Betsey Whittier

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

Betsey Whittier was born in 1709 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River, and she spent her working life catching other people's children. A midwife by trade, she married Ebenezer Faulkner, a militia sergeant on the western edge of the colony and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, in 1731. Together they raised four children, three of whom took up the family's dark trade, and she died in 1756, at the age of forty-seven, of what the record calls old age, a phrase that says more about the life she led than about her years. Haverhill in her girlhood was a frontier town that had been burned by raiders in 1708, the year before she was born, and its people still walked to church with a musket over one shoulder. Its meetinghouse stood on a rise above the river, its streets were lined with modest frame houses and its economy rested on farming, lumber, shoe-leather and small shipping down the Merrimack. Her family, the Whittiers, were respectable and plain, of the sort who kept a Bible on the table, a spinning wheel in the corner and a quiet belief that God helped those who did their chores. She grew up watching the local midwife, an older woman who was called out to every birth for miles around, and at fifteen she was taken on as her helper. The trade was demanding. She learned to handle a difficult presentation, to recognise the signs of a fever after childbirth, to tie a cord, to deliver the afterbirth, to make poultices and tinctures from garden herbs and to keep her head when everyone else was frightened. She learned, above all, to tell a mother the truth gently. The work took her out at all hours and across dangerous ground. She rode a bay mare through snow and river fog, over cart-tracks and along the edge of the woods, and on those nights she met the men of the militia who guarded the roads. Sergeant Ebenezer Faulkner, born in 1709, the same year as she was, was one of them: a hard, methodical man with a sun-cracked face who commanded a small company at the western edge of the settlements and had a name for being unshakeable at night. He escorted her once through a patch of woodland between two farms, and she was struck by the fact that he walked between her and the trees. They were married in 1731, when both were twenty-two, at Haverhill, in a plain ceremony with a militia company to see them off. She learned what he was, in time. The Faulkners of that generation had a way of drawing a line between the family's ordinary trades and its true one, and Ebenezer's line was the militia. It gave him cover and it gave him cause to be out on the frontier at night with a rifle. He had the calling, and in the sergeant's uniform he hunted what preyed on the edge of the colony, and the Red Ledger's tally under his name was long. Betsey was not shocked. A midwife sees a great deal, and she had seen wounds on women and children that no wolf and no Indian raiding party could account for. When he told her, she said only that she had wondered. Then she asked him what he needed. What he needed was a household that could absorb the work. Their first child, Gideon Whittier Faulkner, was born in 1733, and the girl, Betsey Whittier Faulkner, in 1739, followed by Caleb Faulkner in 1741 and the youngest, Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner, in 1749. The eldest, Gideon, was the only one not called, and he became a farmer and a steady presence at home until 1804. The other three grew into slayers: young Betsey, who lived until 1799, Caleb until 1802 and the younger Ebenezer until 1814. That three of four children should have the calling was remarkable even by the Faulkners' standards, and it fell to their mother to shape them, since their father was so often away on the frontier. She raised them with the discipline of a woman who had delivered hundreds of children and buried more than she liked to count. She taught them anatomy, first aid and how to keep a level head; she had them dress a wound before they could load a musket. She told them that what they were going to do was a kind of midwifery in reverse, that it required the same steadiness and the same refusal to look away, and it was a comparison the family repeated for generations. Her house in Haverhill, and later the farm where the family lived, became a place where injured slayers were brought at night, stitched, bandaged and fed, and she never sent anyone away. Ebenezer's militia colleagues thought her the best surgeon within thirty miles and had no idea how many of their own patrols she patched up. The wars with France on the frontier weighed on the household. King George's War broke out in 1744 and the western settlements were raided; the French and Indian War followed in the 1750s, and Ebenezer was in the thick of the militia work, on the road and away for months. Betsey ran the household alone. She delivered babies on the days when she was not tending the wounded, and she kept the family's accounts and its secrets in equal order. She had a habit of writing notes in the margin of her birth register: in among the names and dates were small marks, in a code she had invented, of the nights on which her husband or her children had come home hurt. It is one of the few written records of the household's real work. The rivalry with the Proctors was a distant background hum, but Betsey took an interest in it as a matter of family honour. She read the letters that came up from the southern colonies with the same look she gave a difficult labour, weighing the risk, and she urged her children to keep their tallies honest and their reputations clean. She thought that the Proctors would be more dangerous if the Faulkners were careless, and she told the youngest so on the day he took up his rifle. She died in 1756 at forty-seven, of old age, as the family put it, meaning that she was worn to the bone by thirty years of night-calls, cold rides and worry. Ebenezer outlived her by twelve years and died in 1768. Her register survived in the family and is still consulted. Within the Slayerverse, Betsey Whittier is remembered as the midwife who brought the next generation into the world and kept the Faulkner slayers alive long enough to hunt.