Clara Alden

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

Clara Alden was born in 1809 in Algiers, across the Mississippi from New Orleans, and lived eighty-four years as a herbalist of the lower river. She married the storekeeper and vampire slayer Caleb Thayer Faulkner in 1828, raised a daughter and a son with him, and died in 1893 of kidney failure, having nursed the city through the great yellow fever summers, the Civil War and the long, unsettled years of Reconstruction. She was not a hunter, and was not born to the Faulkner line, but she was for sixty-five years the keeper of the green knowledge of the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter, the woman to whom the hunters brought their wounds, and her garden, which still bears her name in the family, is said to be the oldest continuously tended physic garden in the city. Algiers in 1809 was a village of some few hundred souls on the west bank of the river, directly across from the old French city, reached by ferry and known chiefly for its shipyards, its drydock and its flat, rich bottomland. The Aldens were among the Americans who had come to Louisiana after the Purchase of 1803, from Massachusetts by way of the Gulf, and they had set up as ship's carpenters at the yard. Clara's father built hulls. Her mother, whom the family papers do not name, had a small garden behind the house in which she grew the plants of her own New England childhood, sage, thyme, mint, tansy and horehound, and in which, as the years went by, she added the things that grew in Louisiana, which were a great deal stranger. Clara was the eldest of six. She grew up between the ship's frames and the herb beds, and she understood, very early, that wood and leaf are both things that can be shaped by a patient hand. She was given her first lessons in plants by a neighbour, an old free woman of colour from Saint-Domingue named Madame Fortune, who kept a cottage near the landing and was the acknowledged authority on bush medicine in the village. She took the child on her rounds. They walked the levee and the batture, the headlands and the ditches, gathering leaves in a basket, and Madame Fortune named each one in French and in a tongue that Clara did not then know. Bois-de-fer for the fever. Herbe-a-malice for the sting. The root that eased a woman's labour and the bark that killed the worm. It was as thorough an education in the practical botany of the delta as could be had, and Clara, at fourteen, knew the plants of the river as well as anyone in the parish. She was a tall, calm, deliberate girl, with a long face, grey eyes and a slow way of speaking, and she had from the start the healer's gift of inspiring trust. A sick child who would not take a dose from its mother would take it from Clara. A man with a festering hand who had refused to see a doctor would show it to her. She did not preach, and she did not pry. She sat down, looked, asked a few questions and made a poultice, and by the time she had finished it was generally understood that she would be coming again tomorrow. By eighteen she had a practice. It was a small one, confined to Algiers and the nearer parishes, and she did not charge. She was paid in kind, with fish, eggs, cloth, firewood and in one memorable case a pirogue. She kept her remedies in a row of stoneware jars, each labelled, on a shelf behind the kitchen door, and she kept a notebook, in a fair hand, in which she recorded every case, the symptoms, the treatment and the result. The notebook, which eventually ran to eleven volumes, became in time one of the standard references of the Red Ledger's healers. She met Caleb Thayer Faulkner in 1827, at the ferry. He was a young storekeeper from the Treme, slim, dark and watchful, who had crossed the river to buy a consignment of rope from the shipyard, and she was on her way back from a confinement, with a basket and a lantern. The ferry was late. They stood on the landing, in the dusk, for the better part of an hour, and in that time he told her that his store stocked a good many things that she might find useful, that he was a hunter, and that he would understand if she wished to be rid of him. She said that she had a fairly good idea of what he was. She said that her grandmother had kept a thorn hedge. It was, he said afterward, the first time anyone had told him so little and meant so much. They were married in 1828, in the spring, in a double ceremony at the cathedral with his sister Eliza and Hippolyte Delacroix. She moved to the Treme, to the house behind his store, and set up her own practice in the back room. Within a year she had half the quarter as patients. She planted a garden behind the store, in a square of black earth between the privy and the cistern, and grew in it the plants that her trade required. Some of them, such as the hawthorn hedge that her husband planted along its edge, served other purposes. Her children were born in the first years of the marriage. Carrie Alden Faulkner was born in 1830 and lived until 1910, and Caleb Alden Faulkner was born in 1834 and lived until 1901. Neither became a hunter, although both knew the family's secret from childhood. Carrie took over the laundry behind the store, which she ran for forty years, and in time her mother's garden. Caleb clerked in the store until he took to preaching in 1855, and Carrie's laundry and the herb garden stayed in the house. The house behind the Treme store, in which the four of them lived and worked, was always full of the smell of drying leaves, boiling roots and hot metal. The work she did for the Red Ledger was the work of a healer. A hunter who was wounded, poisoned or simply worn out was brought to her door at night, by a back way, and she treated him, in the room behind the kitchen, without asking how it had happened. She set bones. She drew out venom. She knew what to give for a fever that would not break, and what for a wound that would not heal, and she knew which of the ordinary plants of the parish, in the right hands, were particularly hard on the creatures of the night. She grew a good deal of rue, vervain and wolfsbane, and she made from them a number of preparations that are still in use, though the recipes are kept within the family. Her husband's brothers in the work, who came through New Orleans on the river, knew her house as the place where one could be put back together. She knew Zoe Delacroix, the herbalist of the French Quarter, and the two women, who practised on either side of Rampart Street, had an old and friendly rivalry. They exchanged recipes, patients and, in the great fever summers, even stocks of medicine, and they met every Sunday after mass in the market. Zoe said that Clara had the better hands and she the better ear. Clara said that she had never known which of them was right. The yellow fever summers of 1833, 1837, 1847 and 1853 were the worst that she ever saw. In the last of them, in particular, the fever came early and lasted until the first frost, and in the quarter where she worked one household in five was stricken. She and her daughter nursed the sick from dawn to midnight. They made teas of boneset and willow bark, bathed the fevered in vinegar water, and did what could be done, which was not much, and sat with the dying. She lost her sister that year. She lost her mother the next. The Civil War brought the Union fleet to New Orleans in the spring of 1862, and she, a woman of fifty-three, found herself caring for soldiers of a foreign army as well as her own neighbours. The occupation was hard, with shortages, fevers and suspicion on all sides, and she worked on through it as she had worked through the epidemics. She treated everyone who came. A Union surgeon, who found out that she was the source of the medicine that had saved half his ward, called on her to express his thanks, and left a packet of quinine, which was by then worth its weight in gold. Her husband's death in 1871 took much of the colour out of her life, but she went on. She lived for another twenty-two years, in the house on the Treme, surrounded by her garden and her children's children, and treated patients until the last year. She died in the winter of 1893, of kidney failure, in her own bed, in a room that smelled of camphor. She had asked that the garden should be left as it was. It was, and it still is. Clara Alden is remembered in the Faulkner family as the herbalist of the Treme, the healer who kept the hunters of the lower river alive. In the Slayerverse she stands for the physicians of the Red Ledger, the women of the garden and the jar, who closed the wounds that the night opened.