Alexander Sumner

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

Alexander Sumner was born in 1898 in Lafayette, Louisiana, the railway town on the Acadian prairie, and lived seventy-three years as a telegraph operator, for most of them in New Orleans. In 1925 he married the telephone operator Wilma Faulkner Cormier, a daughter of the Red Ledger on her mother's side, and they had one child, Ethel Sumner Faulkner, born in 1926 and dead in 2015. He died in 1971 of a long illness, aged seventy-three. He was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and he belonged to no slayer house, being a Sumner of the Teche country with no hunting in his blood that anyone could find. But for forty years he sat at a key in the hours when the city was asleep, and a good many of the messages that went across his wire were from cousins of the Faulkner family who needed to say a thing in six words and have it arrive. The family remembers him as the man who could hear what a sender meant by how the sender hesitated. Lafayette in 1898 was a place that the railroad had made. The Southern Pacific ran through it on the line to Texas, the depot was the centre of the town's life, and its telegraph office, a small clapboard room with a bay window over the platform, was the nearest thing in the parish to a university. His father was a section foreman on the line, a quiet Methodist from Opelousas with a broad back and a stutter, and his mother took in sewing and kept hens. Alexander was the fourth of five. He was a thin, grave boy with large ears and a tendency to stand very still, and he was at the depot, by the age of nine, as often as he was at home. The operator, a one-armed veteran of the Spanish war named Pruitt, let him sit under the table and listen to the sounder. By ten he could tell the hand of the operator at Crowley from the hand of the operator at Opelousas as easily as he could tell his brothers' footsteps. He said that a key had a voice, and that the voice told you whether the man was tired. He learned the trade as it was learned, by sitting beside it. At fourteen he was a messenger boy, running the yellow slips from the depot to the cotton buyers on Jefferson Street, and at sixteen Pruitt taught him the code, the abbreviations, the railway forms and the discipline of the wire, which is that you send exactly what you were given and not a word more. He was quick. He could take thirty-five words a minute at seventeen, and could copy while talking, which was considered a vice in a young man. He was sent in the spring of 1917 to a relief post on the line at Schriever, and in the autumn, when the Great War drew men away from the railway, to the busy central office in New Orleans, at nineteen, as the junior of a night shift of eight. The Southern Pacific, which had a great respect for a man who kept his head, gave him a desk by the window. New Orleans in those years was a loud, damp and extraordinary city. The district behind Basin Street, the Storyville of the houses, the cornetists and the brass bands, had been shut by the Navy in the autumn of 1917, and the music, which had been put out of doors, simply went into the neighbourhoods. He heard a band at the corner of Rampart and Perdido on a Sunday afternoon and stood under the gallery with his hat in his hand until it was over. He did not play anything himself, though he could drum a rhythm on a table that had been known to make a waiter stop. His rooming house on Dryades Street held a trumpeter and a cooper and a French teacher who could not be made to stop, and he said afterward that he had learned more about timing from the trumpeter than from forty years of railway rules. The influenza of the autumn of 1918 gave him his first great evening on the wire. The city's offices were half empty, the telegraphers were falling sick by the dozen, and the night shift of eight was reduced to three. For eleven days he worked sixteen hours, taking down the lists of the dead from the parish offices and the army camps, relaying the doctors' requests for coffins and the undertakers' requests for ice. He kept the key from shaking by thinking of the sounder at Lafayette. He said that every name that he copied was a person, and that he took it down as slowly as he could without making the next man wait. He did not take sick. His supervisor, who did, wrote him a note from his bed that he kept in his wallet for fifty years. He met Wilma Faulkner Cormier on the wire, in 1924. She was twenty-two, a telephone operator at the exchange on Carondelet Street, a small, fast, outspoken young woman who had been brought up in the boarding house of her mother, Clara Faulkner, and was known on the board for the speed with which she could put a call through. A message came to him from her exchange to be passed on to Houston, in a hand that he did not know, with the word "urgent" and no address. He rang the exchange to ask, and Wilma, who answered, told him that the address was a matter of principle and that he should send it as written. He sent it as written. It arrived. The next night she rang him to ask whether it had, and they talked for twelve minutes, which was a good deal for a man who sent his words at a cent each. They were married in the spring of 1925, at the church where her mother had been married, and Clara Faulkner, who looked him over from her chair for a full hour at the wedding breakfast, said at the end of it that he had the face of a man who would never read another person's letters. It was said to be a compliment. She told him, within the year, in the kitchen of the boarding house, with the door shut, what the Red Ledger was and what her sons were doing at night. He took it as he took everything, quietly, and he asked only whether the messages that the cousins sent were ever put in plain language. They were, in the main. He said that he would see to it that they were not read by anyone else. It was the service that he gave the family for the next forty years. A hunter on the road, in a bayou parish or a river town without a telephone, could send a word to the Faulkner house by the nearest telegraph, in the guise of a business message, and Alexander, who was on the night desk, could see that it reached the right hand. He had a private habit of marking such messages, with a light tick in the margin, so that they would be set apart from the rest. He gave a number of cousins the knack of writing the dull, flat, commercial sentence that goes through a wire without a second look. He never asked how the work was going. He knew by the pauses. Ethel Sumner Faulkner was born in 1926, in the second year of the marriage, and he taught her the dots and dashes before she could read, rapping them out on the edge of her high chair until she could tell him the word. She took the Faulkner name, at her grandmother's request. The great flood of the spring of 1927 found him at the key in the central office for three nights while the river rose, sending the levee boards' messages to Baton Rouge and Vicksburg and sleeping in a chair, and Wilma, at the exchange, kept the other end of the same conversation going. They did not see each other for four days, and spoke at intervals, in the intervals of the work, in the clipped, affectionate abbreviations of two people on duty. The war years of the forties filled the city with soldiers and shipyards, and the night wire grew very heavy. He worked it without complaint, being too old for the army and too useful to be spared. When the telegraph companies began to be replaced by the teleprinter, he learned to operate that too, and said that it was like talking to a person who had stopped listening. He retired in 1963, at sixty-five, with a watch. His illness began in the late sixties, and it was a slow one, and he bore it with the same economy that he had brought to his messages. He died in the autumn of 1971, in his own bed, in the house in the neighbourhood that he and Wilma had kept for forty-six years. Ethel sat up with him through his last night and tapped the old code on the blanket. He answered it with one finger, and said, as clearly as the dots could make it, that the message had been received. Alexander Sumner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the telegraph man, the quiet in-law who carried the Red Ledger's words down the wire without ever reading them twice. In the Slayerverse he stands for the signallers and operators of the hunting houses, the people who sat at the far end of every urgent night and made sure that a plain message was delivered on time and to the right hand, and who asked for nothing but that it be sent as written.