Lucy Osgood

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

The hill farms above Deerfield are steep, and in April the roads on them are more water than road, so that when Lucy Osgood's grey mare put a foot wrong on a wet slope in 1775, the fall that ended her life was one that the valley had been expecting to happen to somebody for years. She was fifty. She had been called that night to a lying-in at a farmhouse three miles up the ridge, and she had gone, as she always went, with a basket of herbs at her saddle and no thought for the weather. The women of six parishes turned out for her funeral, and the story of it, with the basket lying undamaged in the road beside her, was told for two generations. She had been born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1725, on the low, rich ground where the Merrimack broadens toward the sea, in a house that smelled of drying plants and woodsmoke. Her family's own accounts leave out the names of her parents, remembering only that her father kept a few acres and a boat and that her mother was a good-natured, tired woman with more children than beds. What they remember better is her aunt, an unmarried woman who lived in the back room and who supplied half the neighbourhood with simples: pennyroyal, horehound, tansy, mullein, wormwood and a dozen more, sold in twists of paper or dissolved in cider vinegar. Lucy attached herself to the aunt at the age of six, carried her basket for her over the meadow, and learned, before she was ten, the practical distinction between what would soothe a cough and what would stop a heart. Haverhill in the 1730s was a shipbuilding and tanning town, with a wharf on the river, a busy ferry, and a meetinghouse whose bell rang for fires, funerals and news of the French. The winters were hard and the summers were wet. Diphtheria, which the doctors then called the throat distemper, swept through New England in a savage epidemic of 1735 to 1740, and Lucy saw more small coffins than a child should. It is the source of a certain fierce steadiness in her character. She learned that the herbs were not miracles but tools, and that the honest practitioner was one who could say when she had done all she could. Her notebook, a stitched quire of coarse paper, recorded remedies with the results beside them, some crossed out, some underlined twice. The turning point of her life came at the age of seventeen, in the summer of 1742, when she travelled with her aunt up the river road to the Deerfield fair. The two of them set up a small stall under an elm, and a young carpenter of nineteen, Obadiah Faulkner Cole, bought a poultice for a gashed thumb and stayed to talk. He was tall and serious and slightly embarrassed, and he told her in the course of an hour that he had built a barn, that his mother made hats and that his father preached in seventeen parishes. Lucy replied that her aunt would be sold out by noon if he did not stop obstructing the stall. He walked her home that afternoon, carrying her bundle of yarrow, and they were married in the autumn of the same year, in 1742, in the Deerfield meetinghouse. It was a fast courtship even by the standards of the day, and Lucy always said it had taken exactly as long as it needed to. The young couple lived at first behind the shop of Obadiah's mother, Rebecca Faulkner, the milliner, where a red-covered book was kept and consulted by lamplight. It was here that Lucy learned what kind of family she had married into. Obadiah's mother, on a quiet evening in the second winter, told her plainly that the Faulkners hunted the dead who would not stay dead, that the brother-in-law William Faulkner Cole was one of them, and that any physician who could be trusted with such knowledge was a treasure. Lucy considered this for a moment, asked whether the wounds were clean or torn, and then went back to her kitchen and began grinding garlic. From that day her herbal practice ran on two tracks, the ordinary one for the parish, and a second, quieter one for the hunters who came to the back door. They raised two children. Rachel Cole, their daughter, was born in 1745 and grew up beside the drying racks, sharp-eyed and dutiful, and lived until 1819 as the keeper of her mother's notebook. Ephraim Faulkner Cole, their son, was born in 1749, named after his preaching grandfather, and became a farmer and joiner like his father, dying in 1796. Lucy was strict about mealtimes, tolerant about mud and severe about lies. She taught her children the plants by walking them through the meadows in each season and asking them to identify what they saw, and on rainy days she taught them arithmetic and the psalter at the kitchen table. In her later years she hired a girl from the town to help with the drying, and the girl remembered a household where every shelf was labelled and every jar dated. The wars with France on the frontier ran through the middle of her life, and Deerfield sat squarely on their road. Militia companies marched north through the town in 1745, again in 1755 and again in the years after, and each time Lucy set up a second kitchen for the sick and the footsore, treating blisters, ague, dysentery and, more than once, the wounds of men who had been in the woods at night and would not say what had happened to them. She grew particularly skilled with burns, since silver and fire often came together, and her paste of comfrey, marigold and fat from a goose became known along the valley as Osgood salve. She was never asked for payment by the hunters and never sent a bill to the Red Ledger house, though in the household she kept a private list of what she owed and what was owed to her, and she was as scrupulous about the first as the second. She had a way of standing very straight when she disagreed with anyone, a small woman making herself taller, and a sharp, dry, direct voice that made many a stubborn farmer take his medicine. She was also loved. Her laugh was a well-known sound in Deerfield, and children who had been frightened by the great Faulkner tales of things in the dark found that they could tell her about them and be believed. She belonged to no slayer house, held no craft, carried no gear. What she held was the trust of a great many people, gained one bad night at a time, and a set of ointments that saved hunters from the worst of their hunting. The family recalled afterward, in their quiet way, that the woman who had mended so many others had been given no chance to be mended herself. Obadiah, fifty-two, was left alone in the saltbox on the south road, and he survived her by twenty-one years, working on until he too was taken by fever in 1796. He kept her notebook on a shelf beside his hand plane and would not allow it to be moved. Later chroniclers of the Slayerverse regard Lucy Osgood as one of the most useful people who never held a rifle. The Red Ledger, in the margin of a page from the 1760s, carries a note in a hunter's rough hand that says only, the herb-wife saved my arm, and that is how she is remembered in the family that received her.