Aristide Delacroix

Slayer of House of Delacroix, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Aristide Delacroix was born in 1881 at Mobile, Louisiana, a small river landing and railway halt that is not to be confused with the Alabama port, and lived seventy-seven years as a railway clerk and a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix in New Orleans. The family book knows him as The Fallow Ledger, a name that recalls a page left blank on purpose, and it classes him as a Thief, a hunter who does not fight a vampire but takes from it, its papers, its keys, its hiding places and its secrets, and leaves it poorer and exposed. His craft was Salon Reading, the art of entering a crowded room and learning in one slow minute who in it is lying, who is frightened and who is not breathing as the others breathe, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was called in 1902, in a sickroom, when a fever broke and the patient asked for the shutters to be closed. He raised one daughter, the slayer Josephine Delacroix, born in 1918 and dead in 1981, whose mother the family papers do not name, and he died in 1958 of a car accident, aged seventy-seven. Mobile, Louisiana, was a place that appeared on the railway timetable and on no respectable map. It was a cluster of a dozen frame houses, a cotton platform, a water tower and a general store, where the line to the coast stopped to take on water, and the Delacroix who lived there, a cadet branch of the Norman-French family of the Vieux Carre, kept the store and the post office. The family papers do not name his parents, which is the Delacroix habit, and say only that his father sold flour and his mother kept the stamps. Aristide was the third child of four, a thin, quick, pale boy with large ears and a habit of standing in doorways. He listened to everything. By seven he could tell from the sound of the engine which train was coming and from the tone of the stationmaster's voice what he had had for breakfast. The railway was his school. He hung about the platform from the time he could walk, and was given, at twelve, the job of meeting the noon train with a mailbag and a slate, and learned there, without being told, the craft of watching people step down. He noticed who had no luggage, who carried too much and who looked first at the roof of the station and then at the ground. He noticed that a particular sort of passenger, who came off the night train only, never asked the way. He kept these observations to himself. They went on the slate in small letters, under the heading of weather, and were rubbed out at dusk. He went down to New Orleans at seventeen, on the same line, to a cousin on Dauphine Street, and took a post as a junior clerk in the freight offices of a railway company on Poydras Street. It was a large, dim, high-ceilinged room with a hundred desks, a great many ledgers and a clock that ran slow, and he was put at the end of a row to copy bills of lading. He was good. He wrote a fast, regular hand, made no errors and had a great gift for being unnoticed. In three years he had been moved to the tracing desk, where a clerk followed lost goods up and down the line, which is a detective's work with a pen, and he discovered that he liked nothing so much as finding out where a thing had gone. The calling came in the autumn of 1902, when he was twenty-one. A fellow clerk, a young man called Gaspard Lemaitre, fell ill with typhoid, and Aristide, who lodged in the same house, sat up with him in the evenings, reading aloud from the newspaper. The fever went on for eleven days. On the twelfth night, about two in the morning, it broke. The sweat ran, the eyes cleared and Gaspard, looking very small in the bed, said in a perfectly ordinary voice that he would be obliged if the shutters could be closed. They were closed. Aristide went to fetch a glass of water, came back and found the sick man sitting up with his head cocked, listening to something in the street, and understood, in a manner that he could not afterward explain, that the man in the bed was no longer the man that he had been sitting with. He was still smiling. The clerk's whole face was the same. But he had stopped breathing through his nose. Aristide put down the glass, walked to the window, opened the shutters and let in the first grey of the morning. The thing in the bed looked at the light and did not like it. It is not recorded what it said. He was trained by an old cousin of the family, a retired river pilot who lived over a pharmacy in the Quarter and had been waiting for someone with the right eyes. The cousin looked at him for a long minute and said that he had the makings of a thief. Aristide, who was an honest young man, took it badly. It was explained to him that a Thief, in the Delacroix sense, was not a burglar but a taker of what a vampire kept, and that a vampire kept more than people imagined. They lived, said the cousin, as a rich man lives, with accounts, leases, keys, letters, servants and a cellar, and it was a good deal safer to empty the cellar than to go down into it. He was taught to pick locks, to forge a hand and to pass a guarded door, and above all to read a room. Salon Reading was his own gift, refined by the cousin into a discipline. A salon, said the old man, was any place where people gather in a pretence of ease, a parlour, a saloon, a ballroom, a ferry deck, and a vampire who wished to hide in the world must go into such places. Aristide learned to stand at the edge of a crowd, let the room settle and read it. He looked at who held a glass and did not drink, at who did not cast a shadow in a mirror that the others did, at who stood always a little away from the lamp. He learned to count the breath in a room by the movement of the fans. In the Storyville years, after 1897, when the district of licensed pleasure had filled half a dozen blocks with bright parlours and pianos, the young clerk from the freight office took to spending his evenings in the halls on Basin Street, in a good suit, with a soda water, reading the crowd. The music, which was new and loud and became jazz, he thought excellent. It was an honest noise. A vampire, he observed, cannot keep time. He worked the day job and the night work side by side for fifty-five years. By day he rose, in due course, to the chief clerkship of the tracing desk, and by night he took what was needed. He took a ledger from a cellar on Esplanade that recorded the rents of twelve houses owned by something that had been dead since the Louisiana Purchase. He took the keys of a warehouse on the levee. In 1917, when the war years filled the city with soldiers and every cot in every lodging house was in use, he took a list of names from the pocket of a quartermaster's coat and saved, by the family's reckoning, thirty men. He never fired his pistol more than a dozen times in his life. He said that a hunter who had to fire was a hunter who had already made a mistake. His daughter Josephine was born in 1918, in the autumn, in the worst week of the influenza epidemic, when the city's hearses were stopped for want of drivers and the Board of Health closed the schools, the theatres and the churches. Her mother, whom the family papers do not name, brought her through the sickness. Aristide brought her up in a house on Burgundy Street with the help of an aunt. She was a solemn, sharp-featured, observant child who stood in doorways, and he watched her do it with a kind of gloomy pleasure. He taught her to read a room before she could read a book. She was called late, in 1951, on a River Road at dusk, when he himself taught her. In 1937 she married Norman Thorne, of the Proctor and Thorne line, in the church at the end of Dauphine Street, and the clerk who had never made a mistake in a ledger made, it was said, a long and moving and perfectly accurate speech. He retired from the railway in 1946, at sixty-five, with a watch and a pension, and lived on for twelve years in the house on Burgundy Street, reading, playing dominoes and taking, when the work required, a stroll. He died in the spring of 1958, at seventy-seven, when a delivery truck ran a light on Canal Street and struck the car in which he was being driven home from a wedding. He was the only passenger who did not survive. He was found with his hat on his knee and his hands folded, and his eyes, the police officer remarked, open and a little amused, as though he had seen it coming and had thought it over. Aristide Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Fallow Ledger, the clerk who took what the dead had hoarded and never raised his voice doing it. In the Slayerverse he stands for the thieves and watchers of the Red Ledger's cousins, the hunters who learned that a vampire can be beaten by a good eye, a steady hand and a quiet entrance, and that a blank page, carefully kept, can hold a great many secrets.