Eunice Dow

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

The herb bundles that hung from the rafters of Eunice Dow's kitchen were, by the reckoning of the neighbours, the most reliable medical library between Worcester and the sea. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1720, she married into the Faulkner family in 1752 and spent the next forty years as the person the household sent for whenever a fever, a burn, a difficult birth or a wound that did not smell right needed attending. She never hunted, never carried a rifle and never held a slayer's craft, yet the wounded of the Faulkner lines who came through the Massachusetts river country in her lifetime often owed their recovery to her stillroom. Eunice was born in the year of a hard winter, in a house on the edge of the Worcester common, to parents whom the family accounts remember only as a cooper and his wife, people of steady habits who held a pew in the old meetinghouse and a small orchard beside the Blackstone road. Worcester then was an inland county town, a place of courthouse days and drovers' taverns, with a mill stream, a burying ground and a ring of farms that sent butter, salted pork and barrelled apples down to Boston. Her girlhood was one of chores: churning, carding wool, dipping candles. It was also one of unusually long walks, because from the time she was eight or nine she followed an elderly widow named in the accounts only as Goody Rice across the meadows in search of plants. The widow taught her boneset for the ague, yarrow for a cut, elder flower for a fever, comfrey for a sprain, and the difference between a healing tea and a tea that would put a person into a long sleep from which he did not return. Eunice learned every one, and drew the shapes of them in a stitched notebook in a careful, upright hand. She grew into a slight, brown-haired woman with a habit of watching a face before she spoke, and by her early twenties she was known in the neighbourhood as a sensible pair of hands at a lying-in. She kept a garden behind her parents' house that the town considered almost too orderly: raised beds edged with boards, a border of thyme and hyssop, a corner for foxglove that she would not let the children near. There was a small drying loft where she hung bundles upside down, and by the time she was thirty she sold tinctures, salves and cough syrup out of a cupboard by the door. She took payment in eggs, wool, firewood and now and then a silver shilling. She had a reputation for outspokenness. When the town's physician suggested bleeding a feverish child, she asked him politely to think again, and the child lived. It was on a river trip, in the spring of 1751, that she met Nathaniel Putnam Faulkner. He was a boatman of the Merrimack, born in Andover in 1726 and six years her junior, who worked the flat-bottomed gundalows and the lighter barges that carried timber, grain and cider between the upper landings and the harbour towns. He had come inland to carry a load of her employer's pressed cheeses, and he stayed to eat a meal at the Dow table, where he discovered that the herbalist spoke as easily about river currents as she did about willow bark. They were married in 1752, and she moved to Andover to a small house near the landing, its garden fenced against the pigs. The Faulkners, she quickly noticed, were a family of two temperaments: the farmers and tradespeople who went about their business, and a smaller circle of relatives who arrived at odd hours, spoke low in the kitchen, and left before dawn with their coats heavy on one side. Nathaniel explained it to her over the first winter, plainly and without embarrassment. His people had been hunting a certain kind of creature since before anyone had planted an orchard in Massachusetts, and had kept a record of it in a red-bound book. He was not himself among the hunters, but his kinsmen sometimes came to the door needing shelter and a doctor. Eunice took this news the way she took most things, by asking a great many practical questions. What did the wounds look like? Did they close by themselves? What did a hunter eat the night before and the morning after? Within a year she had built a second, locked shelf in her stillroom for the family's particular needs: a poultice of garlic, mustard seed and plantain for the bites that refused to knit, a strong tea of feverfew and valerian for the shaking that followed a bad night, a paste of marigold for the burns from silver. She adapted her methods again and again, recording each attempt in the notebook she had brought from Worcester. She earned the family's respect in the plainest way a woman in that century could earn anything, by being right, repeatedly, in front of witnesses. Her children were born in the same low-ceilinged house. Joseph Faulkner arrived in 1754, an anxious solemn baby who would grow into a careful farmer and live to the age of seventy-six, dying in 1830. Polly Faulkner followed in 1757, a bright, restless girl who learned the herb garden almost by osmosis and who died in 1805, still remembered in Andover as the woman who knew where every plant was hiding. Eunice raised them on the principle that knowledge weighs nothing to carry. Each child had a corner of the garden by the age of five, learned the Latin names as if they were nursery rhymes, and was taught the two rules of the Faulkner family that mattered most at home: never tell a stranger what the herbs are for, and never open the door after dark to anyone who will not speak first. The wars with France on the frontier sent a stream of returning provincials down the river in her middle years, some of them ailing, some of them hired onto boats like her husband's, and Eunice treated them all. The Revolution came in her fifties. Andover men went to Cambridge in April 1775, and Nathaniel, nearing fifty, ferried powder and provisions along the river for the American cause rather than march. Eunice ran a small infirmary from the front room of the house for sick soldiers, wagon drivers and refugees from Boston, boiling linen in the copper, dosing dysentery with blackberry root, and refusing point-blank to hand over her last supply of Peruvian bark to a requisitioning officer until he had shown his authority in writing. She was cheerful and tireless, and in the crowded winters her stillroom became something like a parish hospital. Unaffiliated by blood, she held a place in the Faulkner household by usefulness and affection, and the members of the Red Ledger house who visited her recorded, in their own tallies, that a certain proportion of their successes had been made possible by her salves. She never took a mark for herself. She was privately amused by the long rivalry between the Faulkners and the Proctors of Yorkshire descent, which she thought a very odd way to spend eternity, and she was known to share a jar of comfrey ointment with a passing Proctor cousin who had sprained an ankle, to the visible discomfort of the Faulkner men at table. Eunice Dow died in 1791 after a fall from a horse, at the age of seventy-one. She had ridden out to gather a late flush of angelica from a hillside pasture and the mare shied at a hare. Nathaniel followed her the next year. She was buried in the Andover burying ground beside the boatman's plot, and her notebook, stitched, stained and full of small confident drawings, passed to Polly and then down through the women of the family. Later readers of the Slayerverse chronicles regard her as the model of a helper without a calling, whose craft was patience, observation and a well-labelled jar.