Sarah Foster

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

Sarah Foster was born in 1832 in Lafayette, Louisiana, then a small Acadian market town on the Vermilion that still went by the name of Vermilionville, and died in 1886 of kidney failure, aged fifty-four, having worked for some thirty-five years as a herbalist in the French Quarter of New Orleans. She married the river pilot and vampire slayer Augustus Faulkner in 1861 and raised four children with him, Sarah Faulkner, Hippolyte Foster Faulkner, Clara Faulkner and Andrew Faulkner, of whom the eldest became a slayer of the Red Ledger. She was not a hunter herself. She belonged to no family of the great houses, and the family book gives her its own heading, between the healers and the wives, as the woman who could be trusted to put a hunter back on his feet and to keep a household of four young children in order while the man of the house was at the wheel of a steamboat or at the end of a lane. She grew up on the prairie edge of the Acadian country. The town of her birth was a place of a few hundred people around a church and a courthouse, a mile from the river and ten from the nearest bayou that did not dry up in August, and its people spoke a French of their own, rode small tough horses and raised cattle, cane and cotton, in that order of affection. Her father, a Kentucky horse-trader called Foster who had married into the parish, sold mules and was by general agreement the only man in it who could be trusted to describe one accurately. Her mother, whose name the papers give only as Marguerite, was the daughter of a traiteur, a healer of the old Acadian kind, who treated burns, warts, fevers and children's colic by prayer, by herb and by the laying on of hands. It was from her grandmother, in a cottage at the back of a pecan orchard, that Sarah learned most of what she knew, and she learned it on her feet, walking the fence rows with a basket, at dawn, when the dew was still on the plants. She was a thin, angular, dark-haired girl with a long nose, a dry wit and a pair of hands that were never still, and she was capable at ten of setting a child's arm. The traiteuse taught her the plants of the prairie and the bayou: boneset and sassafras, snakeroot and mullein, the black root that cooled a fever and the pale one that raised a blister. She taught her to dry, to grind and to steep, and, above all, to ask. A healer, she said, is a person who sits down. The remedy is the smaller part of it. The larger part is to know what is wrong, which the patient will tell you if you let him finish. It was a lesson that Sarah, who talked a good deal in company, learned to apply to the sick-room and to nowhere else. At nineteen, having outgrown the orchard, she went down the Teche and the Atchafalaya by steamboat to New Orleans, with a letter to a cousin of her mother's, and a box of dried herbs. She took a room on Dumaine Street and set up a stall in the French Market, at the corner where the herbalists of the Quarter had sold their wares for a hundred years. She was an outsider, a prairie girl among Creole women with their own plants and rivalries, and it took her three years to be accepted. It was Clara Alden of the Treme who did it. The old herbalist, who had the best practice in the quarter and did not admire competition, stopped at her stall one morning in the spring of 1856, looked over the bundles, picked up a sprig of a prairie mint that she had not seen before and said that it was a good plant and that she would like to know where it grew. She came back the next week with a jar of her own tincture, and they traded for thirty years. It was Clara's house, in the Treme, where she met Augustus Faulkner. He was a river pilot and Clara's nephew, a lean, quiet man of twenty-two, with a slow smile and hard hands and the look of someone who listened to the water, and he came to the back door one evening in 1859 with a long cut on his forearm, which he said was from a snag. She dressed it. She said that it was not from a snag. He said that she was probably right. It took him a year to explain, and her about a minute to decide. She had been brought up by a traiteuse, she said, and she had never once believed that the only things in the dark were the ones you could see. They were married in 1861, in the spring, at St. Louis Cathedral, a few weeks before the guns opened on Sumter, with Clara Alden giving the bride away and a dozen Faulkners and Delacroix in the pews. The war took him from the river and gave him back again in 1865. Augustus served as a pilot through it, and stayed, after the surrender, in the city, where the river trade was the only steady employment to be had. Sarah's eldest, Sarah Faulkner, was born in 1863 in a rented room on Dumaine Street, while the Union fleet sat in the river, and she was named into a family that already held two Sarahs, her mother and the tailor Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, who was Augustus's own sister, and who said with some satisfaction that the house was now adequately supplied. The second Sarah was a long, dark, thoughtful child, who took to her father's gun-case by the age of eight and became a slayer of the Red Ledger. The other children followed. Hippolyte Foster Faulkner was born in 1867, named for the old farmer on the Lafourche, and lived until 1930. Clara Faulkner was born in 1868, named for the herbalist, and lived until 1944. Andrew Faulkner was born in 1869, the youngest, and lived until 1942. The last three did not hunt. The work that she did for the Red Ledger was the work of the healer. The hunters of the Faulkner and Delacroix houses who came through New Orleans after 1865 came to her door, as they had to Clara's, and she took them in, cleaned them up and sent them out. She had, in addition to Clara's knowledge of the river plants, the gift of the prairie, a large stock of the bush remedies of the Attakapas country, which the Creole herbalists had never seen. She made a balm of camphor and beeswax that would close a torn hand in a night. She made a tea of the pale root that cleared a fever. She made, it was reported, a wash of bayou herbs that cooled the burn that a vampire's touch left on a man's skin, a thing that nobody had found a cure for in the city before, and the hunters who used it swore by it, and did not say why. She did not spare herself. She nursed her neighbours through the fever summers of 1867 and 1878, with her children in the next room and a pot of boneset on the stove. She nursed the wounded of the Reconstruction riots, of which the city had a number, and did not ask what side they were on. She sat up with hunters through the long nights and made them eat. She grew a little grey, and a little stooped, and the shoulder that she used for carrying the baskets began to trouble her, and then, in the mid-1880s, her kidneys. She treated herself, at first, with juniper and uva ursi, and then with a good many things that she had never before prescribed, and in the end, as she had told so many others, she sat down, and let it finish. She died in the autumn of 1886, at fifty-four, in the front room on Dumaine Street, with her husband at her side and her daughter Clara, who was eighteen, holding the lamp. Augustus outlived her by three years and died in 1889. She was buried in the Faulkner tomb in the cemetery of the Treme, and the jars on her shelf, which were labelled in her own neat, rather angular hand, were divided between her daughters. The wash of bayou herbs is still made in the family, though the recipe, by an old custom, is kept at the bottom of a drawer. Sarah Foster is remembered in the Faulkner family as the herbalist of Dumaine Street, the prairie girl who married a pilot and mended a generation of hunters. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers of the Red Ledger, the women of the pot and the jar, who learned their plants in other people's fields, and who taught a great city's hunters that the first step in any cure is to sit down and listen.