Benjamin Thayer

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

Benjamin Thayer was born in 1777 in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the old frontier town on the Connecticut River, and he spent sixty years on the roads of western New England as a teamster. He was not a vampire slayer and never claimed to be one, but he married one, Naomi Adams Faulkner, in 1801, and for twenty years the two of them ran a household in which a wagon and a hunting rifle shared the same shed. He outlived her by twenty-four years and died in 1845 of a fever, aged sixty-eight, having watched the railroad arrive to take away the trade he had followed all his life. Deerfield gave him his sense of history. The town had been raided by a French and Indian war party in the winter of 1704, when fifty of its people were killed and more than a hundred taken captive on a forced march to Canada, and the raid was still the defining story of the place. The old houses, pocked with hatchet marks, were pointed out to visitors. The Thayers lived among them on the long main street, under elms that were already old, in a farmhouse with a big central chimney and a view of the meadows where the river flooded every spring. A boy who grew up there learned that history could knock at the door, and that the defence of a town depended on men and women who were ready. He was the kind of boy who preferred horses to books. By the age of twelve he was driving a two-ox team on the family farm, and by sixteen he was hauling loads for hire. The trade of teamster was a hard and honest one in the decades after the Revolution, when the roads were rutted tracks and the great freight business of the country moved on wagons. A Connecticut valley teamster carried flour, grain, potash, lumber, barrels of cider and pork to Boston and Hartford and brought back salt, molasses, iron, rum and dry goods. A heavy wagon with a six-horse team could haul three tons, with luck, at fifteen miles a day. The teamster slept under the wagon, fed his horses first, patched his own harness and knew every tavern from Albany to the coast. Benjamin was a large, slow, good-natured man, with a broad face, big hands and a dry way of speaking that took a moment to understand. His horses loved him. He had a team of greys that would walk through a snowstorm if he asked them to, and he could back a loaded wagon into a barn door with an inch to spare. Among teamsters he was known for never overloading and never abusing his animals, and there were farmers in five counties who would wait a week for his wagon rather than hire a faster driver. He met Naomi Adams Faulkner in the autumn of 1799 at her general store in Concord, where he had stopped to deliver a load of barrels. She was twenty-five, tall, watchful and unhurried, and she kept the counter with the air of a woman who had seen every trick a customer could try. He made three trips that month. She teased him for being a man who found reasons to drive to Concord, and he said he was a man who had found a reason. They were married in 1801, in the Concord meeting house, with her father Caleb Faulkner, the famous courier of the Lexington ride, giving her away. It took Benjamin some time to understand his wife's second occupation. He noticed that she kept a long box under the counter, that she was up at odd hours, that she sometimes came home with mud on her skirts and once with a torn sleeve. She told him, one night in the second winter of their marriage, what it was, with her rifle across her knees and the lantern turned low. He listened to the end, said nothing for a while, and then asked what she wanted him to do. She said she wanted him to be there in the morning. He said that he had always meant to be. What he did was practical. He carried her rifle in the wagon when she needed to travel. He took messages between the Faulkner cousins in the valley and on the coast, which no stranger could have done without raising questions, because a teamster was expected to be everywhere. He learned to read a road for what had passed along it, and to say nothing when a passenger who had asked for a ride disappeared at a crossroads. He sat up with her on the nights when she was out, and he kept the shop when she was away. Their daughter Ada Faulkner was born in 1803, took her mother's name by the family custom, and was called in time to the work as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger; she lived until 1878. Their son Horace Thayer Faulkner was born in 1806, did not hunt, and followed his mother into the shop, which he ran after her death; he died in 1856. Benjamin raised them both on the road, taking them along on short trips as children, and Ada in particular grew up with the sound of hooves and the smell of harness. She said later that her first lessons in watching the dark had been given from the seat of her father's wagon. The long stretch of his working life was the great age of the turnpike and the canal. In the 1820s the Erie Canal opened and the freight began to move by water; in the 1830s the steam railways began to reach out from Boston, and by the early 1840s a line was laid up the Connecticut valley. Benjamin, who had seen three generations of roads, watched his trade die. He sold his wagon in 1842 and worked for a few years as a livery keeper in Deerfield, hiring out horses to travellers, and he was the last man in the valley to drive a six-horse team for a living. His wife's death in 1821, after a long night on the marsh, was the great grief of his life. He never remarried, and he kept her rifle oiled, in its long box, on a peg in the barn. He died in 1845, aged sixty-eight, of a fever caught on a wet November road, and his son and daughter buried him in the old Deerfield burying ground, a few steps from the graves of the raid. Benjamin Thayer is remembered as the teamster husband of The Slow Lantern, the man who drove the wagon and kept the secret. In the Slayerverse he is honoured as one of the steady, unglamorous spouses whose practical loyalty kept the Red Ledger's hunters on the road.