780, in the meetinghouse at Springfield, with the usual publishing of banns, and the ceremony was performed by the same minister who had licensed Reuben as an exhorter.
The marriage was an unusual one, and it worked. Naomi kept school for much of each year and hunted where and when the ledger required; Reuben rode his circuit and became, without any intention of doing so, the family's eyes and ears across a third of the state. He heard of missing livestock, of strangers who did not eat, of graves found disturbed. He was welcome in every kitchen, and he listened, and he carried what he heard back to his wife. She, in turn, gave him a purpose that his ministry had not always supplied. He came to believe that pastoral care and hunting were the same work, done from two sides: one comforted the living, the other kept the dead from returning to prey on them. He never carried a rifle himself, but he preached several sermons, in the years that followed, that his congregations found strangely sharp about the reality of evil.
Two children were born. Joshua Endicott Faulkner arrived in 1782 and Deborah Faulkner Endicott in 1786, in the household's custom of passing the family name through whichever line it favoured; neither took up the calling. Joshua grew up to be a steady, practical man and died in 1829. Deborah, who was to outlive nearly everyone of her generation, died in 1863. Reuben was often away at the time of both births and learned of them by letter, and the guilt of it was one of the few subjects on which he would say nothing. He made up for it in later years by taking the children with him on short stretches of the circuit and teaching them to ride.
His wife died in 1823, and the loss emptied his house. He continued to preach for several years, though age and rheumatism made the saddle a punishment, and he began to hand his rounds to younger men. In the winter of 1829 to 1830, one of the harshest in living memory, with snow to the eaves and rivers frozen solid, he was called to a burying in a distant hill town and rode out against advice. He caught a chill on the road, took to his bed in a farmhouse and did not leave it. He died in 1830, aged seventy-six, of what his neighbours called a hard winter.
His notebooks, thick with the names of households and the tallies of sermons, passed to Deborah and were consulted by the family for decades afterwards. In the wider Slayerverse he is remembered as the preacher who married a slayer and whose long rides supplied the Faulkners with news from every corner of the hills.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
