Albert Prejean Faulkner

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

Albert Prejean Faulkner was born in 1898 in Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-eight years as a cattle drover, the second of his family to work the prairie roads between Opelousas and the stockyards of the city and the only one who ever took a bank clerk's ledger with him into a saddlebag. He was the younger son of the cattle drover Andrew Faulkner and the milliner Alice Prejean, and the brother of Andrew Prejean Faulkner. The family papers name no wife and no children. He died in 1976 of cancer, aged seventy-eight. He belonged to the House of Faulkner and to the Red Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. He was not a hunter, and he was not the sort of man to be mistaken for one, but he was the person who counted what the drovers of the Ledger carried and what they were owed, and for fifty years the road accounts of the Louisiana chapter were kept in his small, upright hand. His birth in Algiers repeated a family habit that the Faulkners had begun to treat as a superstition. His father had been born there in 1869 and his brother in 1894, both in the pilot's widow's house on Verret Street, and by 1898 the widow was dead and her house had been let to a ferry inspector. Alice, who was seven months gone in October, had meant to stay in the Quarter. She went across to Algiers on a foggy morning to take a hat to a customer, and the ferry, which on that run was usually quarter-hourly, was held for two hours in the channel by the fog. She was taken ill at the landing. The ferry inspector's wife, who knew a Faulkner when she saw one, put her to bed in the front room of the widow's old house, and Albert was born that afternoon, a small, dark, wide-eyed child who looked at the ceiling and did not cry. His brother, who was four, was sent for. He arrived on the next boat with a hat-box, having been told that it was an emergency, and was found to have put in it a doll, a biscuit and his mother's best straw bonnet. He was a careful boy. His brother was large and slow and loved cattle. Albert was small, sharp and exact, and loved to know how many. By eight he was keeping a tally of the hats in the Royal Street shop, which his mother found more accurate than her own, and at twelve he was doing the shop's weekly sums at the counter on a stool. When his mother died in 1914, in the autumn, he was sixteen, and she left among her papers a bound account of the Ledger's New Orleans chapter, balanced to the last penny, with a note that read, Carried forward. It was Albert, and not his elder brother, who carried it forward. He sat down at the kitchen table in the room over the shop with the book, a pen and a bottle of ink, and went through the whole of it in one night, and in the morning he knew what the Ledger owned, what it owed and which of its cousins paid late. He went into a bank at seventeen, by his mother's wish, a small old house on Carondelet Street where the clerks wore sleeve-guards and the manager wore spats. He was good at it. He liked the quiet and the arithmetic, and he was promoted in the first year to the savings counter, where he learned how a deposit looked when it came from someone who wished it to be forgotten. He was nineteen in the spring of 1917, when the country entered the Great War, and he was called up in the second draft and sent to Camp Beauregard near Alexandria as a company clerk in an infantry regiment. He spent the war on the Red River with a typewriter and a quartermaster's stores, and he came home in 1919 with a sergeant's stripes, an excellent knowledge of army forms and the conviction that the bank had been a mistake. It was his father who changed his mind, though by accident. Andrew Faulkner, who was fifty and tired, came into the city in the spring of 1919 with a drove, and found that his elder son had a share in a dealer's pen and his younger one a stool at a bank. He asked the younger one to write him out a statement of what the Ledger's roads cost him, and Albert, who had not seen the old man's saddlebag accounts, took one look at them and went white. They were a mess. He told his father so. His father said that he had been waiting for someone to say it, and that the saddlebag was available. Albert gave notice at the bank at the end of the month. He told the manager that he proposed to take his arithmetic to the cattle. The manager said that he had never heard anything so improvident, and wrote him a letter of reference that was very good. He was never as easy on a horse as his brother, and never claimed to be. What he did was keep the drives. He drew up, on a long table in the rooms above the saddler in Algiers, a book of the road, with every crossing, every ranch, every cousin and every price, and with it a system of tallies that let the Ledger's Louisiana chapter know, within a week, where any given drove had been and who had fed it. He knew which ranch-houses kept a decent table and which had a stranger who did not eat. He rode out in spring and autumn with a ledger in his saddlebag and a pencil behind his ear, and the old drovers of Vermilion Parish, who had never seen anything like it, called him the Bank. He did not mind. He said it was the only title that had ever been given to him by a customer. The great flood of 1927 was the only time in his life that anybody saw him run. In April the river rose against the levees of the lower parishes, and on the twenty-ninth the city, in a panic that was never quite forgiven, cut the levee at Caernarvon below St Bernard to save itself, and the water went across the cattle country of the parish and drowned it. Albert and his brother, who were bringing a herd of two hundred from the prairie, found themselves on the wrong side of the breach with the rising water and a ridge of ground an acre wide. They were there for three days. Andrew held the cattle on the ridge. Albert swam a bayou with a rope in his teeth, which he had not done since boyhood, and brought back a skiff from a fishing camp, and the two of them poled the last of the herd across to the Chalmette road, forty head at a time. He lost the pencil. He said that he regretted it more than the boots. His father died in 1942, and Albert, who was forty-four, took the old man's sheet of the Ledger's names without comment and added to it. The war years brought a new kind of traffic, with the army camps of the state buying beef by the trainload, and the old roads were crowded with lorries. He adapted. He kept the books of the drove for the dealer's firm, sat in on the buying and by 1945 was a partner of sorts. He and his brother shared the rooms above the saddler for twenty years, until in the mid-forties he took a house of his own on Pelican Avenue, a few doors from the old Eaton place, with a garden and a very precise rain gauge. When Andrew died in 1953 he was beside him. He drove another twenty years, with a young nephew to do the riding, and stopped in 1974. He was ill in 1975, with a cancer that he treated as an unfavourable entry, and he died the next spring, in the house on Pelican Avenue, with the road book open on the quilt. It was found to balance, to the last head of cattle, on the evening before his death. In the margin, in his hand, was written, Carried forward. Albert Prejean Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the Bank of the prairie roads, the younger son who left the counting-room for the cattle and kept the accounts of the drove. In the Slayerverse he stands for the bookkeepers of the Red Ledger, the quiet men and women who counted the cost of the work, and who by an honest total made it possible for others to go on.