Amos Whittier

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

Amos Whittier was born in 1738 at Andover, Massachusetts, and lived forty-five years as a carpenter, husband and father in a town that valued all three. He was not a Faulkner by blood and never held a slayer's calling, but in 1762 he married one, Betsey Whittier Faulkner, and spent the remainder of his life inside the working machinery of the Red Ledger house. He died in 1783 of a fall from a horse, leaving a widow and two daughters, one of whom would become a hunter herself. The Whittiers of Andover were a numerous and respectable clan of farmers and tradesmen, with a family name that turned up in half the pews of the meetinghouse. Amos was raised among them, in a household that lived by the seasons: plowing and haying in summer, threshing and wood-cutting in the cold. His people were plain Congregationalists who held that work was a form of prayer, and that a badly made gate was a small sin. He showed an early aptitude for wood, and at fourteen he was bound to a housewright in the next parish for a term of years, learning to frame barns, lay clapboard and cut a rafter to pitch. It was heavy, dangerous work, done with broad axe, adze and pit saw, and the frames were raised by whole neighbourhoods with rum and a hired fiddler at the end of the day. By his early twenties he was building on his own account. Andover was expanding in those years, with new farmhouses, meeting rooms and mills, and the French war brought a demand for barracks, wagons and gun carriages. He was a tall, easygoing man with a soft voice and a habit of whistling hymn tunes through his teeth as he worked, which annoyed no one. He had a reputation for square corners and for finishing when he said he would. He was also, as neighbours remarked, curiously incurious, in that he never asked why the widow Faulkner's house needed so many locks. He met Betsey Whittier Faulkner through his trade. She was a milliner, born in 1739, and kept a shop room in her family's house where she sold caps, ribbons and straw bonnets, and Amos was hired to build shelving for it. The job took a month longer than promised. She was a quick, direct woman with a firm grip and a clear view of what she wanted, and he was, as he later admitted to a brother, entirely lost within a week. She was also, as he discovered in stages, a vampire slayer of the Faulkner house, which explained the locks, the silver in the cash drawer and the tendency of her hours to shift toward evening. He took the knowledge with a long silence and then a shrug. He asked only that she tell him before she went out, and that she come back. They married in 1762, when he was twenty-four and she twenty-three, in the meetinghouse at Andover with a wedding dinner in the Faulkner kitchen. The Whittier and Faulkner kin found themselves seated at the same long table, and the conversation was cautious. It was a curious fact of the alliance that Betsey's family name and Amos's were the same, and that her children, by the custom of the family that let surnames pass through the women, would carry the name into another generation in a form that visitors found confusing. Their first daughter was Betsey Faulkner Whittier, born in 1763, and their second was Elizabeth Faulkner, born in 1766. The household he built for them stood at the edge of town, a two-storey frame house with a central chimney and a workshop attached. He designed it with a hunter's household in mind. There was a back stair that opened into the cellar, shutters with inside bars, and a low door behind the kitchen chimney that led into the barn. In the workshop he kept a bench and a small forge for nails and hinges, and under the bench a strongbox of shot moulds. Betsey said that no man in Massachusetts had ever built a house with so little discussion of its purpose. He did the work as he did everything, without comment and to the last detail. His life ran alongside hers rather than through it. He did not hunt, but he kept the horses shod and the wagon greased, and on nights when she went out he sat up with the children. He mended the wooden parts of her kit, restocking a rifle, planing a new hilt, and fitting a sling. Some nights, when she came home late, they sat at the kitchen table and said nothing much, which was how each of them preferred it. He knew the Faulkner Red Ledger well enough to help her copy an entry, and he had opinions about the Proctors, which he kept to himself. When a Proctor cousin passed through in 1769 on a wagon trip and stopped to ask directions, he gave them, then added a piece of advice about a broken bridge that saved the man a day, and the Proctors remembered it. The wars and politics of his time touched him as a tradesman. The French war ended in 1763, the year his first daughter was born, and it was followed by a decade of hard money, Stamp Act protests and rising tempers. He was among the Andover men who signed the non-importation agreements, and in 1775 he was building a gun carriage for the local militia, in a shed lit by lanterns. He was thirty-seven, too old for the line, and did what he could with his hands, which was a great deal. In 1783 he was riding home from a job on the far side of the parish, on a horse he had owned for six years, when the animal shied at a loose dog on an icy road and threw him against a stone wall. He died that night at forty-five. Betsey lived on until 1799 and never remarried, and the daughters carried on, Betsey Faulkner Whittier as a slayer until her death in 1807 and Elizabeth Faulkner as a quiet housewife until 1812. The Red Ledger's margin notes that the Andover house was built by Amos Whittier and never bettered. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the carpenter husband who built the house that made a hunter's marriage possible.