Ephraim Cole

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

Ephraim Cole rode more miles on horseback than most men of colonial Massachusetts walked, and he preached at the end of nearly all of them. He was born in 1701 in Newbury, Massachusetts, a shipbuilding and farming town on the Merrimack estuary where the smell of tar and salt marsh hay hung over the meeting-house green, and he died in 1766, aged 65, of a fever. Between those years he became a circuit preacher, a man without a settled pulpit who carried the word from parish to parish, and he married into the Faulkner line, whose ledger and rivalries he learned to live beside without ever claiming to understand them fully. The Faulkners always spoke of him as the only man in the family who could quiet a room by opening a book. Nothing survives in the Red Ledger about his own parents, and the family remembered him as a man whose people stayed in the background of his story. He grew up in the Newbury of the early eighteenth century, in a town still shaped by its Puritan founding. The meeting-house stood at the centre of things, Sabbath observance was enforced by the tithingman, and the winter was long and hard. Boys of his class learned their letters from a dame school and the Psalter, then a little Latin if the minister thought them promising. Ephraim was promising. He had a good ear, a strong plain voice and a habit of learning passages by heart, and by his teens he was helping a minister of the neighbourhood with the lesser services and the copying of sermons. He did not go through Harvard, as a settled minister would have done, and the lack of a degree closed the doors of the established pulpits to him. That fact made him what he became: a preacher of the roads. In 1720, at the age of nineteen, he married Rebecca Faulkner of Ipswich, a milliner who was eighteen or nineteen herself and had already built a small trade in hats, ribbons and hoods for the wives of merchants and captains. The match came out of a meeting at a lecture-day gathering, where he had been the young man who read the scripture and she had been in the row of women who could not stop watching his hands. The Faulkner side of the family brought a good deal of gentle reserve to the marriage, and the household at first tolerated the young preacher with a mixture of pride and suspicion. Rebecca's people knew their own history, including the hunting business, and they wondered whether a man who spent his days on the road could be trusted with any of it. He was, as it turned out, and better than most. He never asked a question he had been told not to ask, and he never repeated to a stranger what he had seen at the table when the Faulkner cousins came to talk. Their two sons were born in the first decade of the marriage. Obadiah Faulkner Cole came in 1723, and he lived until 1796, a long life which took him through the whole of the Revolution. William Faulkner Cole followed in 1727 and died in 1775, and he was the one who took up the family's hidden work as a slayer. The double surname was a Faulkner custom, and Ephraim did not resist it; he bore the sight of his sons carrying Rebecca's family name after his own with equanimity. Obadiah, the eldest, turned toward the steady trades of the coast, and William turned toward the woods, the muster field and the cellar hole at midnight. Ephraim's role in this was to teach them what he could: the Bible, a fair hand at writing, and the discipline of sitting still in a cold room until it was time to speak. He was away a great deal. A circuit preacher in those years travelled on a horse with a pair of saddlebags, a Bible, a small case of sermons, a change of linen, and a razor. He worked the towns of the north shore and the inland farms, crossing into New Hampshire and out toward the Connecticut valley, staying with whatever family would take him and preaching in barns, kitchens, meeting-houses and, when the weather allowed, under the trees. The wars with France on the frontier were never far from his road, and he had the sad duty of burying men who had gone north with the militia and come home in a wagon. He preached at raising bees and at mourning suppers, and he spent one long autumn among refugees from the raided settlements, writing letters for people who could not write. He heard confessions of a sort, though he was no Catholic, and folk told him things at the end of a long day that they had told nobody else. That habit gave him, quite by accident, an unusual value to his wife's family. A man who is trusted in a hundred kitchens hears of strange happenings. He learned to listen for the particular kind of story that had a Faulkner shape: the pale stranger at a cellar door, the cattle found bloodless in the morning, the family that would not open their shutters after dark. He would write these down in a small notebook and, on his return to Ipswich, hand them across to Rebecca, who passed them on to the cousins. He kept no ledger himself, and he never claimed to hold a place in the tally, but there are entries in the Red Ledger from the 1730s and 1740s that carry a small mark in the margin, a cross and a letter E, which the family took to mean that the report had come by way of Ephraim. The years of the religious revival, when the great itinerant preachers filled the fields and split the churches, were hard on a man like him. Some of his own hearers turned against the itinerants, and some turned against the established clergy, and Ephraim, who was no firebrand, was pulled between them. He was blamed by one faction for enthusiasm and by another for coldness. Rebecca held the household together through all of it, running her millinery shop out of the front room and sending bonnets to Boston by the coasting sloops, and it was in that shop, more than at any pulpit, that his family remembered him: at the table by the window, with his coat off, reading a sermon aloud while she stitched. His last years were quieter. Age took away the long rides and left him with a smaller circle of parishes near home, where he was received as a familiar and slightly stooped figure. In 1766 a fever took him, and he died aged 65 after a short illness, in the house he had spent so little of his life inside. Rebecca outlived him by six years, dying in 1772. The Faulkners who came after him were slow to place him in the family story, since he had never kept a ledger and had never hunted, but the phrase in the Red Ledger's margin, the cross and the letter E, is still cited by scholars of the Slayerverse as an early example of how the families relied on trusted outsiders to carry their news across a country with few roads and fewer secrets.