Hezekiah Osgood

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

Hezekiah Osgood carried a musket for the Massachusetts militia through two wars and never once fired it at a man he could see. He was born in 1743 in Newbury, Massachusetts, a shipbuilding and farming town at the mouth of the Merrimack River, and he died in 1795 of a wasting illness at the age of fifty-two, in the same county where he had been born. He was not a slayer and did not come from a slayer house, but he married into the Faulkner line in 1762, and for more than thirty years he was the steady, unremarkable centre of a household that lived beside a secret. The Red Ledger has no page for him. The family remembers him all the same. Newbury in his boyhood was a place of salt marsh and orchard, where the tide came up the river twice a day and left mud on the wharves. The town's wealth was in ships. Every spring the yards along the water rang with the adzes and mauls of shipwrights, hulls stood on their stocks in the open air, and the lanes smelled of pitch, oak shavings and boiled tar. Farmers in the outlying district grew hay, rye and apples, cut cordwood, and drove cattle down to the market at the head of the tide. The meetinghouse, rebuilt and enlarged in his father's time, was the centre of the community, and the Sabbath was kept with a strictness that left small children stiff in their pews for hours at a stretch. Hezekiah grew up in a family of moderate means, working his father's few acres in the summer and hiring himself out to a shipyard in the winter, where he learned enough carpentry to fix a roof and hang a door. At the age of sixteen he was enrolled in the town's training band, as every able-bodied boy was, and he drilled with his neighbours on the common on muster days. It was in the militia that he found a place. He was a broad, slow-speaking, good-natured young man who was liked by his officers because he obeyed without argument and by his comrades because he shared what he had. The French and Indian War was drawing to a close, and the militia had turned out for the campaigns on the northern frontier. Hezekiah, who was too young for the first expeditions, listened enviously to the returning men. He served in the later musters and, by the time he was twenty, had his own firelock, a powder horn marked with his initials, and a reputation as a man who could be relied on to hold a line. He met Rachel Cole at a husking, or so the family story runs, at a barn on the road between Newbury and Marblehead, where he had gone to help with the corn and she had come to help with the food. She was born in 1745, the daughter of a carpenter, and she was a seamstress who could cut a shirt without a pattern and finish a seam so fine that it looked printed on the cloth. Her family, though Hezekiah did not know it then, belonged to the Faulkner line and had done for centuries. Rachel told him about it a little at a time, after they were married, and she chose her moments with great care. They wed in 1762, when he was nineteen and she was seventeen, and took a small house on the edge of Newbury with a well, a garden plot and a view of the marsh. What Rachel told him did not upset his placid nature. He listened, thought about it for the better part of a week, and then said that he supposed somebody had to see to it. From then on he took his place as a husband of the house. He never went on a hunt. He was no slayer and he knew it. But when a Faulkner cousin turned up on the doorstep at night, he was the one who put the horse in the barn and stood watch outside while the visitor slept. Because he was a militiaman, he was able to keep track of the movements of strangers on the roads, and he could often say without any suspicion being aroused where a stranger had come from and where he was headed. He had a talent for being present without being noticed, a habit that his neighbours took for shyness. Their daughters were born in the first years of the marriage. Rachel Osgood Faulkner arrived in 1765 and Lucy Osgood Faulkner in 1768. As custom in the family required, they carried the Faulkner name forward through the mother's line, with their father's surname set between, so that the household in the Newbury lane held two girls whose names spoke of both houses. Hezekiah was a doting father, if a clumsy one. He carved them wooden animals in the evenings, taught them to bait a line at the river's edge and to tell one kind of tree from another by its bark, and sat through their lessons with a patient smile. He could not read easily, and Rachel taught him to write his name properly. He was proud of it. The Revolution found him in his early thirties, a corporal in the militia. He was among the men who marched toward Cambridge in April 1775 when the alarm came from Lexington, and he served through the siege of Boston and in later short tours on the coast, guarding the harbour towns against raids from the sea. The war brought an end to the shipbuilding that kept Newbury alive, and the town fell on hard times. Hezekiah patched what he could, took what work there was, and kept his family fed on cornmeal, salt fish and whatever the garden yielded. His wife's sewing kept them in cash when the paper money was worth nothing. During these years the old quarrel between the Faulkners and the Proctors was much discussed in the kitchen, and Hezekiah's dry remark, that two families who could not agree who let a single creature go in 1461 would surely never agree about anything else, is one of the few of his sayings that survives. His health failed in the early 1790s. The illness was a slow, wasting one, a gradual loss of flesh and strength that the country doctor could not name and which no bark or tonic touched. Rachel nursed him through it and did not hide from him what she thought the end would be. He died in 1795, at fifty-two, and was buried in the old burying ground with a plain slate stone that gave only his name and years. Rachel outlived him by twenty-four years and died in 1819. Hezekiah is an example of the sort of person who made the great hunts of the Faulkners possible without ever appearing in the ledger. He was a good husband, a decent soldier and a man of his word. In the Slayerverse he is recalled as the Newbury militiaman who married into the Red Ledger's family and asked no more of it than to keep watch by the barn door.