Augustus Hutchinson Faulkner

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

Augustus Hutchinson Faulkner was born in 1888 at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lived sixty-seven years as a druggist, for forty of them behind the same counter on Magazine Street in New Orleans. He was the son of the machinist Hippolyte Foster Faulkner and of the nurse and vampire slayer Martha Hutchinson, known in the Red Ledger as The Fallow Beacon, and the grandson, on his father's side, of the river pilot Augustus Faulkner and the herbalist Sarah Foster, from whom he took both his first name and the smell of his shop. He was not a hunter, and he never married. He belonged to the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger, and the family remembers him as the druggist who sold a hunter what he needed without asking what it was for, and who sat up on more than one night with a man that a doctor would have turned away. He died in 1955 of old age, at sixty-seven, in the rooms above the shop, which the family took to be a polite way of saying that he had worn out the last of a long and steady engine. Baton Rouge in 1888 was a small, hot, yellow-fronted state capital of ten thousand people, strung along a bluff on the east bank of the Mississippi, with a half-built statehouse, a university on the edge of town, a railroad yard and a river full of packets. It was the first high ground above the delta, and its people thought the better of themselves for it. His father Hippolyte, a tall, dry, slow-spoken man of twenty-one, had come up from New Orleans to work in the machine shop of the Baton Rouge ice works and the railroad foundry, where the boilers and pumps that kept the town cold and moving needed a man who could make a part that did not exist. His mother Martha, who was twenty-one also, had taken a place as a nurse at the charity ward, after training in the city. She was a small, brisk, yellow-haired woman of Hutchinson stock, from the old Massachusetts family that had sent a branch to the Gulf, and she had been hunting for two years. She delivered her son on the fourth of March, in the upstairs room of a house on Convention Street, in a spring so early that the magnolias were in flower. He was named for his grandfather, the pilot, who was dead, and given his mother's name in the middle, which was the Faulkner way of keeping two families in one boy. He was a round, brown-eyed, cheerful child, extremely fond of his meals and of being carried, and was known in the house as the Little Alderman. His father worked twelve hours a day at the foundry. His mother worked nights at the ward, and in the small hours, when the ward was asleep, on the river, in a dark coat, with a lantern. Augustus was brought up, therefore, in the company of his father's pipe, a succession of neighbours' daughters and a deal of cold supper, and he said afterward that he had grown up in a house where the grown people were always either at work or asleep, and that he had learned to take care of himself, and of them. He learned, too, what they did. His mother told him at nine, at the kitchen table, in a low voice, with a cup of tea between them, in the plainest words she could find. She said that the family belonged to an old company of people who looked after a particular kind of trouble, that she was one of them, that his father was not and that he, she thought, was not either. She watched his face as she said it. He thought for a minute, and asked whether she would be wanting her supper late. She said that she supposed she would. He said that he would keep it warm. It was, the family agreed, exactly what Hippolyte would have said. The family moved back to New Orleans in 1899, when his father was offered a place in the railway shops in the city and his mother a post at the Charity Hospital. They took a double cottage in the Irish Channel, a few streets from the river, with a gallery and a fig tree, and Augustus, at eleven, found himself in a city that smelled of coffee, molasses and mud. It was a wonderful place to be a boy. There was the river, which he was forbidden, and the Quarter, which he was not, and on Magazine Street, round the corner from the cottage, there was a druggist's shop with a soda fountain and a wall of blue and amber bottles, where the owner, an old Alsatian called Mr Hirsch, gave a nickel a week to a boy who would sweep the floor. He took it. He stayed, in a manner of speaking, for the rest of his life. It was the smell that held him. A drugstore of the day was a place of clove oil and camphor, liquorice and iodine, sulphur, rose water and alcohol, and the boy, who had his grandmother's nose, could name every bottle in the shop with his eyes shut. Mr Hirsch, who had been a druggist for fifty years, was delighted. He taught the boy to roll a pill and to label a bottle, and then to grind, weigh and compound, and he sent him, at sixteen, to the pharmacy school of Tulane, where he took the course in two years and graduated in 1908, at twenty, with a certificate, a prize in materia medica and a licence. He came home and went straight back behind the counter. When Mr Hirsch retired in 1914, he took over the shop, and kept the old man's name on the sign for another ten years, until it faded, and then put up his own. It was a druggist's trade to know everyone. The shop, open from seven to eleven, six days a week, was the nearest thing in the Irish Channel to a parish office, and Augustus, who was round, kind and unhurried, presided over it with the air of a magistrate who had never been known to convict. He sold soda and tonic, cough syrup and corn plasters. He made up prescriptions for the doctors of three parishes. He advised the dockworkers' wives on everything, from colic to lodgers. And he sold, from a drawer under the counter that held a label of its own, the small silver things that the Ledger's hunters needed, and a number of the plainer drugs that a hunter wanted, for a burn or a bite, and for which no doctor would be asked. He never inquired. He simply filled the order. A hunter who came in at two in the morning, with a torn sleeve, was taken into the back, sat down by the stove and given a cup of coffee and a bandage, and was out again by half past three, with a bill that was seldom presented. His parents kept the Faulkner house in the Channel. His mother went on nursing at the Charity Hospital, where she was one of the most trusted senior nurses on the ward, and hunting, at intervals, in the wards and warehouses of the river front, until her sixties. His father, who worked at the railway shops until his retirement, made for her, and for a number of the city's hunters, the small, plain, excellent things that a machinist could make, a hinged case, a silver-cutting die, a spring for a pistol. Both died in the same winter, in 1930, within a few weeks of each other, of a bad influenza that had run through the Channel, and Augustus nursed them. He closed the shop for eleven days. It was the only time in forty years that the door was locked in working hours. The great wars of his lifetime passed through the shop. In the Great War, which filled the city with soldiers and sailors, the store was open all night. He stocked iodine and quinine for the training camps and filled prescriptions for a thousand young men on leave, and he spent, in the autumn of 1918, four weeks without a proper meal, when the influenza epidemic took, in New Orleans, more than three thousand people. The pharmacy ran out of everything but aspirin and hope, and he made up a cough mixture of his own, from his grandmother's recipe, that did, it was said, a little good. The Depression years he met by keeping a slate behind the counter, on which the names and debts of four hundred families were chalked in a neat hand, and which he never once rubbed out. He said that a druggist who collected in a depression was a druggist who would not be welcome in the next one. In the war years that followed, when the city filled again with soldiers and sailors, and a good many of them found their way to a counter on Magazine Street, he did the same, and by then was sixty and had nobody to tell him to stop. He was a bachelor. It was one of the family's puzzles, because he was gentle, prosperous, well-liked and had an eye for a pretty customer. He said that he was married to the shop. He lived above it, in three rooms with a gallery over the street, with a green parrot that he had inherited from Mr Hirsch, a great many jars and a view, if he leaned out, of the river. He was a great eater and a great giver of dinners. On Sundays he cooked gumbo for a table of a dozen, which included his cousins, his customers and whoever else was in the neighbourhood, and he served it himself, in a white apron, with a long spoon. He retired in 1953, at sixty-five, to the rooms above the shop, which he sold to his assistant. In 1955, in the spring, he went down to the shop on a Saturday morning, as usual, to see that the new man was not spoiling the stock, and sat down at the counter, on the stool by the scales. He said that he was a little tired. He went upstairs, lay down and died in the afternoon, without pain or fuss, of nothing in particular, at sixty-seven. The parrot, which was then forty years old, was observed to say nothing for a week. Augustus Hutchinson Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the druggist of Magazine Street, who kept a drawer of silver under the counter and a kettle on the stove for any hunter who knocked at night. In the Slayerverse he stands for the apothecaries of the Red Ledger, who never killed anything in the dark and who, by a bandage and a cup of coffee at two in the morning, kept a good many hunters alive to try again.