Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix

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

Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix was a railway clerk who could make a bookshelf, a baby's cradle and a wedding chest out of a few planks and who kept every one of those skills, to his wife's occasional despair, in the evenings and on Sundays. He was born in 1891 in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the house on Burgundy Street, and he lived seventy-five years among the freight sheds and ticket windows of the city's railways. He was the younger child of the streetcar conductor Sylvain Delacroix and of the typist Nettie Faulkner Delacroix, and the brother of Clara Faulkner Delacroix. In 1914 he married the seamstress Alice Goodwin, and they had two children, Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, who became a slayer, and Howard Faulkner Delacroix, who did not. He died in 1966 in a car accident, aged seventy-five. He was not a vampire slayer and said so cheerfully to anyone who asked. He belonged to the House of Delacroix by name and to the Red Ledger's Faulkner bloodline through his mother, a line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and his part in the family's secret work was to see that the paper was in order: waybills, passes and tickets for a long procession of cousins who needed to cross the Gulf South without being counted. He was named for his grandfather, the carpenter Baptiste Delacroix, and it was an uncommonly accurate piece of naming. The old man, who was then fifty-three and still kept the shop on Royal Street, took the baby on his knee at the christening, turned the small fist over and said that it was a joiner's hand. He was right. Baptiste, who was a round-faced, serious, fair-haired child with a stolid manner and a talent for taking things to pieces, was found at three years old under the kitchen table in Burgundy Street with a chair leg, a gimlet and the expression of a man who had a plan. He was given his own small plane at seven. By ten he had made a stool that was still in the family a century later. His elder sister, who was quick and talkative and typed faster than he could speak, put it about that he took after the wood. The plane was never his livelihood, though it was always his pleasure. His father, who had a conductor's firm views on regular wages, held that a man ought to have a trade with a pension attached, and put him at fifteen as an office boy in the freight department of the Illinois Central, in a long, dusty room at the foot of Poydras Street full of bills of lading and green eyeshades. He was a quick, accurate, quiet boy. He learned the waybill, the car record, the demurrage sheet and the way that a lost carload of bananas is found, which is by asking a switchman in the right tone. By nineteen he was a billing clerk. By twenty-two he had a stool of his own, a pen that nobody else could use and a reputation for finding the missing car. He worked at that desk, in one office or another, for forty-five years. He met his wife through his mother's sewing table. Alice Goodwin, a slight, brown-eyed seamstress of twenty who did piece work for a shirt-maker on Magazine Street, had come to the house on Burgundy Street one afternoon in the spring of 1913 to measure Nettie for a dress, and found, in the front room, a young man mending a drawer. He apologised for the sawdust. She said that she had known worse in a tailor's shop. He asked whether she knew anyone who could finish a hem on a man's overalls, and she said that she did and charged him a nickel. They were married in 1914, in the church in the Treme, in a ceremony at which his father Sylvain wept openly and his mother Nettie, who had never been seen to, kept her handkerchief in her bag and read out the vows from a typed sheet by way of insurance. They were a great pair. She sewed, and he made things. She took in alterations from the neighbours, in a room behind the kitchen with a treadle machine under the window, and he built her a table for it, and a cabinet for the buttons, and in the second year, when she began to have trouble with the light, a lamp bracket of walnut that swung on a pivot. In 1915 their daughter was born in the house on Burgundy Street. Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, a dark, silent, watchful infant, who took in the room with the same slow, level look, lived until 1949, and was called in her turn to the Ledger, as a slayer. Howard Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1917, a plump, sunny, round-faced boy, who lived until 1975 and, like his father, took to the railway and the plane. His father's war was short, and he found it tedious. He was drafted in the winter of 1917, with a baby son at home, and sent, as a man who could hold a plane, to an engineer regiment, where he spent seventeen months building barracks, mess halls and a hospital at an army camp in Georgia. He put up some two hundred buildings, none of which he cared for. He wrote to Alice every Sunday, on lined paper, telling her what he had built that week and what it had cost, and she answered with her own accounts, and between them, he said afterwards, the two letters made a ledger of the war. He came home in the summer of 1919 with a corporal's stripe, a better opinion of rough lumber and a conviction that no man should be asked to build a thing that he did not intend to live in. The Illinois Central took him back on the stool where he had left it. In his absence the Storyville years had ended and the bands had gone, and the city had put on its postwar face, the streetcars crowded, the levee quiet, the sugar mills busy. He stayed at his desk, and he took on, in addition, a small and unspoken duty. A rail clerk can do a great many things that an ordinary citizen cannot, and the Red Ledger, whose cousins crossed the country by freight and passenger train, found in him a man who could get a reservation changed, a car held at a siding and a pass issued to a name that was not on any list. He did it without being asked twice, and never knew who the passengers were. He said that they had always paid their fares. This was also true. The Mississippi flood of 1927 put the yards under three feet of water, and the freight office was moved to a school, where he billed cars on a classroom desk with a map of Europe on the wall. In the Depression, when the roads cut their staff and the clerks of the freight office were reduced from forty to eleven, he kept his place, and made, in the evenings, a number of small wooden toys, which Alice sold at the church fair. He put his son through school on it. His daughter, who by then was fifteen and had her own calling, was a visitor to the shop behind the kitchen, and learned from her father in a few quiet afternoons the thing that he had always understood, that a plank, like a person, has a grain, and will take a great deal if you work with it and break if you do not. The war years, when the city filled with soldiers, brought a rush of work that he faced with some indignation. Trains came in from Texas and Georgia by the hour, loaded with young men in khaki who were to be fed, quartered and put on ships, and the freight office, which had been a calm and bookish place, became a madhouse. He worked double shifts. In the spring of 1945 Alice, who was fifty-three, died after a short illness, in the bed that he had made her, and he buried her in the Faulkner tomb. He kept her treadle machine in the back room. He did not move it, and he did not allow it to be moved. He retired in 1956, and for a decade he made furniture. He made a cradle for each of his grandchildren, a bookcase for the school on Burgundy Street and a small, plain, much-polished chest that he said was for nothing in particular, and that was found, after his death, to contain every letter that Alice had written to him from 1917 to 1919. He was killed in the winter of 1966, at seventy-five, in an accident on the Airline Highway, when a truck coming from the opposite direction went through a stop sign in the rain. He had been driving home from a lumber yard with a load of planks in the back of his Plymouth, and the planks, which were not shifted by the crash, were afterward delivered to his son, who built a bench of them. Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the railway clerk of the Illinois Central, the carpenter's son who put every cousin on the right train. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet clerks and craftsmen of the Red Ledger, the people who kept the line open, the paper correct and the furniture sound, and who believed that a house, a hunt and a timetable are all held together by the same plain virtue of doing a job properly.