Benjamin Cole Faulkner

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

Benjamin Cole Faulkner was born in 1882 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-four years as a cotton factor, the broker's agent who sold a planter's crop on commission and advanced him the money to grow the next one. He was the son of the telegraph operator Benjamin Faulkner and the milliner Mary Cole, and the younger brother of Georgia Cole Faulkner. He never married and had no children. He was not a hunter, and the family never expected him to be one, but he belonged to the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger, and for more than forty years he did for the New Orleans chapter what his father had done before him, which was to put its warnings into a form that a cotton office would pass without a second look. He died in 1956 of cancer, aged seventy-four. The family remembers him as the factor who sent the Ledger's news over the counter, in the dullest prices in the Gravier Street market. He was born in the rooms on Dauphine Street, over the front shop where his mother blocked hats, in a winter so wet that the gutters ran in the parlour. He was a large, calm, slow-blinking baby who did not cry and was said to have slept through his own christening. The family placed him, for the first years of his life, in a drawer of the hat bench, under the forms, where the light was dim and the noise of the street was reduced to a comfortable hum. It is possible that this explains his temperament. He grew into a big, placid, fair boy who disliked hurry and could not be got to fight, a trait that his sister Georgia, who was three years older and had the family's quick tongue, found irresistible and exploited. She did his sums. He carried her parcels. It was an arrangement that lasted fifty years. The house ticked. His father, who brought home a spare sounder from the Western Union office, sat at the table every evening tapping out the news of the day for the children, and Benjamin Cole, who had learned Morse before he learned to write, took to it as other children take to a game. By eight he could follow a sounder at twenty words a minute. By twelve he was sending, on a practice key in the back bedroom, messages to a cousin in the next street, in which, to his father's amusement, the price of cotton was usually in error. His father said that it was the only time he had heard a Faulkner make a joke in code. It was also the beginning of a real education, because the old man had by then taught him the private set of commercial phrases, cotton firm and sugar dull and the rest, by which the New Orleans chapter of the Red Ledger had sent its warnings over the wire since the 1850s. He left school at sixteen and went, like his father, into the telegraph. It lasted three years. He was a good operator, steady and accurate, but he had no taste for the dim room and the clicking, and he found that what interested him was not the message but the man who was sending it. In 1901, at nineteen, he took a place as a junior clerk with a cotton factor on Gravier Street, a dry, thin, Presbyterian Scotsman called Malcolm Dunning, who sold the crops of a hundred Delta planters and had a reputation for paying the best price in the district. It was the start of his real career. He learned to grade cotton by the fibre and the feel, to read a classification sheet, to judge the weather from the price and to judge a planter from the way he asked for an advance. He learned the language of the trade, which was made up of bales, staples, futures and spots. He learned that a cotton factor is a banker, a salesman and a confessor, and that the last duty is the heaviest. In 1909, when he was twenty-seven, his mother died of kidney failure, and the front shop, with its bench and its forms and its little card in the window, was closed. It was a bad year. His sister Georgia took the hats, and the pins in her mouth, and set up in the front room of her own house, and Benjamin Cole was left with his father, who had retired from the wire in 1915 and come to live with her. He took a room near the Cotton Exchange and ate his dinners at his sister's table. He threw himself into work. By 1912 he was a partner's clerk, by 1919 a junior partner in the firm of Dunning and Faulkner, and by 1925 the senior one, when the old Scotsman died at his desk. The firm sold a quarter of a million bales a season. The New Orleans chapter of the Red Ledger used him, and he did not refuse it. A factor's telegrams were a flood of cotton traffic, most of it routine, and in that flood a few lines could pass unobserved. He sent them. Sometimes the message was a price, and sometimes it meant a cousin on the Teche should be warned against a stranger in a good coat. He learned the code from his father and kept it up to the end, and it was said that in forty years he never once sent a wrong word. He was not told what the warnings were for. He was told only which wire, on which day, to which office. He did it the way he did everything, without hurry or remark, and he entered it in his books under the heading of market intelligence, which was, in its way, exact. He was a bachelor, from preference and from habit. He lived in two rooms on Prytania Street, with a gas ring, a good many books and a canary, and he had dinner every Sunday at his sister's. He was known in the Exchange as a man who could be trusted with a figure and with a silence. A tall, heavy, pale, round-faced man with a grey moustache, he moved about the floor in a cream suit in summer, a dark one in winter and a pair of carpet slippers in the office, which were his single vanity. He was not a great talker. In the course of his whole career he was heard to raise his voice once, at a dealer in Memphis who had described the Delta crop as a disgrace. The war years, in the sense of the Great War, brought soldiers into the city, troops at the training camps and sailors on the river, and cotton prices that rose like steam. He made money for the planters and for himself. He also sent, in the course of 1917 and 1918, a dozen messages that mattered, to the Ledger's cousins in the parishes, at a time when the camps were full of young men and the boarding houses of Rampart and Decatur were the target of something that had an appetite. His sister, who knew, said nothing. In the autumn of 1918 the influenza closed the Exchange for a week, and he spent it carrying soup to the widows of four members. Then came the great Mississippi flood of 1927, which drowned a million acres of the Delta and ruined half his customers. He worked for three months without a Sunday, advancing money on crops that no longer existed, and was blamed by some of his partners for it, but he said that a factor who abandoned a planter in a flood was no factor. He kept forty of them afloat. The Depression years, which followed, took the rest. Cotton went to five cents a pound, the planters defaulted, and the firm of Dunning and Faulkner, reduced to a clerk and a boy, survived on the credit that he had extended, in better times, to those who now repaid him in kind. He took payment in pecans, in hams and, on one occasion, in a mule. He began to fail in 1954. It was the cancer, and it was quick. He worked until the spring of 1955, from a chair, and sent the last of his telegrams, to a cousin in Natchez, in the summer. His father had died in 1923 and his sister Georgia in 1933, and he was nursed, at the end, by a landlady's daughter who had been bringing up his dinners for years, in the rooms on Prytania Street, with the canary's grandson in a cage by the window. He died in the winter of 1956, at seventy-four. On the shelf by his bed, in a tin box, his father's brass sounder was found, with a short length of wire still attached, and a piece of paper on which he had written, in pencil, one word, to be sent to no one in particular. It said, Firm. Benjamin Cole Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the cotton factor who took the wire his father had kept and carried it forward into the next century, unhurried and exact. In the Slayerverse he stands for the agents and merchants of the Red Ledger, who never drew a pistol and who, in the routine of their trade, kept a line of communication open for the hunters that no one could have found without knowing where to look.