William Hale

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

A good carpenter of the 1770s could be recognised by his hands and his handwriting: the hands square and nicked and stained with pitch, the writing clear, upright and mathematical, made for carrying dimensions across from a plan to a board. William Hale, born in 1759 at Haverhill, Massachusetts, had both. He was a carpenter by trade and belonged to no slayer house, a man who married into the Faulkner family, the Lancastrian line that kept the Red Ledger, and who spent most of his short life building things that the family's hunters found useful without ever asking what they were for. He died in 1799, at forty, of the sweating sickness. Haverhill lies on the Merrimack, in the north of Essex County, a town of ship-timber, farms and a meeting house with a very tall steeple. In William's boyhood it was a place of mills on the falls, shipyards downriver, and a long main street where every second building was a barn or a shop. The dossier of his family does not survive; the Haverhill parish books record a boy of the right age and name, apprenticed young, but the ledger keepers never entered his parents, and his own account was that he had come into the trade the way most boys did, by hanging about a joiner's yard until someone gave him a plane. He was bound at fourteen to a housewright, a master builder who framed houses, barns and meeting houses in white pine and oak, and he served seven years in a shop where the day began at dawn and the chalk line was law. The training was thorough. He learned to lay out a frame on the ground, to cut mortises and tenons with a chisel and a mallet, to draw-bore a joint and drive a peg through it so the timbers pulled tight, and to raise a bent, the great assembled section of a frame, with a crew of neighbours and a pike pole while the master called the lift. He learned to read a plan and, more importantly, to distrust one. He learned the difference between a sill of white oak that would last a century and one that would rot in twenty. He learned, too, that the trade was a mixture of geometry and diplomacy, because the person who paid for the work was seldom the person who understood it. He was of medium height, sandy-haired, rather deaf in one ear from years of mallet work, and known for a dry humour that he seldom directed at anyone. In his twenties he took work where the wages were best, and the war years pulled him up the Connecticut valley, where the demand for barns, mills and bridges had not stopped, and where a young man out of his time could make a living without being drafted into the line, having done his turn with the militia at Saratoga and returned. In Northampton he framed a dairy barn for a farm family named Faulkner, and there, in the yard, he met the daughter of the house. Polly Faulkner, born in 1757, was two years older than he was, freckled, sure of herself and completely unimpressed by carpenters. He was to remember for the rest of his life that she corrected his measurement of the milk-room door. They married in 1780, in the autumn, and he built the house they lived in. It was a small, tight, framed cottage of two rooms below and a loft above, with a dairy on the cold north side, a chimney built by a mason he trusted, and a workshop at the back where he made furniture on winter evenings. He was proud of it. He carved a date into a beam where no one would see it, a carpenter's habit, and he built into it, without being asked, certain features that the family's hunters were later glad of: a cellar with a false wall, a loft floor that could be lifted in one piece, a door with an iron bar that dropped from either side. He understood, gradually and without fuss, what his wife's family did. Polly's father and mother were in the river and herb trades, and her cousins came and went with long guns and short explanations. William asked few questions. He was the kind of man who, having noticed that a certain visitor never ate before dark and never accepted a seat with his back to a window, simply arranged the chairs differently. He did not share the calling and had no desire for it. His contribution was the frame of the house, the tight joinery, and the discretion. Their two children were born in the first years of the marriage and shaped it. Sally Faulkner Hale arrived in 1783, in the same season as the peace treaty, and became a slayer in adult life. Gideon Hale Faulkner was born in 1787. William raised them with an eye to the trade: Sally, who wanted to be in the shop from the age of five, was allowed to hold the tools but not to use them, and Gideon, who did, learned to cut a clean dovetail before he was twelve. William's chief rule was that a job should be done once and done properly, and he applied it equally to a barn frame and to a daughter's education. In the 1790s his work took him back to the coast, and he built or repaired frames in Newburyport, Ipswich and Salem, where he met the printer Caleb Bartlett Faulkner, a Faulkner cousin, and did some joinery work for the press. The two got on well. Both were careful men in trades that depended on accuracy, and each thought the other's job looked impossibly hard. The sweating sickness came through the valley in the summer of 1799. It was a name older families gave to a violent, rapid fever, with drenching sweats, and the doctors of the day used other words for it. It took William in a few days. He was forty. Polly nursed him, and she buried him, and she kept his tools. In the Slayerverse, William Hale is remembered as the carpenter who married into the Red Ledger's house and built, joint by joint, the places where its people could sleep safely. He kept no tally and wanted none.