Elijah Sagar

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Winter killed Elijah Sagar, but it took its time about it. He was born in 1718 at Haverhill, Massachusetts, on the bend of the Merrimack where the river turns from a fast country stream into a broad tidal one, and he died in 1779 at sixty-one, when a hard winter of the Revolution's fourth year finally closed on a man who had spent his whole life outdoors. He was a farmer, he never married, and he had no children. He was a Faulkner in descent through a family name that had travelled through the female line, and though he was no slayer the Red Ledger lists him among the household who held the farmstead steady through a long war and a longer decline. Haverhill in his boyhood was a river town with a meetinghouse on the hill, a ferry at the landing, a shipyard building sloops and small brigs on the flats and farms spread back along the roads to Bradford and Methuen. The fields were mown for salt hay on the marshes and planted with rye, oats and corn on the higher ground, and the orchards produced cider by the barrel. It was a plain, frugal, argumentative place, with its share of ministers who could preach for two hours and men who could complain for three. His father, George Faulkner Sagar, was a ferryman, one of those weather-cured men who spend their lives on a rope and a flat boat and know every mood of a river, and his mother, Jane Bradford, was a shopkeeper's wife, keeping the counter of a store at the landing where farmers traded wool and cheese for tea, nails and molasses. Elijah was the older child. His sister Susanna Faulkner Sagar was born in 1722, four years after him, and the two grew up between the landing and the shop, running errands, minding the ferry rope, and hearing the talk of every traveller who crossed. The ferry was a hard living, and George was the sort of man who did not so much work as endure it. His hands were scarred with rope-burn, his back bent early, and his temper became shorter as the winters lengthened. Elijah learned to handle a flat boat at twelve, and to read ice at thirteen, and by fifteen he had a good idea that he did not want to spend his life on a rope. His father died in 1739, when Elijah was twenty-one, and Susanna seventeen. The ferry lease passed elsewhere. Their mother Jane, a capable woman in her early forties, kept the shop going for as long as she could, and Elijah, who had no particular love of counters, turned to the land instead. He rented a few acres from a relative on the upland road, built a shed, and over the years bought the acreage outright, paying it off with the proceeds of cider, hay and hired labour. By the time he was thirty he owned a modest farm of forty acres with a low house, a barn, an orchard and a wood lot. He was a lean, weathered, grey-eyed man with a thin mouth and a slow, gentle drawl, who was known in the town as a fair dealer and a tolerable fiddler. His connection with the family's work was of a piece with the rest of his life, indirect and dutiful. The Faulkner cousins who moved around the Merrimack valley, the preachers, coopers and hunters, knew that Elijah's barn was a safe place, and his ferry-bred knowledge of the river was valuable. A man who had grown up on a rope knew where the current ran, where the ice broke first, and which crossings were used by people who did not want to be seen. When a Faulkner slayer needed to know if a stranger had crossed at night, or where a body might have been carried by the tide, it was Elijah they asked. He did not carry a rifle. He was called on several times to hold a lantern, and once to row a boat, and afterwards he said very little about it, and kept his door unlatched. He never married, and the family had several theories about why. His sister said that he had once courted a girl in Bradford who chose a sea captain. A cousin said that he was simply too fond of his own company. His mother, in one of her later letters, remarked that he had been born with a rope in one hand and a book in the other and had never learned to put either down. The truth may be simpler. A bachelor farmer in a New England town was not unusual, particularly one who had looked after a widowed mother, and Elijah kept Jane in his house from the mid 1740s until her death in 1761. He nursed her through her last winter with the same patience he gave to lambing ewes. The wars with France on the frontier drew Haverhill's young men into the militia in the 1740s and 1750s, and Elijah, by then in his thirties, marched with the company more than once, though he was a mediocre soldier and a superb forager. He served a season on the northern frontier in the 1750s, and returned with a limp and a horror of powder smoke. He was in no way a fighter, but he had a great sense of what a farm could supply and how far an army travelled on its stomach. When the Revolution came he was in his fifties, too old to march, and he served the cause in the way that the older farmers of the Merrimack valley did, by selling grain to the commissary at a fixed price, by billeting soldiers, and by sending his hired man to the muster. Those war years were hard on the countryside. Continental paper money lost its value, prices soared, the tax collector called more often than the doctor, and the winters were cold. The winter of 1779 was cold beyond recall, the one still remembered in New England as the hard winter, when snow lay deep from November and the Merrimack froze thick enough to bear loaded sledges. Elijah, who insisted on tending his stock personally, caught a chill in the first week of December and never shook it. He died that winter, at sixty-one, in the farmhouse on the upland road. His sister Susanna, who had married and lived nearby, sat with him. The farm passed to a nephew by marriage and out of the family's hands within a decade. The Red Ledger has no entry for Elijah Sagar in its columns of tallies. It has a note added by a later keeper in the margin of a page for the 1750s, recording that the river was watched by a man who never asked to be thanked. In the Slayerverse histories he is one of those quiet figures who show how much of the hunt lay outside the hunters, in a lantern held, a boat rowed and a door left unlatched by a ferryman's son who preferred the land.