Andrew Prejean Faulkner

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

Andrew Prejean Faulkner was born in 1894 in Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-nine years as a cattle drover, bringing beef on the hoof from the Attakapas prairies to the slaughterhouses of the city, as his father had done before him. He was the elder son of the cattle drover Andrew Faulkner and the milliner Alice Prejean, and the brother of Albert Prejean Faulkner. The family papers name no wife and no children. He died in 1953 of kidney failure, aged fifty-nine. 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, and he was not a hunter and never wished to be one. What he did was walk beside a herd for forty years and carry, in the ordinary course of selling steers, the small messages that the Ledger's cousins in the western parishes could not afford to put in the post. He was born across the river because his father was. Andrew Faulkner had been confined at Algiers himself, in the winter of 1869, in the house of a pilot's widow on Verret Street, and when his own wife, Alice, in the winter of 1894 reached the last fortnight of her first confinement, a cattle dealer's wife of the Algiers stockyards sent over word that the widow's front room was free. Alice, who thought the superstition ridiculous and who also had no objection to a midwife she already knew, took the ferry with a hat-box and a trunk. The baby arrived on a wet morning with the ferry bell going across the water. His father, who had come in from Opelousas with a drove of two hundred head and was standing in the street holding a lead rope, was told through the window. He said that it was a boy, and that the widow had better be paid for the bed. The widow, who was then eighty, remembered the elder Andrew, and said that in her opinion the Faulkners had no business being born anywhere else. He was brought home to Royal Street at three weeks and grew up above the hat shop, in a house that smelled of steam, glue and straw. His mother's trade was the centre of it. The ladies of the Garden District came in the mornings, and in the afternoons came the ladies of Storyville, who had views about ostrich feathers and who paid their bills in cash and in advance. Andrew, who was a large, brown, slow, shy boy, was given the job at nine of carrying the hat-boxes to Basin Street. He went with a clean collar and a grave face, and was received at the door by a succession of women who called him Mister Andrew and gave him pralines. He did not know what the street was. He knew that the ladies tipped well and that the doorman, a former prizefighter, would let him sit in the kitchen. He said afterward that the Storyville years taught him that there are two kinds of people, those who look at a boy with a hat-box and those who do not, and that the second kind were worth cultivating. His mother wanted him in an office. She had taught him to add in his head, and at eighteen she found him a place on the cotton exchange, running slips to the floor, where in a year he was given a seat in the pit. It was a respectable thing for a milliner's son, and Andrew, who was fond of his mother, sat in it for two years and was good at it and loathed it. He said that a cotton pit was a herd that had no manners. Then in the autumn of 1914 his mother died, of heart failure, in the room over the shop, and he drove into town with his father in a borrowed wagon and, after the funeral, took a long look at the old man's face and said that he would come out to Opelousas for the spring drive. His father said that it was a long way. Andrew said that he knew the way. He gave up the pit seat the following Monday. He learned the road from the wrong end. His father had come to the prairie as a boy, with a letter from a sister and a rope, and had grown into it. Andrew came to it a man of twenty, soft from the exchange, and spent the first season on a mule behind the drag, eating dust and learning the language, which was part French, part English and part cattle. He learned to read the sky for a squall and the herd for a restless night, and to bring two hundred head across the Bayou Teche at a ford where the bank was good and the cousins who owned it were not. His father taught him the other part in the second year, at a camp near Opelousas, in the evening, over a pot of coffee. The Ledger, the old man said, was a book of names and a set of roads, and a drover who knew the roads was in a position to learn the names. Andrew, who had a grave and literal mind, asked which names. His father gave him a small, folded sheet with a dozen families of the Red Ledger on it. It was the same sheet that he himself had carried for twenty-five years. The war that began that August took the cattle trade in odd directions. The price of beef rose, the army bought on the hoof and the slaughterhouses of Algiers worked double shifts, and in the spring of 1917, when the Storyville district was closed by order of the navy and the hat shop lost half its custom in a morning, Andrew bought his mother's old trunk of ribbons and cleared it for sale from the back of a wagon. He did not like it. He kept a good deal of the ribbon for himself, and tied the tally of every drove with it, a different colour for every year, so that when he got an old rope out of a barn he could tell you what the weather had been. He never married, and the family never pressed. He took rooms above a saddler on the Algiers side, a short walk from the stockyard, and shared them with his brother Albert until Albert moved out, and for the next thirty years he went out in the autumn and came in at Christmas. The Depression was hard on him, as it was on every drover, and in the winter of 1932 he sold nothing for six weeks and drove a herd of sixty back to the prairie rather than accept a price that he thought an insult to the cattle. His father died in 1942, from a fall off a step in a neighbour's yard, and Andrew buried him beside his mother and took over the old man's sheet of names. He was forty-eight. He kept up the roads for another ten years, and in the years of the Korean War, when the price of beef rose again and the young men went to Pusan, he took a younger man along on the drives and told him which crossings to trust. He became ill in 1952, with a kidney, and said it was the water. By the spring of the next year he could not sit a horse, and he spent the last months in the room above the saddler, in a chair by the window, looking at the stockyard, where the dealers' wagons still came in at dawn. He died in the autumn of 1953, with Albert beside him. The last herd of the season was in the pens that night, and the dealers, who had heard, kept the lanterns lit until morning. In the drawer of the table by the chair Albert found a coil of coloured ribbon, forty years of it, knotted end to end, and with it a tally that gave, for every drove, the number of head, the weather and the name of the family that had put him up for the night. Andrew Prejean Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the drover from Algiers, the elder son who left the cotton pit for the prairie and carried the Red Ledger's word in the tail of a herd. In the Slayerverse he stands for the travellers of the Ledger, the men who moved across the country slowly and in plain sight, who never carried a stake and who kept the cousins in touch by the roads that they knew best.