Ezekiel Faulkner Cooke

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

Ezekiel Faulkner Cooke set type for a living, and a slayer's family found that a printer, of all people, can be useful. He was born in 1704 in Andover, Massachusetts, the second child of the saddler Denys Cooke and the widow Hannah Faulkner, and he died in 1746, aged 42, of an accident on the fells. The word fells is odd in New England, where the hills are called hills, and it was a Lancashire word that the Faulkners carried across the ocean with their spelling and their stubbornness, using it for any bare, steep upland pasture. It was on such a slope above a Massachusetts valley that his life ended. His birth put him between two brothers of very different temper. His elder brother was Denys Faulkner, born in 1702, who became a wheelwright and a slayer. Behind him came Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, who also took the calling, and Hezekiah Cooke, born in 1719, the baby of the house, who never did. Their father Denys Cooke, born in 1676, made saddles and harness and died in 1736; their mother Hannah Faulkner, born in 1678, was a farmer's widow who insisted on keeping the Faulkner name for her children, and who lived until 1751. The Cooke and Faulkner names ran through the family like two threads in a plait, and Ezekiel wore both, a Cooke by his father and a Faulkner by his mother and, as he later liked to say, a printer by choice. Andover in his boyhood was a farming parish of about a thousand people, spread out along the Shawsheen and the Merrimack road, with a great many orchards and a meeting-house that was too small for the congregation. He went to the town school for four winters and was quick at his letters, quicker than his brothers, and he had a passion for the printed page that was odd in a household of leather and grain. There were few books in the house besides the Bible and an almanac, but the almanac fascinated him: the columns of tides and moons and weather, the small woodcuts, the way the type sat in even rows. At thirteen, he was apprenticed to a printer in Boston, a house on Queen Street that produced newspapers, sermons, broadsides and the small change of colonial publishing. Printing in the 1710s and 1720s was heavy, hot and precise work. An apprentice learned to distribute type into the case by feel, to compose a line upside down and back to front in a stick, to lock a forme into a chase, to ink the balls with a pad of leather and lampblack, and to pull the bar of a wooden press with the whole weight of his body. Ezekiel was slight but wiry, and he took to it. By the time he was twenty he could set a page at a speed that made his master suspicious, and by twenty-five he was a journeyman who read the copy he set, and often corrected it. He came out of the trade with ink permanently in the creases of his hands and a habit of noticing errors that nobody else saw. In 1731 he married Rosamund Hamilton, a dairywoman of the Andover country, aged thirty-two to his twenty-seven. She was a broad, calm woman with a raised scar along one forearm, the story of which she never told to strangers, and she had a reputation in the parish for a fearless way with bulls. She was also a slayer. The calling had come to her in her twenties, on a night when a strange visitor had come to her dairy, and she had killed it with a cheese-press, and she was of the sort of people the Faulkners valued: unfussy and unflinching. She had no house of origin that the ledger recognised, and she came to the Red Ledger as a bride does to a strange church, with curiosity and an open mind. She and Ezekiel were, on paper, an unlikely match, and in fact a very good one. They had two daughters, both in the early years of the marriage. Rebecca Faulkner Cooke was born in 1732 and lived until 1806, and Phebe Faulkner Cooke followed in 1733 and lived until 1802. Both became slayers, and both were raised in a house of ink and milk, in which a pamphlet was as likely to be drying on the line as a pair of gloves. He taught them to read from proof sheets, and it is said that Rebecca could recite an almanac backward before she was seven. Their mother taught them to shoot and to stand still. His most important contribution to the family was one of preservation. The Red Ledger, the tally opened by Hugh Faulkner in 1455, had for nearly three centuries been kept by hand, in a series of volumes that were copied when they wore out and recopied when the ink faded, with errors accumulating at each stage. Ezekiel, who understood the fragility of manuscripts as few others did, proposed and carried out a systematic fair copy, checking each entry against the notes of the keepers. He made his corrections lightly, and he was careful to mark every place where the older text was doubtful. He set in type only a very few pages, for private use, in a run of less than a dozen, and those pages are the reason the Massachusetts branch's copy of the Ledger is the most legible of any. In his hands the Wars of the Roses, the Guest and the long quarrel with the White Ledger acquired a consistent spelling. The Proctors, he thought, were unfairly blamed for Towton, but he kept the opinion to himself, and when a Pennsylvania cousin wrote to argue the point he printed his answer as a broadside and mailed it, folded small, without a signature. In 1746 he went with his brother Ebenezer on a journey into the hill country to consult an elderly cousin. On the way, on an open pasture the family called the fells, in wet weather, a slab of rock let go beneath him and he fell some distance. He was forty-two. Ebenezer carried him down, and he died that night. Rosamund outlived him by ten years and died in 1756. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the man who made the Red Ledger legible, and for the good pages that survive from his press.