Sally Faulkner Hale

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

Sally Faulkner Hale was born in 1783 in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lived seventy-two years as a midwife and, for forty of them, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book calls her The Bitter Sentinel, a name that irritated her, because she considered herself neither bitter nor a sentinel, and that stuck anyway. She was a Hunter, and her craft was Quarry Reading, the trained study of what a vampire leaves behind. She married the teamster Daniel Sevier in 1802, raised two children, buried her husband in 1821 and went on hunting well into her sixties. She died in 1855 of a stroke, the longest-lived of the Red Ledger's women of her generation. Her father, William Hale, was born in 1759 and died in 1799. He was a carpenter of the Connecticut valley, a gentle, unambitious man who built cradles, coffins and farm gates and who was killed when a scaffold gave way under him at a meeting house in Hadley. Her mother, Polly Faulkner, born in 1757 and dead in 1805, was a dairywoman who made cheese for the Northampton market, a spare, sharp-tongued woman with hands like leather. The Faulkner name came from her side, and the family custom gave it to her children, so that Sally grew up as a Faulkner though her father was a Hale. She had a younger brother, Gideon Hale Faulkner, born in 1787, who became a printer and who married the schoolteacher Hannah Dunlap. The Northampton of her childhood was a prosperous valley town of some fifteen hundred people, handsome and self-satisfied, with a broad main street, a courthouse, a stone-and-timber meeting house and a great many taverns. It had known a famous preacher, Jonathan Edwards, in the previous generation, and it had a long memory for sin. Its farms were rich, its mills were small, and its young women had few avenues open to them except marriage, teaching, sewing, dairying or midwifery. Sally, who was practical and unsentimental, took up the last. She was apprenticed at fifteen to an older midwife who had delivered half the town, a woman of few words who taught her by example. A midwife in New England at the turn of the century was a person of real consequence, who was called at all hours and in all weathers, who was trusted with the most private things and who was paid, when she was paid at all, in produce. Sally learned to judge a labour by the pulse and the colour, to turn a child, to clear an airway, to stop a haemorrhage and to lay out the dead. She also learned the thing that all good midwives learn, to keep her own counsel. By eighteen she had delivered her first baby alone, in a snowstorm. She married Daniel Sevier in 1802, at nineteen. He was a teamster from Worcester, cheerful, wiry and unflappable, and they had two children, Ida Faulkner, born in 1803 and dead in 1845, and Albert Faulkner, born in 1807 and dead in 1854. She carried on her practice through both pregnancies and was, in her husband's words, the only woman in the county who delivered other people's babies while waiting for her own. The family lived half on the road and half on the hearth, and she took to the arrangement well, because the road brought news and the hearth kept her steady. Her calling came in 1815, when she was thirty-two, on a lonely road. She was returning from a confinement at a farm in the hills when a coach appeared ahead of her in the dusk, drawn by four horses. It was the kind of coach that carried passengers between the valley towns, and it had a driver on the box, but as it came abreast of her she saw that there was no one inside, that the windows were dark and that the horses were wet with sweat as if they had been driven hard for a great distance. The driver did not look at her. She stood at the side of the road with her bag in her hand and watched it disappear. Then she walked on, found a cousin who was a Faulkner hunter and described what she had seen. What she had seen, it turned out, was a coach that was used to carry something other than passengers, and the discovery launched her career. The Ledger records that she tracked the thing down in a month, and that she was the only person in the Northampton circle who could have done it, because she was the only one who had spent her life attending people in the small hours. Quarry Reading came naturally to her. A midwife learns to read a room in a moment, the set of a bed, the state of the fire, the face of the husband, and Sally applied the same attention to a barn, a cellar or a stretch of road. She could tell from a trampled bed of straw how long a vampire had lain up in it and in which direction it had gone. Her gear was silver-cast shot and a revolving pistol of the new kind, which a Springfield armourer had made for her, and which she carried in her midwife's bag under the flannel. The Ledger credits her with more than fifty vampires, taken over forty years, in the valley and across the hill towns. She never hurried and she never boasted. She gave the impression that the work was a kind of extended midwifery, bringing things to an end that had gone on too long. The nickname, which she disliked, was given to her by a hunter who had watched her stand for four hours in a snowed-in churchyard, waiting for something to come out. Daniel's death in 1821 was a blow, but she took it with the same quiet with which she took most things. She kept his wagon for a few years, hiring out the horses, and then sold it. Her practice went on. She delivered a third generation of the valley's babies, taught her grandchildren to read the signs of a good or a bad labour and kept up her night rounds until the winter of 1854, when her son Albert died and she stopped. She died in the following spring, in 1855, of a stroke, aged seventy-two. Sally Faulkner Hale is remembered as The Bitter Sentinel, the midwife who read a barn the way she read a bedchamber. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who came to the work late, in the middle of a life already full of other duties, and did it better than most.