Odelina Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

In the winter of 1654 a cooper's wife in Haverhill, Massachusetts, was in labour for two days in a house where the walls were so thin that the frost grew on the inside of them, and the woman who sat with her through the night was another midwife, one of the town's old hands, who said afterward that she had never seen a child come out so calmly. That child was Odelina Faulkner, and the cooper was Denys Shuttleworth, born in 1633, a man who built barrels for the fishing and the rum trade, and whose wife Quenild Chaloner, born in 1629, was herself a midwife of the town. Odelina was the first of two children; her brother Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner followed in 1655. Both took the Faulkner name, which the family's custom passed through the mother's line, and both were raised inside a household in which the doings of the Red Ledger were understood but not discussed at table. Haverhill in her childhood was a place of clapboard and log houses set along a street, with a meeting-house that doubled as a fort. The colony was Puritan in every particular: a fast day for a drought, a thanksgiving for a harvest, a minister who could quote Scripture for an hour without notes and a magistracy that fined a man for absence from worship. Life ran by the almanac and the tide of the seasons. Winters were long and hard, with snow to the windowsills, and springs came as a flood of meltwater and mud. A child born in such a place learned early what the body could endure, and who was called when it could not. Odelina saw her mother go out into the dark with a bag of linen, oil and a small pair of shears, and come back at dawn with clean hands and a look of quiet satisfaction. She followed her mother into the trade by degrees. First she carried the bag, then she boiled the water, then she held the lamp, then at seventeen she delivered a child herself, a difficult breech in the middle of a snowstorm, when her mother was miles away nursing another woman. The child lived. Midwifery in the colony was a recognised calling, licensed in due time by minister and magistrate, and a good midwife had status: she was present at the two most dangerous moments in a family's life, and she knew things about the town that no one else did. Odelina had steady hands and a low, even voice, and mothers trusted her. She learned the use of herbs, raspberry leaf and shepherd's purse and the bark of the black haw, and she learned that an appalling amount of the trade was a matter of waiting and of keeping the household quiet. The work put her at a useful crossing point. Midwives entered every house in town, at every hour, and saw households at their most exposed, and Odelina noticed what a slayer needed to know. She saw which children were born pale and which mothers, weeks after a delivery, grew strangely drained. She noticed the house where a cellar door was locked from the outside and the family said only that they kept preserves. She noticed when a newcomer to the district was very careful never to be seen at a birth or a burial, or to touch a child, and she passed word of these things, in a plain hand, to her Faulkner cousins who kept the Red Ledger. She was not a slayer and did not have the calling. What she had was access, and the good sense to use it sparingly. Two great fears moved through her adult life. The first was King Philip's War of 1675 and 1676, when the frontier townships of the colony were raided and burned, and Haverhill, on the exposed edge, spent months behind palisades. Odelina was twenty-one that year, and she delivered children in garrison houses by rushlight, with men standing at the loopholes. She dressed wounds, sat with the dying, and learned how the colony's terror shaped what people would see and not see. The second was the witchcraft panic that gripped the colony in 1692, when she was thirty-eight, and it was in some ways the more dangerous to her. Midwives were exactly the sort of women accused of witchcraft: they knew herbs, they attended births that went wrong, and they held knowledge others did not understand. Odelina was quiet, careful and unmarried, and each of these was a risk. She kept her herbs in ordinary jars, her opinions to herself, and attended the meeting-house with more regularity than she had before. She was never accused, though the family said afterward that it was a near thing. Her mother Quenild died in 1692, in the same year, and Odelina buried her in a season when a whole county was afraid of the dark. She did not marry and had no children of her own. When asked, she said that she had already brought more than a hundred into the world and that this was family enough, a number the family took to be an exaggeration until the parish registers were later counted. Her brother Denys Shuttleworth Faulkner lived a more conventional life, and his children were her particular care; she taught his daughters the rudiments of the trade. Her sense of the old rivalry with the Proctors was the sense of a woman a long way from where it was fought. The White Ledger was kept somewhere to the south, by people she would never meet, and the Guest who escaped at Towton in 1461 was, in Haverhill, a story rather than an argument. She listened to the Faulkner account with the courtesy she gave to a neighbour's account of a difficult labour, taking it as probable but unproven, and thought the whole matter would be sorted out more quickly by two sensible women than by two families of men. She died in 1727 of a hard winter, aged 73, in the same house where she had been born, and the town turned out. A hundred children she had delivered were by then grown men and women. The Faulkners of Massachusetts recorded her in the Red Ledger as one of the great supporters of the colonial branch, a woman who gave the family eyes in every house in Haverhill. In the Slayerverse she is remembered for that patient, unforced knowledge, and for the fact that in the worst years of the colony's fear she kept her head and protected her own people by being, in every visible way, ordinary.