Amelie Delacroix

Spouse of Elias Faulkner Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from the House of Delacroix.

Amelie Delacroix was born in 1866 in Natchez, Louisiana, the small river village on the Cane River, and lived fifty-nine years as a bookkeeper in the French Quarter of New Orleans. She was the only daughter of the shopkeeper and vampire slayer Monique Delacroix, The Plain Tally, and she kept her mother's books for thirty years and then her husband's. In 1887 she married the bookkeeper Elias Faulkner Delacroix, and they raised two sons, Robert Faulkner Delacroix and Alexander Faulkner Delacroix. She died in 1925 of pneumonia, aged fifty-nine. She was not called to the work, though her mother was a Broker of the House of Delacroix and her husband's mother a Faulkner of the Red Ledger, and she never carried a gun, a craft or an alias. But she did something that no slayer in either family could do, which was to add, and the Louisiana chapter remembers her as the woman whose columns always balanced. She was born on the Cane River because her mother, at the end of the war, had wanted a quiet confinement and had gone up to her own mother's house at the crossroads store for it. The child's father is not named in the family papers, and Amelie never asked, which was the first sign of her character. She was born in the early spring, on a morning of high water, in a room behind the counter, and she was carried out to be shown to the customers within the day. Monique brought her down to New Orleans at six weeks, in a basket on the deck of a packet, and set her down behind the counter of the shop on Royal Street, where she would spend most of her childhood. The shop sold thread, tobacco, lamp oil and news. Amelie learned to count on the shelves. There was never any question of what she was to be. She was a square, fair, deliberate child, with a flat voice and her mother's habit of looking at a customer until the customer produced the correct amount. At five she was counting the day's coins on the counter into piles of ten. At eight she was keeping a column of her own, on the back of a wrapping-paper pad, headed simply what is owed, and at eleven her mother, who had not been asked, found that the child had caught a forty-cent error in the shop's books that had been standing since Christmas. Monique, who was in the middle of a serious business with a crowd and a crate of oil lamps that winter, considered for a moment, and then took the child's pencil and wrote beneath the correction, in her own hand, the single word good. It was a large word in that house. Monique was a slayer, called in 1860 on a canal towpath when a barge drifted in with its lamps still lit, and her whole life's work was in the matter of the honest count. She kept her name, The Plain Tally, because she never inflated a number. She was a Broker, a hunter who moved people by favour, knowledge and obligation, and she told her daughter, in the plainest terms, what she did, at the kitchen table, in Amelie's fourteenth year. Amelie said that she had thought so. Then she asked what the shop's credit with the night-watchmen came to, and whether the favours were entered anywhere. They were not. Monique, who had conducted the business in her head for twenty years, looked at her for a full minute. Then she took down a new book. That was the beginning of the Delacroix ledger, and it was the most useful thing that Amelie ever did. A Broker's favours, her mother said, were owed and were owing, and in twenty years she had not written one down, for fear of the book falling into the wrong hands. Amelie wrote them in a private shorthand of her own, in a cash book labelled for the thread suppliers, and in a year had a complete account of every debt, every friend and every promise that the Delacroix house had outstanding in the Quarter. Her mother was astonished. She was also, for the first time in her life, able to take a holiday. She went down to the coast for a week. The house did not fall down. She met Elias Faulkner Delacroix in the summer of 1886, in the front of her mother's shop, where he had been sent by the firm of a levee cooper to collect a bill. He was twenty-three, the elder child of the carpenter Baptiste Delacroix and of the schoolteacher Georgia Faulkner, and he had been a cooper's agent on the levee for three years, a tall, amiable, rumpled young man who was, it turned out, dreadful at figures. Amelie, who was twenty, looked at the bill, corrected it in pencil and handed it back. He paid the amended sum without a murmur and came again the following week, on no business at all, and then the next. He said afterward that he had never before been so thoroughly and so kindly put right. They were married in 1887, in a small church in the Treme, with Monique, who had wondered whether the match would answer, sitting in the second pew with a carefully accounted smile. It answered well. Elias went into his wife's trade, though not at once, and proved, under her instruction, a very good bookkeeper, slow, thorough and incapable of dishonesty. The two kept the accounts of half a dozen small businesses in the Quarter from a pair of desks in the back room on Royal Street. They had two sons. Robert Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1889 and Alexander Faulkner Delacroix in 1893, neither of them hunters, and both taught their letters from the ledger. Amelie, who had an exact opinion of the amount of nonsense that a child can absorb, taught them that a column has two sides, and that the one that cannot be seen is the one that matters. Her mother died in 1893, in the autumn, of old age, at sixty-five, in the front room, with the shop still open below. Amelie took over the counter and the books in a single morning. The Plain Tally's ledger of favours came to her with the keys, and she kept it up for thirty-two years, adding, in her small square hand, the new names, the new debts and the new cousins, until it held some eleven hundred entries and could have put the whole of the Louisiana chapter in the dock. It never came to that. She kept a second copy in a flour bin, a third in the school on Ursulines Street, and a fourth in her head, and she was quite unmoved by the suggestion that this might be excessive. Elias died in 1914, in the spring, before the war, of a bad chest, at fifty-one, and she went on alone. The Great War came three years later, and her sons went into the service, Robert as a quartermaster's clerk and Alexander to a shipyard at Algiers, and both came home. The Storyville district, which her mother had watched from the shop window when it was new, was closed by order of the navy in the autumn of 1917, and the brass bands went north in a trail of railway carriages to Chicago, and with them, as she noticed, went half of the Quarter's custom. She took the loss in the books. The influenza arrived a year later, and she did the accounts of the funeral houses on Claiborne Avenue for a month, at a rate that would have shamed a cooper, and she did not catch it herself. She died in the winter of 1925, of pneumonia, at fifty-nine, in the back room on Royal Street, with the cash book open on the desk. The Ledger's Louisiana chapter, in the letter that it sent to the sons, called her a balanced woman, and meant it as a pun. She was buried beside her husband in the Faulkner tomb in the Treme. The ledger of favours, in her last entry, was closed, in black, to the day. Amelie Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the bookkeeper of Royal Street, the daughter who wrote down what her mother carried in her head. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and counters of the old houses, the people who proved that a good memory is a danger and a good book is a defence, and who kept the honest count that the hunters could not.