Augustus Trahan Faulkner

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Proud Otter. Craft: Beacon Reading.

Augustus Trahan Faulkner was thirty-two years old, a cotton factor with a good desk on Carondelet Street and an unblemished record of never having been surprised by anything, when a dead man in a dairy barn showed him what he was for. He was born in 1891 in New Orleans, in the Algiers quarter, Louisiana, and lived forty-two years as a cotton factor and a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Proud Otter, a name that recalls the sleek, dark, self-satisfied river animal that swims the current as though it had been built for it, and it classes him as a Soldier, a hunter who meets the enemy directly and relies on discipline, order and the fixed habits of a patrol. His craft was Beacon Reading, the art of understanding a district by its lights, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was the younger child of the bookkeeper John Trahan and of the typist and slayer Sarah Faulkner, The True Mantle, who trained him, and the brother of Ida Trahan Faulkner. He never married. He died in 1933 in an ambush on a lonely road, aged forty-two. He descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he was the second of his house to be called in a barn, thirty-one years after his mother. He was born in Algiers, like his sister and his mother before him, and for the same reason. The Alden cousins, who kept a shipyard and a very large kitchen on the west bank, had made it a family custom that no child of the Faulkner line should be born anywhere else if the river could be crossed, and Sarah, who was twenty-eight and had a sharp sense of when a custom was worth keeping, crossed on the ferry in October 1891 with a bag and a bad temper. The baby arrived in the same back bedroom as his sister, to the sound of a steam hammer. He was a long, dark, silent infant with his mother's pale eyes. The Alden aunt, who held him up to the window, remarked that he looked at the drydocks as though he was thinking of buying them. It was, as things turned out, not a bad guess at his character. He grew up in the narrow house in the Marigny, with an older sister who taught him his sums and a father who taught him to hold his tongue. He was a self-possessed, tidy, rather vain boy, fond of a good collar, with a way of entering a room that suggested he had been expected. His mother, who watched this with something between exasperation and respect, called him the otter, and the name stuck, though she did not mean it as a compliment. He was a strong swimmer, who spent his summers off the old levee at Algiers, and he was never afraid of the water. When he was twelve a ferry deckhand fell from the rail in a high current and he went in after him, in his Sunday clothes, and pulled him out by the belt. He was punished, on the whole, for the clothes. The Ledger took an early interest, and was put off by his own good sense. He knew what his mother was by the time he was fifteen, and he had a perfect understanding of the hunting, and he did not want it. He wanted the ordinary prizes. He left school at sixteen and went as a runner into a cotton factor's office on Carondelet Street, a long, dim, high-ceilinged room full of sample bales and brass spittoons, where the factors of the city bought and sold the crop of the whole Delta by the grade of a tuft of lint held up to the window. He had a good eye. By twenty he could tell the grade of a bale by touch. By twenty-five he was a junior partner, with a clerk, a roll-top desk and a gold watch, and a reputation as the best judge of staple on the street. He lent his mother a hand, now and then, by carrying her lantern, standing her watch and walking behind her on the beat. He was, he said, an amateur. He did not feel called. The Army's examining board of 1917, which looked at his flat feet and a childhood ear complaint, put him in the lowest class, and the influenza of 1918, which took four of his partners, left him standing on a diet of lemons and obstinacy. What changed it was a barn. On the second Tuesday of September 1923 he was on a buying round up the river, in St. James Parish, among the cane and the old plantations, with a hired car and a sample case, and he stopped at a dairy on the River Road to ask the way. The yard was full of people. A stranger had come in off the road at noon, asked for water and a place to lie down, and died in the straw within the hour, and was lying there still under a horse blanket. The dairy's four dogs, which were big, rough, fearless animals who would go anywhere, would not go within thirty paces of the barn. They lay flat in the dust, with their ears back, shaking. Augustus, who had been told this story, in a kitchen in the Marigny, a dozen times, stood in the yard with his hat in his hand and understood that it was happening again. He felt, as his mother had told him it would feel, that the world had changed its mind about something. He asked for a hay fork. The dairyman, who thought him a lunatic in a good suit, gave him one. He went into the barn alone and stood at the head of the body until the last of the daylight was gone from the window, and when the blanket moved, he did what was needed, with no more fuss than a man sorting a bale. He came out into the yard with straw in his hair. He asked the dairyman to send for the priest, and then he got into the car and drove the whole sixty miles to the Marigny with the hay fork on the back seat. His mother was on the gallery. She looked at the fork and at him. She said that she had thought the dogs would do it, and went in to put the kettle on. She trained him that autumn and winter, in the evenings, with a patience that surprised them both. He was a Soldier. He could not, in the way of a spy or a detective, find a thing by guesswork or by a flash of insight, but he could hold a line, keep a post and carry out a plan, and his mother, who had walked a beat herself for thirty years, taught him the craft of the dusk walk. Beacon Reading came out of his business. A cotton factor on Carondelet Street watched the signals of the trade all day, the flags on the exchange, the chalked prices, the lamps in the windows of the warehouses that told a buyer whether a bale had been sold, and he came to see a district as a system of lights. He read a street by what was lit in it. A porch lamp that burned all day, a shuttered window with a candle behind it, a dock lantern hung at the wrong height, a window that was dark where it ought to have been bright. He kept, in a small notebook, a record of every lamp in the Marigny and along the Algiers levee, and wrote against each the hour at which it was usually lit. A lamp that was out of order told him where something was. The craft earned him the second half of his name. He had been called the otter in the house, because of his sleekness, and the cousins of the Ledger, who watched him walk the whole levee in an evening and come out at the far end without a hair out of place, added the adjective. Proud, they said, was the only word that fitted a man who, in a flood-lit street at two in the morning, stopped to straighten his tie before he took a vampire apart. He was credited with fourteen in ten years, and every one of them was recorded in his notebook, with the date, the lamp and the hour. His mother's death on the Algiers ferry stair in 1927 came while the river was in spate, and he buried her on a Sunday and was on the levee by Monday evening, with sandbags. He worked there for three weeks, among the Ledger's cousins and half the city, and kept, in a corner of his notebook, a count of the lamps that were lit on the flooded side. In the long years of the Depression he kept his desk through the lean seasons by being willing to buy cotton that nobody wanted at a price that nobody believed, and got most of his money back. He kept his sister fed. He sent apples, now and then, to a school. He was killed on the River Road in the autumn of 1933, at forty-two, on a moonless night, by something that had learned his habits. He had been following, for six weeks, a creature that had settled in an abandoned sugar house below Destrehan, and on the night in question he drove out to read the lights of a farm that lay beyond the bend. A cypress had been felled across the road. When he got out to look at it, three of them came out of the cane. He had a pistol and two stakes, and he used both. His body was found at dawn by a milk wagon, at the foot of the tree, with the lantern still lit at his feet and the notebook in his coat. The last entry gave the hour, and the name of the farm, and said that its lamp was not burning. Augustus Trahan Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Proud Otter, the cotton factor of Carondelet Street who read a city by its lamps. In the Slayerverse he stands for the soldiers of the Red Ledger, the slayers who held their post at the turn of the light because they had been shown, in a barn, what it was for, and who kept a light lit for everyone who came after.