Ruth Putnam

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

Ruth Putnam came into the world in 1704 in Worcester, Massachusetts, a settlement so young and so exposed that its first inhabitants had twice been driven off, and she left it in 1759, aged 55, thrown from a horse. In between she was a seamstress of the plain and enduring kind, the sort whose stitches outlast the garment, and she was the wife of a Faulkner wheelwright. She belonged to no slayer house, and yet the Faulkners of Massachusetts kept a place for her in their memory, for the odd reason that everything they wore on the hunt had passed through her hands. Nothing is preserved in the Red Ledger about her parents or siblings, and the Putnam name, which was common enough in the Massachusetts country, tells us only that her people were of the farming stock of the Bay Colony. Her birth fell in the middle of Queen Anne's War, when the little town of Worcester, founded in the 1680s and abandoned during earlier troubles, was again a cluster of cabins on a wooded rise, watched by anxious neighbours and reachable only by a rutted road from the east. The settlement was properly resettled in the years after, and the girl grew up in a place that was still raw: stumps in the fields, a log meeting-house, a few frame houses, and a general air of people making do. Winters were long, and in a house with a fire that never quite warmed the corners a child learned to keep her fingers moving. She learned to sew almost before she learned to read. A seamstress in that country made shirts, shifts, breeches, waistcoats, bed-linen, caps and, by the time she was fifteen, the whole run of household stitching for three or four families. She worked by daylight when she could, and by rushlight when she could not, using linen thread she had spun herself and needles that were made in England and cost more than they were worth. She sewed a straight seam, which was rarer than one might think, and she sewed it fast. Her reputation spread up and down the road between Worcester and Boston, and it is said that a merchant's wife in Marlborough once sent a cart to fetch her. It was in 1725, at twenty-one, that she married Obadiah Peabody Faulkner, a wheelwright of Faulkner blood, who was a year younger than she was. They met, as the family told it, when the axle of a cart carrying her bundle of finished shirts broke on the road outside the town and the wheelwright who came to repair it stayed to take an interest in the cargo. The Peabody in his name marked a mother's family; the Faulkner marked the line. He was not a slayer. He made and mended wheels, and his shop stood by the road with a mill-stone leaning against the door and a heap of felloes drying in the yard. The pair set up house in a small frame dwelling with a central chimney, two rooms down and two up, and a garden that Ruth planted with beans, squash and a row of flax. Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner was born in 1726, and Samuel Putnam Faulkner in 1730, and both were raised in the smell of shavings and scorched iron. The second name, taken from their mother, was in keeping with the Faulkner custom of carrying a maternal name forward, and the boys wore it with a certain pride. Nathaniel lived until 1792 and Samuel until 1779. Neither became a slayer, though both grew up knowing the outline of what the family did. Ruth taught them their letters, their prayers and their needlework, insisting that a man should be able to mend his own shirt, and the neighbours were scandalised and then imitated her. The Faulkner household did not talk about the ledger in front of the neighbours, but it was never far from the table. Cousins came through Worcester with drawn faces and mud on their boots, and there was a room over the shop where a man might sleep for a night without anyone wondering. Ruth's contribution was practical. Every slayer needs clothing that will not tear at the wrong moment, and she began, quietly, to make it. She stitched deep pockets into coats and cut sleeves that allowed a man to swing an arm. She sewed leather patches at the knees and elbows of the woollen breeches that Faulkner hunters wore in the field, and she made a kind of long, close-woven cloak of dark broadcloth that shed briars and hid a pale face at dusk. She sewed sheaths and loops into linings for knives and small bottles, and none of it looked like anything but a careful housewife's work. Faulkner men rode away from Worcester in her coats for thirty years. The wars with France on the frontier touched her life directly. Worcester lay on the road that soldiers and militia used to go west, and during the 1740s and the years that followed there was constant traffic in the town: recruits, wagons, refugees. She made shirts for the militia company that Obadiah's cousin served in, and she mended, without payment, the uniforms of men who came back wounded. She never spoke of it, but she had a private tally of her own, a knotted string she kept in her sewing basket, with one knot for each garment she had made for a man who had not come home. Her relations with the rival house were nil. The Proctors were a name to her and no more. She had once heard that they kept a white book, as the Faulkners kept a red one, and she was said to have remarked that in her experience white was the hardest colour to keep clean. She worked in blue, brown and black, and thought that was a fair answer. She died in 1759, aged 55, of a fall from a horse, on the road between Worcester and a neighbouring town where she had gone to deliver a bolt of finished linen. Obadiah, who outlived her by eight years and died in 1767, put up a small slate stone for her. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as a woman whose work went out into the dark on other people's backs, and the Faulkners have long said that a good part of their luck was sewn in.