Keziah Woodbury

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

Keziah Woodbury spent her life in a landscape of stone walls, and she knew, as farm wives of central Massachusetts did, that most of what mattered happened at the far end of a field. She was born in 1743 in Worcester, Massachusetts, then a county town of some two thousand people on the post road between Boston and the Connecticut River, and she died there in the winter of 1798 of a cough that would not lift, aged fifty-five. She was a farmer's wife by occupation, which is to say she ran a dairy, a garden, a poultry yard, a loom and a household of children, and she was married to a Faulkner cousin, though she herself came from no slayer house. She was the mother of Daniel Faulkner Cole, one of the Red Ledger's slayers of the following generation, and she gave him a good deal of what made him effective. Worcester in her childhood was a place where the wilderness was still a memory rather than a fable. Grandfathers on both sides of her family could remember a time when the town had been abandoned twice because of Indian war, and the county still bristled with garrison houses and stone-walled pastures where every field had been won from rock and stump. The soil was thin and stony. Farmers raised rye, oats and Indian corn, kept sheep on the higher ground, and made butter and cheese for the Boston market. The court sat in the meetinghouse and brought a hum of business, lawyers and dispute to town at intervals, and the tavern near the common was full whenever the judges were in session. Keziah's father was a small farmer with a few dozen acres who paid his town rates on time and was elected hog reeve once. Her mother, a stern woman with red hands, taught her to make a churn go and a rennet set. She grew up strong and practical. She could yoke a steer, split kindling, dress a fowl in the time it takes to say a psalm, and drive a cart in the snow, and she had a reputation in the neighbourhood as a girl who never sat still. She learned to read from the Bible and the almanac, and could sum figures faster than her brothers. Her one complaint was that farm work left no time for anything else. She sang in the meetinghouse gallery, and in later life the tunes she had learned there, the sturdy hymns of the New England psalm books, were the songs she hummed over her churn. She married Ephraim Faulkner Cole in 1773, when she was thirty, an age at which most of her friends had been wives for a decade. The late marriage was noted in the neighbourhood. She had been engaged to another man, who died, and had in the meantime kept house for her widowed father and refused several offers. Ephraim, born in 1749, was six years her junior, a storekeeper with a shop of dry goods, molasses, nails and West India rum on the road through Newbury and later in Worcester County, and he was a man of energy and cheerful vanity. When he asked her, she said she supposed she might as well. Their wedding was held in her parents' parlour, in the autumn, with cider and plum cake. Ephraim's family belonged to the Faulkner house, as his surname declared. Keziah was told what that meant not long after the wedding, in the way such things were told: gradually, by a husband who was clearly nervous about how she would take it. She took it as she took most things, with a short silence and then a practical question about what she was expected to do. The answer was that she should hold her tongue in the shop, keep the household running, and, on the occasions when a Faulkner cousin came through, provide a bed and a meal. She did all of these things with a competence that reassured her husband. What she did not tell him, and what the family learned much later, was that she had been keeping a private tally of her own, jotting down in a small book at the back of her kitchen dresser the times that unusual visitors called. Daniel Faulkner Cole was born in 1774, the following year, and Jacob Cole in 1776. Daniel proved to be called, and became a slayer of the Red Ledger; Jacob did not, and grew into a steady man of business. Keziah raised them in the busiest possible household. The farm behind the shop grew a good deal of what the family ate, and she and a hired girl produced butter for sale. In the shop, she often stood in for Ephraim when he was away buying goods in Boston. The boys were sent out in all weathers, to fetch water and drive cows and split wood, and she taught them that the work was not to be complained about. Daniel later said that his mother had taught him more about patience in a hayfield than any hunter ever did on a trail. The Revolution came through Worcester, a town whose Whig committee had been among the first in the province to take up arms. Keziah lived through the closing of the courts in 1774, the muster in April 1775, the flood of refugees from Boston, and the years of rising prices and worthless paper money. She turned the farm to the war's needs, sending flour, salt beef and knitted stockings to the army, and made do with what she could grow. In the harder years the shop's stock dwindled to almost nothing, and she kept the family alive on what the land gave. She spoke little about the war afterwards, except to say that she had been more afraid of the price of tea than of the British. Ephraim died in the hard winter of 1796, at forty-seven, and Keziah mourned him in her customary silence, then took over the shop and the accounts until Jacob could manage them. She herself grew frail the next year and died in the winter of 1798 of a persistent cough, having outlived her husband by only two years. She was buried beside him in the town burying ground. The Red Ledger records her only as the mother of one of its hunters. Her sons remembered rather more: the farm wife who could see a problem clearly and go straight at it, who kept a house where anyone could be fed and no one was asked questions. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as Keziah Woodbury of Worcester, who ran a Faulkner household with a farmer's practicality.