Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner

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

Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner spent forty years of his life at the tail of a rope or the end of a sweep, moving cargo down the Merrimack River between Andover and the harbour towns, and if a person had stood on the bank at Haverhill Landing on any morning between the middle of the 1740s and the eve of the Revolution, there was a fair chance of seeing him come round the bend on a flat, heavy barge loaded to the gunwales with cordwood, cider barrels or shingle. He was born in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1726, of the Faulkner blood, and died there in 1792 of a winter cough, aged sixty-six, a boatman who had never once run a cargo aground that he could not float again by nightfall. He came from a family of wood. His father, Obadiah Peabody Faulkner, born in 1705 and dead in 1767, was a wheelwright, a large, steady man who worked from a shop by the river and taught his sons what he could of the trade. His mother, Ruth Putnam, born in 1704 and dead in 1759, was a seamstress from the well-known Putnam connection of Essex County, and she worked in the kitchen of the house, sewing shirts, shifts, breeches and sailcloth, until her eyes failed. Nathaniel had one brother, Samuel Putnam Faulkner, born in 1730, four years his junior, who took up his father's bench, so that between them the family provided wheels for the roads and a boat for the river. The household stood on a lane that ran down to the water, a plain two-storey frame house with a big brick chimney, an orchard of russet apples, a shed of drying oak and the river always in the background, wide and slow and the colour of tea. Andover in those years was an inland farming town, but the Merrimack made it something more. The river ran east to Newburyport and the sea, and everything the district produced, timber, grain, cider, hay, lime, brick, hides, went down it, while salt, molasses, rum and iron came back up. The boats were flat-bottomed gundalows with a single lateen sail and long sweeps, carrying twenty or thirty tons, and they were poled, towed and sailed according to the wind. A boatman needed to know the river's every shoal, its spring floods and autumn lows, the tides that ran up as far as Haverhill, and the ice that in January turned the whole surface to a road. Nathaniel began as a lad of twelve, working as a deckhand on a cousin's gundalow, and he loved the work at once. He liked the smell of tar and wet rope. He liked to be moving, and he liked that every day the river presented some new small question. By twenty he had his own boat, a battered, low-slung barge that he bought with money saved from years of hauling and named, in a rare flash of humour, the Patient Sam. He was a lean, weather-browned man with a big nose, a short beard, a broad-brimmed hat that had been rained on into the shape of a bowl, and hands roughened by wet rope. He spoke the flat, comfortable talk of the river, full of terms like snubbing, warping, sounding and fending off. His temper was even. He liked a pipe in the evenings and a mug of hard cider, he distrusted preachers who talked about the sea when they had never left the shore, and he was famous for his knot-work, a talent that led a number of Haverhill sailors to call him the Rope-Reader. What he carried on the river, in addition to timber and grain, was the second cargo of the Faulkner family. The house of the Red Ledger, though it did not hunt from his own hearth, made regular use of the Merrimack as a highway, and Nathaniel was one of a small number of kinsmen who could be relied on to take a hunter downriver without a question. A cousin might turn up at the landing before dawn, hooded and quiet, with a long bundle wrapped in oilcloth, and ask for passage to Newburyport, and Nathaniel would nod, shift a few barrels to make room and push off. He learned to read a passenger's silence as well as he read the water. He learned that a sealed keg might contain something that was not cider, that a case of tools might come back lighter, that on a certain kind of night it was best not to stop at the landings between Bradford and the sea. He did not himself hunt, and he never claimed a tally, but the Ledger records his boat over and over, always under the same short phrase, carried by the boatman. His wife came to him by river. In the spring of 1751 he took a load of cheeses up to Worcester, and at a table in a farmhouse there he met Eunice Dow, a herbalist six years older than he, whose steadiness impressed him more than her age troubled him. They married in 1752, and she came to live in the house by the landing. Their son Joseph Faulkner was born in 1754, and their daughter Polly Faulkner in 1757, and Nathaniel, a natural father, took both out on the river as soon as they could sit still. Joseph, who was a careful boy, was given a place at the tiller by the age of eight, and Polly learned to steer by ear. When the ice broke every spring, the whole household went down to the landing to watch the first boats slide out. Eunice's garden and her stillroom on one side, and Nathaniel's rope-walk and boat-shed on the other, made a household that the neighbours regarded as a small, well-managed republic. He was by all accounts deeply and quietly fond of his wife, and would often bring her a root or a leaf from a bank she could not otherwise reach, wrapped in a wet cloth. The wars with France on the frontier drew river men into service, and he spent two summers moving militia and stores up the Merrimack toward the northern forts, in the years when men were mustering at Concord for the campaigns beyond Lake Champlain. He was too useful to be pressed into the ranks and too old, by then, to go willingly. When the Revolution came, in his forty-ninth year, he ferried powder, salt pork, flour and, on one occasion, a very large number of shoes, down the river to the camps. His barge was stopped by a British cutter off Plum Island in 1777, according to the family, and he talked his way past it by declaring, in the broadest of dialects, that he was hauling nothing but manure, which was largely true. He was, for a few tense years, in more danger from the weather and the currency than from any foe. His later years were slower. The knees went first, then the wind, and by the 1780s his son Joseph had taken most of the work. Eunice died in 1791, thrown from a horse, and Nathaniel, who had never really believed that he would outlive her, spent the winter that followed in a chair by the kitchen fire, watching the river freeze. He caught a cough in January. It hung about and deepened, and he died in the early part of 1792 at sixty-six, in the house on the lane where he had been born. He was buried beside his wife. The Red Ledger's summary of him is short. It says that he carried the family down the river for four decades and that no hunter in his care was ever lost overboard. His children carried on: Joseph until 1830, and Polly until 1805. The Slayerverse chroniclers still speak of the Merrimack boatmen as the unrecorded infrastructure of the Faulkner hunt, and Nathaniel as their most reliable example.