Caleb Alden Faulkner

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

Caleb Alden Faulkner was born in 1834 in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and lived sixty-seven years, most of them on horseback, as a circuit preacher in the sugar and bayou parishes below New Orleans. He was the son of the storekeeper and vampire slayer Caleb Thayer Faulkner, called The Narrow Yoke, and of the herbalist Clara Alden, and the younger brother of Carrie Alden Faulkner. He married the milliner Effie Alden in 1854, raised two children with her, Louisa Faulkner and Oscar Faulkner, and died in 1901 of pneumonia, aged sixty-seven. He was not a hunter, although his father was one, and he never carried anything heavier than a Bible, a hymnbook and a bundle of folded papers. But for forty-three years he rode a wide circuit of chapels, brush arbours and plantation kitchens with the Red Ledger's notices sewn into his saddlebags, and the family remembers him as the preacher who could go anywhere in the lower parishes because nobody ever asked a preacher why he had come. He was born at Thibodaux because the city was thought unhealthy that autumn. The fever had come up early from the wharves, and his mother, who was a herbalist and knew precisely how much that meant, was sent by her husband up Bayou Lafourche to the long, low cottage of her sister-in-law Eliza, who had married the farmer Hippolyte Delacroix. The child was delivered there in a thunderstorm by the old Delacroix midwife Adele, who looked him over, pronounced him sound and remarked that he had a great deal to say for a person of his size. Clara carried him home to the Treme at six weeks, in a pirogue and then on a sugar packet, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of the bayou. He always said that it was the only time in his life he had been carried anywhere by the Delacroix, and that he had not got over it. He grew up behind his father's store in the Treme, in the house with the herb garden and the hawthorn hedge, and he was a solemn, slow-spoken boy who read everything that came into the house, including the labels on the ironmongery. His sister Carrie, four years older, managed him, and his mother's jars and his father's lamps taught him two kinds of patience. He learned at about nine what his father was. He was told at the kitchen table, on a wet night, in a few careful sentences, and he said that he had wondered why the spoons were on the window sill. He was given a place in the work, as the children of the house were, and the place was a small one. He was to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. The second part came easily to him. The first took a little longer, since he wanted to look at books. In 1848 his sister married the printer Albert Whitfield, a thin, fair man from Thibodaux who had been set up in business on Chartres Street, and the printing house became a second home to the boy. He swept the floors there on Saturdays and learned to read a line upside down. From the age of fourteen he clerked in his father's store, weighing nails and writing invoices, and did it well. But the shop bored him. He liked the talk that came into it, and especially the talk of the river men and the sugar hands, who would tell him in the course of a transaction a great deal more than they intended. He was uncommonly good at listening. It was what he would later do for a living, and it was also what the Ledger needed. His conversion, if it is the right word, came in the summer of 1852 at a camp meeting on the bayou, where he had gone with a cousin out of curiosity and stayed four days. He said afterwards that it was less like a thunderbolt than like the moment when a stuck drawer at last comes free. He was eighteen. He took himself to the Methodists of the Vieux Carre, studied with a patient minister on Rampart Street and was licensed to preach on trial in 1855. The Ledger, which had begun to regard him as a clerk of uncertain destination, found in this an unexpected convenience. A young man with a horse and a licence could go to every plantation chapel on the Lafourche, and the circuit that he was given in 1856 covered four parishes and some sixty preaching places. He had married before he preached. Effie Alden, a milliner of the Quarter, was a distant cousin from the Alden shipyard families at Algiers, no nearer than a shared Massachusetts carpenter three generations back, and his mother was said to have checked the tree twice before consenting. She was a small, brisk, round-faced young woman with very good hands and strong opinions about bonnets, and she had a shop on Royal Street with two girls and a great many feathers. They met at a christening. He admired the hat of the lady beside him, in the manner of a young man with nothing to say, and Effie, who had made it, told him that the admiration was misplaced because the hat did not suit her. They were married in 1854. She followed the circuit with him in its early years, in a buggy, and sold bonnets to the wives of overseers in every parlour in which he preached, which he said was a great help to his congregation's attention. Their children were born while he rode. Louisa Faulkner was born in 1857 and lived until 1935, and took over her mother's hat shop on Royal Street, where she sold a great deal more than hats. Oscar Faulkner was born in 1858 and lived until 1931, and became a clerk and later a broker's agent at the cotton exchange, a quiet, exact man who was thought by his colleagues to be better informed than he ought to be. Neither was called, and both knew the family's business from childhood, and kept it. Louisa kept the shop's accounts in a cipher that her mother had invented for the price of feathers, and which was in fact used to send word from house to house. The work itself was quiet. A circuit preacher in the sugar country saw what no hunter could. He sat in cabins at night with the sick and the dying, he baptised children in bayous, he buried the dead at dawn, and he knew, before the sheriff did, which families had lost a member without a funeral. He noticed that a certain plantation chapel had begun to stand empty, and that a cane hand had stopped speaking of his brother. He wrote these things down in the margins of a hymnbook, in the code that Louisa's shop had taught him, and passed them on at the next crossroads to his father or to the cousins. Albert Whitfield printed the pocket route lists on which he rode, in a type so small that his wife's eyes hurt to read it. The Ledger's Louisiana chapter counted him as a listening post on four legs. The Civil War found him twenty-seven, with a wife and two small children, and a church that had split in two. He held, through the secession winter, to the plain view that a preacher's business was the people in front of him, and when the Union fleet took the city in the spring of 1862 and the army came up the bayou that autumn he went on riding, with a pass from one side and a blessing from the other, preaching to whatever congregation turned up. He buried soldiers of both armies in the Lafourche country, and wrote to the mothers of some of them. He also sat by more than one sick bed in a country stripped of its doctors, and knew what to give, since his mother had taught him. In the years of Reconstruction he preached to freedpeople on the cane plantations who had no preacher of their own, in brush arbours and sugar houses, for a dollar a month and whatever food was offered, and this was the work that he spoke of in his old age as the best he had done. The great yellow fever summers touched him more than once. The epidemic of 1867 took two of his deacons and a good many of his flock, and in the year of the worst of the later outbreaks he rode into the city against the tide of people leaving it, and stayed six weeks in his mother's house, burying the dead. His father died in 1871, in the back room of the store among the lamps, and his mother in 1893, and both times he conducted the service himself, which he said was the hardest sermon he ever gave and the shortest. Effie died in 1899, in the spring, after a short illness, and he retired from the circuit that year, at sixty-five, though he went on taking a Sunday. He died in the winter of 1901 of pneumonia, which he caught riding out in the rain to bury a neighbour's child. He had been told to stay in bed. He said that the child's mother would not manage without him, and that the horse knew the way. He was found to have a hymnbook in his coat, with notes in the margin, and the family, who read them, found that the last entry was dated four days before he died, and gave the names of three households on the Lafourche that were worth a visit. Caleb Alden Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the preacher of the Lafourche circuit, the son of a hunter who kept the faith and the secret together on four legs and two hundred miles of mud. In the Slayerverse he stands for the listeners of the Red Ledger, the people who could walk into any house in the parish because they were carrying only a Bible, and who saw in a winter's ride more than the hunters saw in a year.