Hezekiah Faulkner

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

Hezekiah Faulkner spent most of his working life on the road, on the long and unglamorous roads that ran between the farms of the Merrimack and Essex country and the wharves of the coast, and he is remembered in the family as the man who could get anything anywhere, if it was not in a hurry. He was born in 1764 at Andover, Massachusetts, the second child of Isaac Ingersoll, a farmer, and Charity Cooke, a farmer's wife, and the younger brother by a year of Mercy Faulkner Ingersoll. The farm lay on the stony uplands, in country of granite ledges, glacial boulders and thin soil. Andover was a town of Puritan sobriety, with a meeting house at the centre, a grammar school and, in the coming decades, the academy that would send its boys to Harvard. But it was also a place of mills and small manufactures, tanneries, forges and gristmills, and the produce of all these had to be carried somewhere. His childhood was a working one. There were cows to be driven, wood to be stacked, and hay to be got in before the September rains, and Hezekiah, a big and cheerful boy, was tolerated as a hand but never valued as a scholar. What he loved was animals. A neighbour's team of four oxen, the great slow patient beasts that dragged loads to the landing, held him for hours, and by the age of twelve he was driving them himself for pennies. The Revolution passed over his boyhood with a series of alarms: the news from Lexington in April 1775, when the men of the neighbouring parishes marched off in the small hours, and the years of shortages after, when salt and iron and cloth were hard to get and every farm made do. He was too young to be a soldier and in his teens too useful at home to be spared. He did carry messages, and he did drive an army wagon on at least one occasion in the late years of the war, and in later life he was inclined to treat this as more of an adventure than it had been. His father Isaac died in 1785, when Hezekiah was twenty-one, and the family's farm was sold in the settling of the estate, the money divided between the children and their mother. Mercy, who was managing and decided, used her share to lease the boarding house at Salem. Hezekiah, who liked open air and had no capital, bought a second-hand wagon and a pair of horses with what he had and started as a teamster. It was a hard living and a respectable one. Teamsters carried hogsheads of molasses and rum up from the Salem and Newburyport wharves to the country stores, hauled grain, cordwood, barrel staves, hides and cheeses in the other direction, and made the rounds of the market towns on a schedule that depended on the weather and the state of the roads. Hezekiah slept in the wagon or in the haymow of an inn and ate at the common table of taverns from Haverhill to Boston. He was a broad man with a weathered face, a slow smile and a great fund of local knowledge, and he knew every bridge, ford and toll gate on his routes. He was not a slayer, and the family did not count him among the hunters of the Red Ledger. But a teamster on a long haul sees more of the dark than a farmer does. He drove at night in the summer to spare his horses the heat, and in winter he was often on the road well after dusk, when the wayside inns had shuttered and the only light was his own lantern. He learned to tell a stretch of road that felt wrong. He would refuse to camp at certain places, and swore to his last years that a horse will not lie about such things, that a team which will not pass a particular culvert has good reason. He told his sister Mercy where these places were, and she wrote them in her shorthand notebook. Faulkner hunters working out of the Springfield line, when they passed through the region, learned to ask Hezekiah before they chose a road. On at least two occasions in the 1790s, the family's accounts say, a hunter rode in the wagon under a tarpaulin on a night haul, because the thing they were following had been seen on that road and the teamster's cart would pass without remark. His relationship with Mercy was the constant in his life. He lodged at her boarding house whenever the work took him to Salem, and she supplied his meals, his mending and a running commentary on his habits. The pair of them argued amiably about money, about religion, about the state of the roads and about whether a man who was past thirty ought to be thinking of a wife. Hezekiah never married. The reasons were the usual and the plain ones, that he was seldom at home, that the pay of a teamster did not stretch to a household and that he was a man perfectly content with his own company and that of his horses. He had no children. He was, however, a devoted uncle to the young of the other lines of the family, and in the family's letters there are references to a wagon that turned up at Springfield, at Deerfield, at Marblehead, wherever a Faulkner was in need of moving furniture or a hunter needed a lift. He also had a share in the quiet contest with the Proctors, though he would have laughed to hear it put that way. The road trade brought him into contact with drovers and carriers who went south, and among them were men who took goods and letters to Pennsylvania and Virginia, the lands where the Proctor line had put down roots. He heard about their hunters, and the news he carried north was of a practical rather than dramatic kind: this hunter had lost a horse, that one had bought a new rifle, a certain family had a good year. The ledgers of both houses depended on such scraps. Hezekiah collected them the way he collected everything else, by keeping his ears open at the inns, and passed them on to Mercy without comment. The years after 1800 were harder. The roads deteriorated in the wet seasons, turnpike companies began to charge tolls where there had been none, and the new canals and better wagons of the following decades were already threatening the old teaming trade. The Embargo of 1807 collapsed the coastal business almost overnight, and the war which followed in 1812 was worse. Hezekiah kept working, selling one horse and then another, and taking whatever haul he could find. But his health had turned. He began to lose weight in about 1809, first in the face and then in the big shoulders, and a cough he had never had before and a persistent weakness in the legs troubled him on the long drives. The doctors of Andover and Salem, who were more confident than they had reason to be, offered bleeding, bitters and a change of air, and none of it helped. It was a wasting illness of the kind that country physicians of the time could name only by its symptoms. He gave up the road in the spring of 1811 and was taken in by Mercy, who nursed him through the summer. He died that year at the age of forty-seven, and was buried in the burying ground at Andover, next to his parents. The teamsters of the district drove out to the funeral in their wagons and left them in a line along the road, a rough compliment which the family remembered for years afterwards. His team was sold to pay his debts, and Mercy kept only his whip. There is no entry in the Red Ledger under his name, and the family chronicles do not describe him as a hunter. Still, the note written against him in a later hand, in the margin of the Faulkner accounts, is a kind one: a good carrier and a true friend of the house. His place in the Slayerverse is the humble but essential one of the man with the wagon, a Faulkner of Andover who knew the roads of Massachusetts in the dark and put that knowledge freely at the disposal of those who hunted along them.