Isaac Ingersoll

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

Isaac Ingersoll was a farmer, and he would have been content to be remembered as nothing else. Born in 1740 at Haverhill, Massachusetts, he worked the same low, flood-prone stretch of Merrimack intervale for the whole of his adult life, and he died there in 1785 of the plague, at forty-five, without ever having written a line in either family ledger or carried a piece heavier than a fowling gun. He entered the Faulkner story by marriage. In 1762 he took as his wife Charity Cooke of Andover, a woman of the Faulkner kin, and his barn, his cellar and his supper table became, without any formal understanding, part of the Red Ledger's working country. Haverhill in the 1740s was a river town of about a thousand souls, strung along the north bank of the Merrimack where the tide from Newburyport gave out at the falls. Its meetinghouse stood on a rise above the water, and around it clustered a tavern, a handful of shops and the houses of the town's better families. Farms ran back from the river in long strips. Shipbuilders worked at the landings, and gundalows loaded hay, cordwood and barrelled goods for the coast. It was a hard-working, church-going community with a fondness for law and a long memory for property lines. Boys grew up knowing who owned which stone wall, and the courts at Ipswich heard a steady stream of quarrels over meadow and ford. His parents are remembered only as Haverhill farmers who kept to themselves. What is clear is that he inherited a working farm, a low framed house, a barn and an orchard with a good many old apple trees. He was raised as a farm boy of his time was: up before daylight to milk, to the fields for haying and harvest, to meeting on Sundays in a stiff coat and to the district school in the winter months. He learned to read and cipher, to keep a day-book of debts and to handle oxen. He grew up broad and slow-spoken, with big hands and a face that reddened in the wind. His youth coincided with the wars with France on the frontier, and Haverhill sent its share of young men north and west. Isaac served in the militia, chiefly on short summer tours at the forts along the upper river, and came home each autumn to the harvest. He was not a soldier by temper. What he liked was the work of land: draining a wet meadow, laying a wall, grafting a new scion onto an old tree. Neighbours said he could tell by the smell of the soil when it was ready to plough, and that his cows gave more milk than anyone's on the road. He met Charity Cooke of Andover at a barn raising in the summer of 1761, when the whole district turned out to lift the frame of a neighbour's new barn. She was twenty-one, the only child of a wheelwright, and quicker than most of the company with a joke and a pitcher of cider. He was twenty-one too, and he spent the afternoon, so the family said, trying and failing to find something to say to her. A year of visits followed, along the road between Haverhill and Andover, and the couple married in 1762 in the Cooke parlour. He took her home to the intervale farm, where his own father's orchard was in bearing and the house had been swept and whitewashed for the occasion. He learned about the Faulkner side of his wife's kin slowly and sideways. There was a cousin, Lucy Hale Faulkner, who appeared at odd hours with a long rifle and a quiet request for a bed, and her brother Reuben Faulkner, a boatman, who tied up at the landing below the orchard and slept in the hay. The hunters went out from the farm at night and came back at dawn, and Isaac was not a man to pry. When Charity told him, after a year or two of marriage, what the cousins were and what the Red Ledger was for, he is said to have sat for some time in silence and then asked whether the barn roof would want mending before the winter. It was the response of a practical man, and Charity took it as his consent. After that he was, in a small way, part of the machinery. He kept a lantern lit in the barn window on nights when a hunter was expected and left it dark when there was danger. He learned to keep dogs quiet and to see that the cellar stayed dry. He put a stout bar on the barn door, not because he wanted it but because a cousin asked. What he never did was join a hunt, and he said so plainly when the cousins offered to teach him. He held that a farm needed a farmer and that it would be a poor return for the Faulkners' trust if he were to get himself killed in a cellar and leave Charity with forty acres and no hands. The children came quickly. Mercy Faulkner Ingersoll was born in 1763 and Hezekiah Faulkner in 1764, and Isaac doted on them in his heavy way, carrying them on his shoulders through the hayfields and teaching the boy to tell a good ox from a bad one. Following the custom of the Faulkner line, whose name passes through the women, the children were given the Faulkner name in their own, and Isaac never objected. He held that names were the wife's business and that his business was the land. The Revolution pulled the farm in several directions. Haverhill's militia marched for Cambridge in the spring of 1775, and Isaac served a series of tours, leaving Charity to run the place. Prices swung, paper money ran down and the price of salt and shoe leather climbed. Even so, the farm held. In the early 1780s he was building a new barn when the last of the war's shortages eased, and he was rebuilding fences the season the peace was announced. He was taken ill in the summer of 1785, when a fever the neighbours called the plague came up the river with the boats and went through the intervale farms in the space of a few weeks. He was ill for less than ten days and died at forty-five, leaving his wife and two children. He was buried in the Haverhill churchyard. The Red Ledger has a single line for him, a note that he had kept faith with the family though not of it. In the Slayerverse he stands as a reminder that the work of the slayers rested on farmers who asked no questions.