George Faulkner Sagar

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

On the Merrimack at Haverhill, where the river widens and slows before it turns toward the sea, there was a ferry in the first decades of the eighteenth century that ran on the strength of one man's arms and another man's good name. The man with the arms was George Faulkner Sagar, born there in 1698, ferryman by trade and a Faulkner through his mother's line, and the record of his forty-one years is a record of small crossings: people, cattle, cordwood, news, and now and then something that did not want to be seen. He was the elder of two children of Alexander Sagar, a clerk, and Edith Tattersall Faulkner, a tavern keeper's daughter, and he grew up in a household that stood on the border between the counting-house and the tap-room. Haverhill in the 1690s and 1700s was a frontier town in the plainest sense. It had been raided by the French and their Abenaki allies during King William's War and again in 1708 in Queen Anne's War, when the town suffered a night attack in which some forty settlers were killed or taken, and the memory of Hannah Duston, who had escaped captivity in 1697, was fresh. Garrison houses stood at intervals along the river, the meeting house doubled as a fortress, and the men of the town mustered under arms on the common several times a year. George was ten when the 1708 raid came and never quite lost the habit of listening for what was on the other side of a door. His father wrote a good hand, and that was the family's living. Alexander Sagar copied deeds, kept the town's minutes, made up the accounts of two merchants and a sawmill, and wrote letters for neighbours who could not manage a pen. He died in 1712, when George was fourteen, of a cause the family record does not name, and the boy was at once the man of the house. His mother's people, the Tattersalls, had come over from Lancashire, and her father's tavern near the landing was the place where every boatman, drover and river-driver eventually stopped. George learned the river from those men over the taproom's long table. He learned that the Merrimack ran quick in April with snowmelt and lay slack in August, that ice made in December could carry a loaded ox-cart and by March could not carry a dog, that the flats below the falls were dangerous when the tide was against the current, and that there was a language of horn signals for calling a ferry across. By his twenties he was running the crossing himself. It was a flat-bottomed scow drawn along a rope, with sweeps for the days when the rope was down, capable of carrying a wagon and team, and he charged pennies for foot passengers and shillings for cattle. He was strongly built, sandy-haired and weathered, with a squint acquired from looking against the water, and known for a patient, level courtesy. In the words of one neighbour, he could take a drunken farmer across in a gale and land him dry and unashamed. He was a militiaman, as every able man was, mustering with the company on training days, and the ferry made him a person of consequence in a small way: he heard who had gone up-river and who had come down, and he was never asked to explain what he knew. In 1717 he married Jane Bradford, a young woman from Northampton, out in the Connecticut valley, whose father, a shopkeeper, had a business that had prospered. The match is remembered as a good one, and Jane brought some property with her, a store of linen and a talent for accounts. Their first child, Elijah Sagar, was born the following year, in 1718, and their daughter Susanna Faulkner Sagar in 1722, and the family lived in a low house near the ferry landing, where the sound of the rope running over the pulleys was the sound of the household. George's sister Rebecca Faulkner, born in 1702, lived nearby, and the family remained close-knit in a way not always usual in the colony. The Faulkner name, in the Sagar family, was a quiet thing. George's mother Edith carried it from the Massachusetts branch of the Red Ledger, which had come across with the Puritan migration in the 1640s, and she had brought it into her marriage as the family custom allowed. He knew that he was descended from the Lancastrian side, that there was a ledger in the family, and that certain kinsmen, especially those around Concord and Boston, spent time on business that they did not describe. He was not a slayer and did not pretend to be. What he did was carry them. A number of hunters crossed the Merrimack in his scow between 1725 and 1739, at hours when the ferry was not meant to be running, and in the family's account he never asked what was in the long bundles they carried. The Red Ledger's Massachusetts keepers credited him in a marginal note as the man who carried it over the water, and the phrase stuck. His character, as his descendants told it, was one of steadiness and a certain dry self-deprecation. He disliked the meeting house sermons but never missed one, he paid his rates on time, he refused to charge a widow, and he kept a small, battered Bible in which he wrote the birth dates of his children. He was fond of the tavern and fonder of his wife. He liked to say that a ferryman was the one honest man in a county of lawyers, because he took you where he said he would, and that the difference between a good crossing and a bad one was mostly whether you had told the truth to the river. The illness that killed him arrived in the autumn of 1739. It was one of the fevers that moved through New England in those years, and it took him after a few days of sweating and chill, in a house in which the children were young adults and the ferry was already being handled by his son. He was forty-one. Jane, who was forty, nursed him to the end. He was buried in the old burying ground at Haverhill, and Elijah took the sweeps from his hands. His mother Edith, who had lived to see the ferry become a small enterprise, outlived him by a year and died in 1740. In the wider story of the Faulkner and Proctor families, George Faulkner Sagar is one of the many in-between figures, a man whose work was neither hunting nor ledger-keeping but the conveyance of both. His son Elijah lived until 1779 and his daughter Susanna until 1776, and both kept up the habit of silence about the crossing. The family tradition holds that the ferry rope at Haverhill, replaced several times over, was always spliced by the same method, the one George used. In the Slayerverse he stands as a reminder that between the two ledgers, the Red and the White, there was a great deal of ordinary labour, and that a river must be crossed before a hunt can begin.