Ada Allen was born in 1896 in Mobile, Louisiana, a river landing and railway halt that is not to be confused with the Alabama port, and lived forty-seven years as a seamstress, in a city that she reached at seventeen on a day coach with a cardboard suitcase and a letter. In 1926 she married the bootlegger's driver and vampire slayer Lucius Faulkner, who hunted vampires between deliveries, and they raised four children, Milton Faulkner, Clara Allen Faulkner, Marguerite Faulkner and Thelma Faulkner, of whom the first three became slayers of the Red Ledger and the youngest did not. Ada died in 1943 of old age, which is what the family papers say and which they have never altered, although she was forty-seven. She belonged to the Faulkner bloodline through her mother's side and was attached to no great house, and she was not a hunter. She was the one who sat up with the lamp lit and the coffee on, and the one who could tell from the state of a collar whether the man wearing it had been in a fight with something that bled.
Mobile, Louisiana, appeared on the railway timetable and on no respectable map. It was a dozen frame houses, a cotton platform, a water tower and a general store where the line to the coast stopped for water, and the Allens who lived there were a small, poor, serious family who raised chickens, took in sewing and kept a Bible with a great many names in it. Ada was the second of five, a thin, plain, dark-eyed girl with a talent for a needle that her mother, who had one of her own, thought excessive. She made her first dress at nine, from a flour sack, with a hem so even that the preacher's wife asked who had done it. By thirteen she was making the dresses for the whole of the landing, and by fifteen she was being paid for them in cash, which at Mobile was a rare enough event that the postmaster mentioned it.
The Ledger's connection came through her grandmother, a Faulkner cousin who had married down the railway line and whom the family papers mention only as Old Mrs Allen. It was she who put it to Ada's mother, in the spring of 1913, that a girl who sewed as well as that ought to go to the city, where there was a cousin who needed a hand. It was said lightly. It was meant very seriously. Ada went down on the morning train in the middle of June, with a letter from her grandmother and a pair of good scissors, and was met at the railway depot by a pleasant, stout, shrewd woman of forty-five in a black hat, who said that she was Mrs Cormier, that she kept a boarding house in a street behind Basin Street, and that she had a back room and a sewing machine. This was Clara Faulkner, the wife of the cotton factor Milton Cormier, and the mother of the man whom Ada was to marry. Milton, who lent the chapter his good name at the bank, died three years later, and Clara, who had been keeping the house for twenty years, did not stop for the funeral longer than the service.
She worked in the back room for nine years, sewing for the boarders, the neighbours and the commercial travellers, and sewing, in the evenings, for the cousins who came to Clara's table. The boarding house was a clearing-house for the Red Ledger's Louisiana chapter, and Ada, who kept her ears open and her mouth shut, learned the work in the usual way, by being given a coat to mend and finding something in the lining. She did not need to be told what to do. She took the cartridges out, wrapped them in a scrap of calico and laid them in a drawer, and put the coat on the chair as though nothing had been in it. Clara, who had been watching, said that she had had a good many girls in that room and that Ada was the first who had not sworn.
The Great War, which closed the Quarter's bars and sent the boarders to Europe, left the room quiet for three years. She made uniforms. In the last year of it she made forty-one pairs of trousers for the army tailor at Jackson Barracks, at a margin so thin that it was lost entirely in the influenza of 1918, which killed two of the boarders and kept the back room full of the sick for a month. Ada nursed them. She was twenty-two, and had not slept for six nights, and was found by Clara on the floor of the sewing room with a basin in her arms, asleep. She was put to bed for a week. She said afterwards that she had never been so rested in her life.
She met Lucius Faulkner in the spring of 1925, when she took his collars. He was Clara's second son, a lean, quick, sardonic man of twenty-five with a scar on his chin and a gift for being where he was needed, and he was then, as the family put it with great delicacy, in the transport trade. This meant that he drove a Hudson for a gentleman in Gretna who sold alcohol in a time when it was against the law. He drove it by night, along the bayou roads, with the lights off and a case of rye under the back seat. He hunted, between deliveries, with a pistol and silver-tipped stakes, and his customers, who were never short of unsavoury acquaintances, supplied him with names. He appeared at Clara's kitchen one evening with a torn shirt and a bloodstain on his cuff, and asked for the seamstress. Ada looked at the stain, and the shirt, and at him, and said that it was not his blood and that he had better tell her whose. He was so surprised that he did.
They were married in 1926, in a small church of the Quarter, with Clara in the front pew in her best black hat and the boarders in the back. Ada made the dress herself, and a coat for the groom with six pockets, one of them sized for a stake. Her mother-in-law, who had arranged a good many things, made no remark on the match except to say that it had been a long time in coming. They took two rooms on Tchoupitoulas Street, above a ship chandler, and she set up her machine in the window. Her husband came in at dawn, smelling of rye and gunpowder, and put a sack of coffee on the table. She said that she had married a man who delivered, and she supposed that she should be glad it was coffee.
Their first child, Milton Faulkner, was born in the spring of 1927, a few weeks before the great flood. The river rose against the levees all through April and the city was in a state of fear, and on the day the levee below the city was cut to let the water out into St Bernard, Lucius was away on the Gulf Coast with a load of cargo that he could not leave, and Ada, who had a six-week-old son, packed the baby, the machine and a sack of coal into a rowing boat at the foot of Tchoupitoulas Street and went across to a Faulkner cousin's house on higher ground, where she sewed for four hundred refugees. The Depression came in the following years. The bootlegging trade, which had been the family's livelihood, shrank with the end of Prohibition, and Lucius took what he could find. Clara Allen Faulkner arrived in 1933, Marguerite Faulkner in 1934 and Thelma Faulkner in 1935, one on top of another, and Ada raised the four of them above the chandler's, on credit, and made every stitch that they wore.
She was tired for ten years. She did not complain, and no one noticed. When the war years brought the soldiers and sailors in their thousands, she sewed for them, on a Singer, by the dozen, in a room full of pins and children, and she kept the family's accounts and the Ledger's in the same small book. By the spring of 1943 she could not climb the stair. She said that it was nothing. Her mother-in-law, who was seventy-five, sat on the end of the bed for three nights, and on the fourth Ada died, in her sleep, with Thelma's head on her arm. The doctor, who was asked for a cause, wrote old age, and Clara, who had known what was meant, did not argue.
Ada Allen is remembered in the Faulkner family as the seamstress of Tchoupitoulas Street, the wife who sat up with the lamp lit and the shirt ready. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the Red Ledger who waited at home, who knew every danger and complained of none, and who by simply being there made it possible for the hunters to come back.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
