Samuel Putnam Faulkner

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

The smith's hammer at Springfield, Massachusetts, rang out for the better part of a century over the roofs of the Faulkner household, and Samuel Putnam Faulkner, born there in 1730, was the man who kept it ringing through the middle of the eighteenth century. He was the younger son of Obadiah Peabody Faulkner, born in 1705, a wheelwright, and Ruth Putnam, born in 1704, a seamstress, and he came into a house that smelled of oak shavings, hot iron and beeswax. His elder brother, Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner, was born in 1726, four years earlier, and the two boys shared a bed, a table and a good many quarrels. Both descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who had married at York in January 1486, and both grew up knowing, in the way that children know the unspoken furniture of a house, that the Faulkners belonged to a long, secret contest of tallies against a family called Proctor whom none of them had ever met. Springfield in Samuel's youth was a compact river town on the Connecticut, with the armoury still decades off and the great arsenal of later years only a rumour. It was a place of ferries, wharves, warehouses and taverns, where cattle were driven down from the hill farms and shipped south by flatboat, and where the Puritan meetinghouse regulated a great deal more of life than the modern visitor might expect. Winters brought floods and ice jams, springs brought mud, and the smoke of a dozen forges and wheelwrights' shops hung over the lower town. The frontier wars with France sat on the horizon like a bad-weather front, and every few years an alarm would come down the valley and send the militia hurrying north. Samuel grew up in a place where iron and timber were the twin currencies of the trades, and it was natural that a wheelwright's son, surrounded by tyres and hubs, would end up drawn to the metal. His mother Ruth was a seamstress, a straight-backed woman with a habit of humming psalms as she worked, and she taught both boys to sew a decent seam, a skill that Samuel later claimed had made him a better smith. She kept the Putnam family's old quarrel with the Peabodys alive for entertainment, and she treated the Faulkner ledger with the same brisk unromantic attitude she gave to laundry, as a job that had to be done on schedule. Samuel learned his letters at a dame school and went on to the town schoolmaster, where he was noted for a stubborn streak and a talent for mental arithmetic. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a Springfield blacksmith, a hard, patient man with a burn scar on his neck, and spent seven years learning the fire. The apprenticeship was a serious education. A boy began by sweeping, carrying coal and working the bellows, then graduated to drawing out iron rods, making nails, punching horseshoe holes, and finally forge welding, the delicate business of joining two pieces of white-hot metal by hammer alone. The master taught him steel from iron, how to read the colour of heat in a dark shop and how to quench a blade so that it neither cracked nor softened. By twenty-one Samuel could shoe a horse in ten minutes and forge a hinge that would outlast the door. In the years of the war with France he made hatchets, tomahawk heads and bayonet sockets for the provincial troops, and the money from those contracts let him set up on his own. He met Deborah Lord in the early 1750s. She was the daughter of a Springfield family, born in 1733, a herbalist who ran a small garden of physic herbs behind her father's house and sold tinctures, salves and dried simples to the neighbourhood. She was intelligent, sceptical and dry-humoured, and she had a way of listening to Samuel talk about his day that he found disarming. They married in 1754, when he was twenty-four and she twenty-one, in a ceremony at the meetinghouse followed by a supper in the smithy yard. The couple set up house in rooms above the shop, with Deborah's garden on one side and the forge on the other, and it was a joke among the neighbours that you could tell the state of the marriage by whether the chimney or the herb bed was in better order. His forge became, over the following years, one of the best-known in the lower town. He was a big, heavy-shouldered man with a short temper that cooled as fast as it flared, careful with his tools and generous with his apprentices, and he had the blacksmith's slow humour. He never claimed a calling of his own, and he was not a slayer. But the household in which he lived turned out to be full of the family's work. Deborah's herb knowledge, particularly her stock of wolfsbane, garlic, wormwood and other curatives, was put to use in ways she treated as a plain professional matter, and Samuel's hammer produced silver-tipped points, chains and blessed nails that hunters of the Red Ledger passed among themselves. In his quiet way he was as much a part of the enterprise as any man who went out at night. Two children came of the marriage, and both became slayers. Naomi Lord Faulkner, born in 1757, was a fierce, clever girl who preferred the forge to the parlour and showed the calling early, and she carried her mother's family name in the Faulkner custom of passing the line through daughters. Obadiah Faulkner, born in 1760, was named for his grandfather, a steadier and more thoughtful child, and the two of them grew up in a house where the family work was not so much secret as unspoken. Samuel watched them come into their gifts with a father's fear and a smith's pride. He taught both of them to handle a hammer, to judge a blade, and to reckon the weight of a shot. He did not want them to go out in the dark, but he knew that if they were going he would rather they went well made. In the years of the Revolution his forge went over almost entirely to war work. Springfield was a supply depot for the Continental Army, and its smiths turned out gun parts, wagon tyres, chains, axes and horseshoes in a steady stream. Samuel, in his forties, was too old to fight and too useful to spare, and he worked the fire from dawn until late, with his son and daughter growing tall beside him. The rivalry with the Proctors reached him only as background. He knew of the quarrel over the Guest, the vampire that slipped away at Towton in 1461 in the Wars of the Roses, and he knew that each house blamed the other. His own view was that a man who spent his life repairing things had no time to spend on assigning blame for something that happened three centuries before. His health held until the last few winters. The forge took its toll, in lungs full of scale and smoke, in burned hands, in a back bent by hours at the anvil, and by 1778 he was moving slowly and sitting for long periods. He died in 1779, aged forty-nine, and the record gives old age as the cause, a phrase that his neighbours found puzzling but not unreasonable. A smith of his kind, working the fire from boyhood, could be a very old man at forty-nine. Deborah buried him beside his parents, lived on for twenty-seven years, and died in 1806. His children carried on the line: Naomi Lord Faulkner and Obadiah Faulkner both lived until 1823, and both are credited with tallies in the Red Ledger. Samuel has no tally of his own. The ledger's compilers note only, in a later margin, that the smith of Springfield made the tools that made the entries possible. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the Faulkner who stood by the anvil, and the hammer that rang over Springfield is counted among the quiet instruments of the family's work.