Alexander Faulkner Delacroix

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

Alexander Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1893 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty-four years as a machinist in the shipyards, rail shops and pump houses of the city, a man who could make a part to a thousandth of an inch and who said of most other things that they were near enough. He was the younger son of the bookkeeper Elias Faulkner Delacroix and the bookkeeper Amelie Delacroix, and the brother of Robert Faulkner Delacroix. The family papers record no marriage and no children. He died in 1977 of cancer, aged eighty-four. He belonged to the House of Delacroix by name and to the Faulkner bloodline of the Red Ledger through his father's mother, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. He was not a vampire slayer, and the whole of his usefulness to the Ledger was that he could turn out in brass and steel the small things that the hunters broke, lost or had never been able to buy. He was born in the rooms behind the shop on Royal Street, in the summer of 1893, in a house where the books were done at the kitchen table and the cash drawer was counted twice. His grandmother Monique, the shopkeeper whom the family called The Plain Tally, was in her last year and sat on the gallery in a chair, watching the Quarter go by, and is reported to have looked at the baby for some time and said that it had a good grip. It did. His mother observed, years later, that he had been the only one of her children who took things apart to see what was inside, and that this had started with the bread knife. Robert, four years older, was the one who liked to add. Alexander was the one who liked to open the back of the clock. The shop could not hold him. His parents were people of columns, and a son who looked at a column and saw only a number was a puzzle to them, though a kind one. They did what they could. His father took him, at ten, to the cooperage where he kept the books, and showed him the barrel hoops, the adzes and the iron-bound machinery of the stave mill, and the boy stood at the door of the steam shed for an afternoon without saying a word. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a machinist in Algiers, a Scot named Dunbar who ran a one-lathe shop at the back of the railway yard and who had a rule that no apprentice touched a lathe until he could file a flat surface that would stick to another by suction. It took Alexander eleven weeks. He said that it was the only time in his life that he had been proud of something that looked like nothing. Elias had told him at twelve what the Ledger was, at the kitchen table, in the same flat voice in which he explained a debit. Alexander had listened and had asked a single question, which was whether the hunters had trouble with their guns. His father said that they did. They broke springs, they lost pins and they carried a good deal of their equipment in ways that it was not meant to be carried. The boy said, with great gravity, that in that case he thought that he could be of use. It was a more practical form of vocation than most of the family could claim, and Elias wrote it down. By nineteen he was a journeyman, and he made his first piece for the Ledger that year, a replacement hinge for the cylinder-pin of a revolver belonging to a hunter of the Treme, who had dropped the original into the Mississippi and who had been obliged to carry the gun for three weeks with a bent nail. The hinge was handed over wrapped in a bit of oiled rag, and the man looked at it for some time, and then at Alexander, and then said that he had a cousin who would pay good money for a boy who could do that. By twenty he had a list. He made stake-caps for the silver-tipped stakes, which are the kind of item that a blacksmith will not make because he does not know what it is for, and ferrules, and spring clips for holsters, and a small steel hasp for a coffin lid that could be locked from either side. He made them in the evenings, after the shift, in a corner of the Algiers shop, and the hunters came and collected them in the dark. The Great War came to him as a shipyard. His brother Robert went to the quartermaster's office, and Alexander went to the Algiers yard where, in the year after the declaration, they were turning out wooden hulls, engine beds and steam fittings as fast as the lathes would run. He worked twelve hours a day for two years and was never once late. He was, in 1917, the youngest man in the shop to be given a charge hand's armband, and in the same autumn he lost his father's last three years of letters in a fire at the lodging house on Tchoupitoulas. His father, who had died three years before, was in the grave at the Treme, and his mother, who read a good deal into the loss, said nothing. In the evenings she kept the cash book and, on the table beside it, a brass paperweight that her son had made in the shape of a hand. It held down the page for eight years. Amelie died in the winter of 1925, and the rooms behind the shop were let. He took a room above a bicycle repairer in the Marigny and kept it for fifty years. He was a plain, spare, dry, silent man, with large hands and a habit of looking at a clock on the wall as though it owed him something, and the neighbours knew him as the gentleman who mended things. He mended their sewing machines, their pumps, their clocks and a great many locks, and the evening when the mother of the family opposite found her door open and a stranger inside, it was he, with a pipe wrench and no hat, who walked in and sat down in the kitchen until the stranger left. He never explained how he knew what the stranger was. The great Mississippi flood of 1927 put the rail shops under water, and he worked for nine days on the Algiers levee, with a crew of men and a steam pump that he had rebuilt from a wreck, keeping the water out of the railway yard at the cost of his thumbnail and a good deal of his temper. It held. The Depression years cost him his shift and then his post, and he took the work that came, which was repairs, and he repaired the sewing machines of half the women of the Marigny, which is how he met, at one remove, most of the families that the Ledger employed in the district. In the war years of the next decade, when the city filled with soldiers and sailors and the shipyards roared again, he went back to the lathe at sixty-eight, because they asked, and made, on a night shift, the fittings of a hull that he never saw launched. He was sixty-eight, and then seventy, and then eighty, and he did not stop making. In the last decade he made the Ledger's gear in a bedroom workshop, with a treadle lathe, a vise and a lamp. He made, among other things, a set of silver-tipped stakes with a screw-on cap for a young woman of the Faulkner family who had written to ask for something that would not rattle. He was found to be ill in 1976, and he died in the spring of the following year, in his own bed, at eighty-four. The last piece on the bench was a brass thumbscrew, half threaded, with the die still on it. The young woman, who came to the funeral, said that it would have fitted. Alexander Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the machinist of the Marigny, the younger son who took apart the clock instead of balancing the books. In the Slayerverse he stands for the makers of the Red Ledger, the people with lathes and files who never raised a stake and never failed to turn one, and whose precision was a kind of protection.