Naomi Adams

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

Naomi Adams kept a boarding house, and for most of her adult life the door of that house was the most reliable listening post in eastern Massachusetts. She was born in 1742 in Concord, Massachusetts, in the years when the town was a compact farming community of some two thousand people, with a meetinghouse on the green, a river that flooded every spring, and a strong Congregational conscience. She died in 1783 of the plague, at forty-one, having raised four children and fed, at a rough estimate, several hundred strangers. She was not a slayer, but the Red Ledger's margins record that she made a great deal of Faulkner work possible. Her father was a farmer with a middling holding of meadow and orchard, and her upbringing was the plain, useful one that a New England girl of the middle sort received. She learned to spin, to weave, to make cheese and candles, to salt pork, to bake beans and brown bread in a brick oven, and to reckon accounts in pounds, shillings and pence. She also learned the district's whole network of kin, grievances and reputations, an education no less valuable. The Adamses had no connection to the old slayer houses, but Concord was small enough that everyone knew everyone else's business, and in a time of near-constant French and Indian scares, the town's men were often away on militia service. Women like Naomi ran the farms in their absence. She met Caleb Faulkner in Boston, or so the family story goes, in a printer's yard near the harbour where he was working as an apprentice while also carrying letters and parcels for his employer between the town and the country. He was a courier and a printer's apprentice, born in 1741, quick on his feet and always short of money, and he was also a slayer of the Faulkner house, one of the Red Ledger's active hunters in the colony. He had come to Concord to deliver a bundle of pamphlets. Naomi, who was buying flour at the mill, told him firmly that he was standing in her way. They were married in 1769, when she was twenty-seven and he was twenty-eight, and by all accounts they went on arguing happily for the next thirty years. Marriage brought her into the family's work, and it happened gradually. Caleb's calling meant that he kept irregular hours and often came home at strange times with a strange story. Naomi took him at his word and asked few questions. When he began to bring fellow hunters home, she started to feed them. Then she started to put them up. The Faulkners' Massachusetts hunters travelled between the harbour towns, the militia musters and the inland farms, and a house on a main road that had spare beds and did not gossip was worth more than a fortress. Naomi took over the business of a boarding house in a larger property on the Boston road, taking in drovers, travelling tradesmen, militiamen on their way to musters, and, in due course, people the Red Ledger wanted quietly lodged. She ran it with precision. Her rules were posted inside the front door in her own careful hand: no spirits after nine, no boots on the beds, meals at six, noon and six again, payment in advance from strangers. She knew how many loaves her ovens could turn out in a morning and how much a barrel of salt cod would cost her in the spring. She also knew who had arrived, from where, and what they carried. A slayer coming in wet and exhausted at midnight would find a fire banked and a bowl kept warm, and would find a lodger's name entered in the house book under a plausible pretext. Her ledger of guests was, in its way, a companion to the family's tally of kills, and Faulkner hunters later said that Naomi could have told them, weeks after the fact, who had stayed in which room on the night a particular creature was taken. The children came quickly. Ebenezer Adams Faulkner arrived in 1770, Silas Faulkner in 1772, Naomi Adams Faulkner in 1774 and Nancy Faulkner in 1779. Three of the four grew up to be slayers, and only Nancy did not. Naomi raised them in a house that never wanted for noise. The two older boys learned to carry trays before they learned to carry weapons. Her daughter and namesake was often to be found at the back stairs, listening to the lodgers' stories, and in time she would take the ledger's lessons further than anyone had expected. Naomi's own view of the calling was cautious and unromantic. She wanted her children to come home alive, and she said so frequently. The years of the Revolution were hard ones for a boarding-house keeper. The war closed the harbour at Boston and drove up the price of everything, and the roads were full of soldiers, militiamen, refugees and deserters. Naomi took them all in and fed them, sometimes with no hope of being paid, and the house on the Boston road served as a way station for the Faulkner slayers travelling between the harbour towns and the country. Caleb was often away as a courier, carrying dispatches and papers, and she ran the house alone. She used whatever the season gave her and made a stew of it. She once turned away an officer who demanded the best bedroom and, on being told that the room was taken, discovered on the bed a Faulkner hunter with a broken arm. She did not turn the hunter out. She died in 1783, of the plague, in a season when a fever went through the coastal towns and took a good many people, including some of her lodgers. She nursed the sick to the last, on the principle that a boarding house was a place of shelter and the rules did not change because the guests were dying. Caleb outlived her by nearly two decades and died in 1802. The house was closed up, and the children went their separate ways. What remained was her guest book, which the family kept, and the reputation of a house where a Faulkner hunter could always count on a hot meal and a closed mouth. The Red Ledger does not carry her name among the kills, but the family's older members recalled her as the woman who kept the Massachusetts branch fed and hidden. Her descendants have never ceased to note that the boarding-house keeper of Concord had a hand in more hunts than most of the hunters. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as Naomi Adams, the innkeeper of the Boston road, who held the door open for the Faulkners through the years of war.