Susanna Faulkner Sagar

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

Every morning for nearly forty years, before the light had cleared the tops of the Merrimack elms, Susanna Faulkner Sagar was already in the barn at Haverhill with her forehead against a cow's flank. Born in that Massachusetts river town in 1722, she lived and died a spinster, made her living as a dairywoman, and built out of milk pans, cheese presses and a very good memory a small, independent standing that the women of her family had rarely been able to claim. She carried the Faulkner blood through the Sagar name of her father, and she lived out the middle of the eighteenth century in the old rhythm of the household ledgers, keeping accounts for cousins who hunted and never asking to hunt herself. Her father, George Faulkner Sagar, was born in 1698 and died in 1739, and worked as a ferryman at the Haverhill crossing, a flat scow on a rope that carried wagons, sheep, travellers and the mail across the broad brown river. It was a job of weather and patience, and it left him with cracked hands and a permanent habit of studying the water. Her mother, Jane Bradford, born in 1699 and dead in 1761, was a shopkeeper's wife, and helped to run a counter of pins, nails, molasses, tea, Bibles and buttons on the main street near the meetinghouse. From her Susanna learned arithmetic and the sharp, steady eye that could tell whether a customer was about to ask for credit. Her elder brother Elijah Sagar, born in 1718 and four years her senior, had no calling and no wish for one, and grew up more interested in horses than in either the shop or the ferry. The Haverhill of her girlhood lay on the northern edge of the Bay Colony, close to the New Hampshire line, a town of orchards, tanneries, shipyards downriver and rocky pasture climbing toward the hills. It had been raided in living memory, and the older women could still tell the tale of the Indian attack of 1708 and the wives who had hidden their children in the cellar. Sunday was the meetinghouse, two long sermons and a cold noon meal eaten in the pew-side shed; Monday was washing; Saturday evening was preparation for the Sabbath, when work stopped at sundown. Susanna's education, like that of most girls, was a dame school, a sampler, a little reading and ciphering and a more thorough training in the domestic arts. She excelled at those last, especially the butter and cheese work that ran through a farm's year like a bright thread. Her father's death in 1739, when she was seventeen, altered everything. The ferry passed to a cousin by a long-standing agreement, and the household contracted around her mother's counter. The family accounts, in their usual reticent way, record only that Susanna went out to service that summer at a farm on the Merrimack's north bank, where the farmwife made a hundred pounds of cheese in a good week and taught her to do the same. The cows were Red Devons and brindled Shorthorns, the pans were shallow and scalded daily, the rennet came from a calf's stomach dried and salted in the loft, and the cheeses were pressed under stones, turned every morning and wrapped in cloths dipped in whey. Susanna learned the lot. She learned that a cow that stands with her head down at milking has something wrong with her, that a rind cracks if the room is dry, and that the price of butter at Newburyport in April was a better predictor of the year than any almanac. By her late twenties she had put together enough savings, and enough goodwill among the shopkeepers, to lease a small dairy of her own on the outskirts of Haverhill: eleven cows, a stone milkroom, a leaning barn and a paddock with a view of the river. She never married. Several men called, among them a widowed tanner and a cooper's son, and the town supposed she would take one of them, but she declined in each case with a dry courtesy that discouraged repetition. What she wanted, she told her mother once, was to keep her own name on her own cheese. She got her wish, and the cheeses sold in the Boston market under a small brand that a smith had cut for her in the shape of a milk pail. In later decades local wags claimed that a Sagar cheese could be recognised by its taste alone, sharp at the edge and unexpectedly gentle in the centre, much like its maker. Susanna's part in the family's other business began in her late thirties, after her mother's death in 1761 when the shop was sold and Susanna took over the ledger of the extended household. The Faulkners of the Red Ledger house moved along the river in those years, on the hunting business of their line, and they needed places to rest, eat and change their clothes without being remarked. Her dairy, with its early hours and its constant tramp of carts, was perfect cover. A cousin might come in at four in the morning with a grey face and a torn sleeve, and neighbours would assume he was one more milk hand. She fed them buttermilk, brown bread and hot porridge, and asked nothing until they wanted to tell her. What she kept were the tallies. The hunters brought their notes to her kitchen table at the end of a season, and she copied them into a fair hand in the ledger book before they went back to the hills, correcting an entry now and then when she thought a cousin had rounded a figure in his own favour. It was, in effect, a clerkship she had taken up without title, and by common consent she was scrupulous. She liked being an aunt. Her brother Elijah's children came in summers to work the pans, and she taught them to write, to weigh a cheese by feel and to keep quiet about what they saw. A niece of the family recalled a stern, straight-backed woman in a linen cap who never once raised her voice yet never once had to repeat herself. She dressed plainly, kept a small cat, read a single borrowed book of sermons every winter and sang hymns while she milked. The rivalry with the Proctors, so bitter in the old poems of the ledgers, struck her as remote. She said, more than once, that a cow did not care whose ledger a farmer belonged to and would still kick over the pail if she were startled. The Revolution reached Haverhill in the spring of 1775, when the militia marched to Cambridge, and by the following year the price of grain, salt and cloth had climbed alarmingly. Susanna sold cheese to the commissary at a fair price, refused to hoard, and turned her stone milkroom into a shelter for two families whose houses had been burned. In the wet season of 1776 a sweating sickness passed through the river towns, and it took her within a week, at the age of fifty-four. She was buried in the Haverhill burying ground beside her parents, and the dairy passed to Elijah's family. Susanna Faulkner Sagar left no tally of her own. The Red Ledger, however, preserves her copyist's hand across three decades of entries, and later keepers of the Slayerverse chronicles honour her as the woman who made sure that what the hunters did was written down accurately, and who did it with a milk pail on her arm.