Andrew Faulkner

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

Andrew Faulkner was born in 1869 at Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-three years as a cattle drover who brought beef on the hoof from the Louisiana prairies to the slaughterhouses of the city. He was the youngest of four children of the river pilot and vampire slayer Augustus Faulkner, The Levee Warden, and of the herbalist Sarah Foster, and the brother of Sarah Faulkner, Hippolyte Foster Faulkner and Clara Faulkner, of whom the eldest became a slayer. He married the milliner Alice Prejean in 1893, and they raised two sons, Andrew Prejean Faulkner and Albert Prejean Faulkner. He was not a hunter and was not called to be one. He died in 1942 of a fall, aged seventy-three, and the family remembers him as the Faulkner who knew every cattle road from the Attakapas prairies to the river, and who carried the Red Ledger's word down them in the ordinary course of selling steers. His birth is the only part of his life that was a great adventure. In the winter of 1869 his father's steamboat was laid up on the ways at the Algiers drydock for a new wheel, and Augustus, who had never been known to leave a boat in the hands of a yard, took a room on the Algiers side to watch the work. Sarah, who was thirty-seven and about to bear her fourth child, went over on the ferry with her three children and a basket of dried herbs to keep him company, and took a room in the house of a pilot's widow on Verret Street. The child came a fortnight early, in a cold rain, with the ferry bell sounding across the water and the widow's hired woman in attendance. The shipwrights, who had heard the news, sent over a cake. His mother said that she had never in her life given birth so near to a drydock, and that she hoped it would not be a habit. The baby was named for no one. Augustus, who was not sentimental, pointed out that there were already too many Hippolytes in the family and that the child might as well have a clear name. He grew up in the rooms on Dumaine Street, at the edge of the French Market, amid the smell of his mother's herbs, and learned the city through the soles of his feet. He was a big, brown, slow-speaking child who took little notice of his elder brother and sisters and spent a great deal of time in the market with the cattlemen who brought beef to the stalls. He liked the cattle. He liked their size, their silence and the way that a steer, properly handled, would go where it was told. His sister Sarah had her father's dark looks and took, at eight, to his gun-case. Andrew took to the drovers. By eleven he was running errands for a Lafayette cattle dealer who kept a pen at the foot of Elysian Fields, and was paid in sugar cane and, on Saturday, in silver. His mother's people came from the prairie, and it was the prairie that he drove from. The Attakapas country, in the parishes of Lafayette, St Landry and Vermilion, was cattle land, where the French-speaking herdsmen ran small tough longhorn crosses on the open grass and brought them, in the autumn, to the railheads. He went out to his grandmother's country at fourteen, with a letter from Sarah, and worked for a summer as a hand on a prairie ranch, learning to rope, to cut, to swim a herd across a bayou and to keep a bull in a good humour. He came home brown and taller, and was taken on by a cattle dealer of the Crescent City Landing, who shipped beef to the slaughterhouses of Algiers and had a great many cousins in the west. His father died in 1889, three years after his mother, and left the family a pilot's pension, a small house and a tally. Andrew, who was twenty, took over the lease. Sarah, who had already been a hunter for some years, carried on her father's work on the levee. The two middle children had their own lives to lead. Andrew said that he thought he would be a drover, and that somebody in the family ought to be in a position to sit down to a meal. He bought a horse, a rope and a licence, and went out to the prairie. He was not a hunter and never thought himself one, but the work suited the Ledger very well. A drover is a man who moves slowly over country that hunters cannot cover, stopping at every farm for a night, asking, in the ordinary way of trade, who has been seen on the road. He found, without being asked, that he could answer the cousins' questions. He learned which ranch-house sheltered a stranger who did not eat, and which bayou crossing had lost a hand. He carried in his saddlebag, from the first year, a small, folded sheet with the names of a dozen families of the Red Ledger between Opelousas and the Sabine, and he took them news. He was thus, in a sense that the Ledger recognises, a courier. His sister Sarah said, in her dry fashion, that he was the only member of the family who could cross the parish without being noticed, and that this was because he was always followed by thirty head of cattle. He met Alice Prejean on Magazine Street in the spring of 1892, in the most ridiculous possible circumstances. A heifer that he was driving up from the stockyard for a butcher in the uptown district had bolted at a streetcar and got into the front garden of a large house in the Garden District, where it ate a good part of a flower bed. The daughter of the house, a slight, dark, determined girl of twenty-one in a grey silk dress, came out with a parasol, told him that the bed was the work of three years, and demanded an account of what he proposed to do. He took off his hat. He said that he proposed to apologise. She said that she was in the trade of hats and not of gardens, but that the apology would do. She was a milliner, and had a little shop in the front parlour, and within a month he had found reasons to bring a cow along Magazine Street four times. They were married in 1893, at St Louis Cathedral, and took rooms in the French Quarter near the market. Alice kept her shop, in two rooms on Royal Street, and made hats for the ladies of the Garden District and, in increasing numbers, for the ladies of Storyville, who had their own opinions about feathers and paid very well. She kept the house too, at a quiet, sensible, economical pitch that Andrew, who came in from the prairie twice a month smelling of horse, found a blessing. Andrew Prejean Faulkner was born in 1894, and Albert Prejean Faulkner in 1898. Neither son was called. Andrew went into the cotton exchange, and Albert, who liked a ledger of a more ordinary kind, went into a bank, though after Alice's death in 1914 and the war both left their desks to drive cattle with their father. Alice died in 1914, of heart failure, at forty-three, in the room over the shop, with her husband beside her. He had come in from Opelousas that afternoon and she had said, in her last clear hour, that it was a pity about the heifer, because she had always liked the bed. He closed the drove for a month. He went on driving until he was past sixty, through the years of the jazz bands and the years when the Storyville brass went up Basin Street and then, in 1917, was shut. He was caught in the great flood of 1927, which brought the river to the top of the levees and put the prairies under water, and he spent three weeks in a skiff taking cattle off the roofs of barns in St Bernard and Lafourche, while the city itself held its breath. He said that it was the only time in his life that he had been afraid for the stock. The Depression was hard on beef, and on the drovers, and he came in from the prairie at sixty-four, in 1933, for the last time, and settled in the French Quarter with a pension, a rocking chair and a dog. He died in the spring of 1942, at seventy-three, of a fall from a step in a neighbour's yard, where he had gone to reach an old lamp. His sons buried him beside Alice in the family tomb, and his sister Clara, then seventy-four, stood at the gate in her black hat and said that he had been the only one of the lot of them who had never frightened her. Andrew Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the drover from Algiers, the youngest son who took his mother's prairie roads and carried the Ledger along them in the tail of a herd. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ordinary travellers of the Red Ledger, the men who moved cattle, letters and news across the country, who never carried a stake, and who kept the cousins in touch for forty years.