Rachel Goodwin Faulkner

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

Rachel Goodwin Faulkner was born in 1791 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the daughter of a wheelwright and a farmer's wife, and she worked for most of her life as a herbalist in the hill towns of the state. She married the circuit preacher Amos Wheeler in 1813, bore him two sons, Arthur and James, and died in 1869 after a long illness, at the age of seventy-eight. She was not a hunter. Her younger brother Ezekiel Faulkner was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, and she was, in the family's phrase, the apothecary of his trade, the woman to whom he brought what he could not bring to a doctor. Her father, Silas Goodwin, was born in 1768 and lived until 1844. He was a wheelwright, a large, slow-spoken craftsman of Salem who spent a few years in the early 1790s at Worcester, where the new turnpikes had created a great demand for wagon wheels, before going back to Salem. Her mother, Rachel Osgood Faulkner, born in 1765 and dead in 1829, was a farmer's wife and the sister of the schoolteacher Lucy Osgood Faulkner, who had taught half of Marblehead to read. Rachel was the elder of the two children. Her brother Ezekiel, born in 1792, was called to the work in middle life and lived to 1851. The Goodwin household was one of those in which the Red Ledger was both a background and a blessing, known to everyone and mentioned by no one. The Worcester of her girlhood was a hill town in a hurry. The old Puritan common was being ringed with new brick stores, the turnpikes were multiplying, and the first cotton mills on the Blackstone River a few miles south were drawing in mill hands by the hundred. Rachel grew up in a yard full of wagon wheels, in a house that smelled of steamed oak and hot iron, and she learned early that a thing made well would last. Her father, who took a large view of his daughter's abilities, taught her to read and cipher at home, and her mother taught her to spin, sew and run a household. But it was her mother's farm-wife skills, the gathering and drying of herbs, the making of salves and tonics and cordials, that caught her imagination. The hills around Worcester were rich in plants. Along the brooks grew boneset, which the country people brewed for fevers, and jewelweed, which eased the sting of nettles and poison ivy. In the pastures she found yarrow, tansy, plantain and mullein, in the woods wild ginger, bloodroot and witch hazel, and in the marshes calamus and sweet flag. She learned each by sight, smell and taste, and by the time she was twelve she was gathering for her mother. At fifteen she began, on her own account, to sell salves and syrups to neighbours, and by eighteen she had a small but steady practice. A herbalist of the period worked somewhere between the kitchen and the sickroom. She made teas and tinctures, poultices and plasters, syrups and ointments from plants she grew or gathered, and she treated the ailments that a physician's costly and sometimes dangerous remedies could not reach: coughs, colds, bruises, burns, fevers, rheumatism, stomach complaints, childbirth pains. The regular physicians, with their lancets and their calomel, distrusted her, but the farm families trusted her, and more than once the country doctor, asked whether a poultice should be applied, said that it would do no harm and probably some good. She married Amos Wheeler in 1813, at twenty-two. He was a circuit preacher, born in 1792, one of the Methodist itinerants who rode the hill towns of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire on horseback, preaching at farmhouses and meeting houses and staying a night here and a night there. He was a tall, earnest, red-headed young man with a fine tenor voice and a habit of looking at the ceiling when he was thinking. He met her at a meeting in a barn near Worcester, where she had come, at her mother's request, to sell a salve for his cough. They were married at the Faulkner family's church in the same year, and she moved into the itinerant life. She took to it better than anyone expected. She travelled with him on the circuit for the first years of the marriage, in a covered gig with a medicine chest under the seat, and treated the families they stayed with, in return for which they were given a bed and a meal. The circuit gave her an education in the plants of a dozen counties. She learned the herbs of the Berkshires, the Connecticut valley, the hills of New Hampshire and the Vermont border, and she kept a notebook, which grew to eleven volumes, of everything she found. Her sons were born on the road: Arthur Faulkner in 1815, who lived until 1873, and James Faulkner Wheeler in 1818, who lived until 1863. Neither was a hunter, and both took up their father's ministry, though Arthur, who kept the Faulkner name, preached for a number of years on the Connecticut valley circuit, and James served as a chaplain in the Civil War and died of a camp fever at the end of it. Her brother's work was the larger part of her life, though she rarely spoke of it. Ezekiel, who hunted the Ohio landings from Louisville and came east when the river allowed, arrived torn, bruised, feverish or worse, and he brought his wounds to his sister. She dressed them, purged them, treated them with poultices of comfrey and plantain, and sat up with him through the bad nights. She wrote down everything, each wound, each dose, each result, in a notebook that she kept apart from the others. The Faulkner family later called it the Goodwin book, and it became a reference work for the Red Ledger's healers for fifty years. Her husband's death in 1847 was a blow, and she settled in a small house at Worcester, where she continued to practise. She went on gathering, drying and dosing through her sixties and into her seventies. In 1866 she began to fail, and in the spring of 1869 she took to her bed with an illness that the doctors could not name. She died in May, aged seventy-eight, in the house where she had been a girl, and her herb garden was in flower. Rachel Goodwin Faulkner is remembered as the herbalist of Worcester, the keeper of the Goodwin book and the healer of the Red Ledger's hunters. In the Slayerverse she stands for the long tradition of hill-country medicine that ran alongside the hunt, and for the notebooks that carried its knowledge down.