Ephraim Faulkner Cole

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

Ephraim Faulkner Cole kept a shop, and a shop in eighteenth-century Massachusetts was where a town told the truth about itself. He was born in 1749 in Newbury, Massachusetts, and died in the hard winter of 1796, at forty-seven, having spent his adult life behind a counter weighing out tea, measuring cloth and remembering who owed what. He was of the House of Faulkner by blood, a cadet descendant of Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, but he was not called and did not hunt. His trade gave the Red Ledger's hunters something they valued as highly as a rifle, which was reliable news of the road. He was the younger child of Obadiah Faulkner Cole, a carpenter born in 1723, and Lucy Osgood, a herbalist born in 1725. He had one sister, Rachel Cole, four years his senior, and the two were close all their lives. The family had moved north from the fishing town of Marblehead to Newbury by the time of his birth, and it was in the rambling lanes of that river town, with its shipyards, its salt marshes and its long High Street of merchants' houses, that he grew up. His father built and mended houses, barns and wharves. His mother made physic from roots and leaves and was known as a woman who could be sent for at any hour. He grew up with the smell of cedar shavings in one part of the house and steeping herbs in another. Both his parents knew what the family was, and neither concealed it from the children beyond what caution required. Ephraim was a lively, talkative, rather vain boy, fond of a good coat and quick with a joke. He had no aptitude for his father's trade, having, as Obadiah put it, a carpenter's ambition and a merchant's hands. At fourteen he was placed as a clerk in a dry-goods store in Newburyport, a harbour town where ships arrived from the West Indies with molasses, sugar and rum and left with lumber, fish and barrel staves. There he learned the business of a storekeeper: how to keep an account book, how to bargain with a ship's captain, how to judge the quality of a bolt of cloth by feel, and how to extend credit to a farmer against the next harvest without being cheated. He learned to reckon in pounds, shillings and pence and in the multiple kinds of paper and coin that circulated. He also learned that gossip travelled faster than the mails and was often more accurate. By his early twenties he had saved enough to open a small shop of his own, on the main road to the interior. He stocked nails, thread, pins, powder and shot, rum, tea, molasses, salt, and the coarse woollens that farmers liked. He kept a ledger of his own, an ordinary account book that grew fat and dog-eared, in which the debts of half the county were recorded in a hand more elegant than the local schoolmaster's. It was a very different book from the Red Ledger, but the two were more closely connected than either of them looked. The connection was simple. A Faulkner slayer on the road needed to know where a creature had last been seen, who had gone missing, whose cattle had been found drained and whose dogs had turned strange. A storekeeper heard all of these things, because everybody came to the store. Ephraim listened, and he remembered. When a cousin passed through he would sit him down by the stove and repeat what he had heard over the counter: a drover's tale of a man found dead by the road with no wound to account for it, a widow's talk of a lodger who never came down in the daytime. He made no claim to be a hunter, and his contribution to the Red Ledger was recorded, when it was recorded at all, as information given. In 1773 he married Keziah Woodbury, a farmer's daughter from Worcester who was six years his senior. She was a sturdy, sensible woman with a sharp tongue and a great capacity for work, and the marriage suited them both. She kept the household and the dairy, and he kept the shop. Their sons were born within three years. Daniel Faulkner Cole arrived in 1774 and Jacob Cole in 1776. Daniel was called, and became a slayer of the Red Ledger, and Jacob became a man of business and outlived them all. Ephraim was, by all accounts, a doting and rather indulgent father, who let his boys play among the barrels in the shop and gave them sugar plums from the jar. The Revolution complicated his business. In the spring of 1775, when the alarm came, he shut his shop for a week and marched with the militia toward Cambridge, though he was no soldier and was back at the counter within the month. The war closed the sea trade, choked the roads with troops and made goods scarce. Paper money lost its value from year to year, and he was often paid in promises. He learned to barter, to hold stock back for better prices, and to write off debts that would never be paid. At one point he kept the family going for a whole winter by trading flour for stockings. He supplied the army with what he could and was never fully repaid, a grievance he nursed for the rest of his life. His mother Lucy died in 1775 and his father Obadiah in 1796, in the same hard winter that took Ephraim himself. The winter of that year was long and bitter. Snow lay deep on the roads and the shop was cold, and Ephraim, who had never been robust, took a chill that settled on his chest and did not lift. He died before the thaw, aged forty-seven. His sister Rachel and his wife Keziah nursed him through the last weeks, and Keziah, who lived only two more years, kept the shop running until Jacob could take it over. His ledgers survived him, and the family kept them. The Red Ledger does not carry his name, but the hunters who passed his counter knew what he had done for them. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as Ephraim Faulkner Cole, the storekeeper of Newbury, who heard everything and repeated it to the right people.