Charles Trahan

Hunter slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Bitter Furrow. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Charles Trahan was born in 1937 in the Treme quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived forty-two years as a high school coach and, from 1956, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Bitter Furrow and classes him as a Hunter, the plainest of the hunting styles, a person who finds the thing and goes straight at it, without a disguise, a cover story or a crew. His craft was Quarry Reading, the art of knowing a hunted creature's habits, hours and hiding places from the small marks that it leaves behind it, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. In 1959 he married the hospital cook Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, the elder daughter of Xavier Delacroix, and they raised two daughters, Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, born in 1960, and Lorraine Faulkner Trahan, born in 1964, both of whom became slayers. He died in 1979 of pneumonia, aged forty-two. He belonged to no great house, and was entered in the Ledger as unaffiliated, although his wife's people had counted him one of their own from the first Sunday that he came to dinner. His coaching began with a stopwatch. At fourteen he was the fastest boy in the Treme, a long-legged, serious youngster with a mild stammer, who ran the half-mile for a parish school and whose coach, a retired Pullman porter who kept the stopwatch in his waistcoat, said that Charles ran as though he were reading a page. This was nearer the truth than the coach knew. A runner who studies the stride of the boy in front can tell, from the way a heel lands, whether the boy has a blister, whether he is tiring and which leg is going to fail first, and Charles, who had a talent for watching, used it to win. His parents, whom the family papers do not name, were a plasterer and a cook, and the Trahans of the Treme, who had no tie to the Acadian Trahans of the Algiers Ledger that the papers can find, kept a small shotgun house a block from the cathedral-sized church on their street and a great, noisy, loving household of aunts. He was the third of six. He was brought up on red beans on Mondays, brass bands on Sundays and the idea, very widely held in the quarter, that a young man should be useful. He was called at nineteen, in the autumn of 1956, in the bell tower of his own parish church. He was a part-time sexton's helper, paid a dollar a week to sweep the vestry and trim the lamps, and the old bell-ringer, a stooped, genial man called Mr Alphonse, went up the stair at dusk to ring the evening bell and did not come down. The bell stopped halfway through its peal. Charles, who was in the sacristy, waited five minutes by the clock, and then went up the stair with a lantern, two steps at a time, and found the ropes swinging, the louvres open and the old man's hat on the floor. There was no one in the bell chamber. There was a long, pale smear on the beam above the bell, at a height that no man could have reached, and a smell of cold stone and a fresh grave. He stood and looked at it. Then he knelt and read the floor, the way that a coach reads a track, the dust in the corners, the scuff of the old man's shoes, the other, lighter marks that went towards the beam and did not come back. He could say, with a certainty that he did not understand, that whatever had taken Mr Alphonse would be back in three nights, at the same hour, and would come in by the same louvre. He sat in the tower for three nights with a pistol of his father's and a flask of cold coffee, and on the third it came. He fired twice. It went out over the roof, and the sexton found a hat on the cobbles and the old man himself, alive, in the crypt, with a gash in his neck and a vivid account. A cousin of the Ledger, who had been called by the priest, took Charles to breakfast and gave him the history of the work. He learned the word that the family had for what he was. He learned that his habit of reading a place was a craft that the Ledger had long known and that Vera Butler, a nurse and hunter of the Red Ledger, had practised for fourteen years. Vera taught him the rest. Quarry Reading was a matter, she said, of knowing what the household had done. A thing that preys on people leaves a household as a runner leaves a track, favouring a side, shortening its stride, taking the same turn on the same night. He had only to read it. He went to Dillard University on a track scholarship, took a degree in physical education in 1960 and began to coach in the autumn of that year at a high school in Gentilly, where he was to remain for nineteen years. He coached the track team, the cross-country team and the junior basketball squad, and he said that the whole of it was the same trade as the other, which was to find what a creature was doing wrong and tell it quietly. A boy with a bad start was told. A girl who ran too much on the toes was shown. The school's records for the half-mile and the mile fell, one after another, and his boys went to the state meet seven years in a row. He was known as a man who never shouted, and who could see from the top of the stand a boy who had been up all night, and who always knew why. He married Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner in 1959. She was twenty-five, a stout, dark, good-natured woman who ran a hospital kitchen, the daughter of the druggist Xavier Delacroix, and she had been fifteen when her mother Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, The Hard Scythe, was killed under a barn. She was not a hunter. She had made up her mind, as a girl, that she would be the one to see the household to the end of the day. Charles met her at her father's table, at one of the Sunday dinners to which the Ledger's young men were invited and the old men rarely, and he stammered through his first sentence. She said that if he wanted a second helping he had only to ask. They were married in the church in the Faubourg in the spring, with her sister Josephine as maid of honour and her father, who was forty-eight, standing at the back with an expression that Charles said he had never seen on another man's face, which was relief. The daughters came in 1960 and 1964, and both were named Lorraine, after their grandmother, which caused, in the household, a good deal of confusion. The elder was called Lorraine Trahan Faulkner at school and Lorrie at home. The younger, Lorraine Faulkner Trahan, was called Lolly, and the cousins said that they were the only girls in the Ledger whose names could be told apart by their surnames, and then only after a pause. Both grew up at the track and in the stand, and both, in their time, were called to the work, the elder on a market day in 1989 and the younger by a bad winter. Their father, who had thought that he would be the last of the family to carry a gun, found that he had become a trainer of hunters in the back yard, where he taught them in the cool of the evening, with a stopwatch, to look at the ground before they looked at the thing. In September 1965, when Hurricane Betsy drowned the Ninth Ward and Gentilly, his school gym was a shelter for three hundred people, and he ran it with a whistle, a roll book and a perfectly clear head. On the second night, in the dark, with the water at the doors, a thing came in among the refugees, and he picked it out, by the way that the crowd gave way around it, and walked it out of the gym with an arm about its shoulder, as though it were a lost boy. It was found at dawn in the schoolyard. He was never a man to talk about what he had done, and Lorraine said only that he had come home with the roll book soaked, and the roll called. The Vietnam years took more of his boys than he liked. He wrote to every one of them, in a plain hand, on the lined paper of the school, and got back from a great many a postcard from a beach with a number on the back. He sat up with the telegrams. In the winter of 1978 he went out on a night of cold rain to follow a quarry into the culverts of the Gentilly ridge, a hunt of nine hours, and came home soaked and shaking and said that he was fine. It was pneumonia, and it came on slowly, over a year, and went to the lungs in the following winter. His sister-in-law Josephine, who was a nurse, nursed him through the last of it with her usual calm. He died in February 1979, at forty-two, with a stopwatch on the bedside table, and his daughters, both still in their teens, ran the half-mile at the memorial meet in his name that spring and came in first and second. Charles Trahan is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Bitter Furrow, the coach who read a quarry as he read a runner and who could name the hour a thing would break. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trackers of the Red Ledger, the plain hunters who gave the young a trade and a fair start, and who believed that the surest way to catch a creature is to watch it with the same patience that one gives to a child.