Clara Allen Faulkner was born in 1933 at Thibodaux, Louisiana, and lived twenty-nine years as a hospital cook and, for the last of them, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Bitter Harrow, the iron-toothed frame that is dragged over a field to break the clods and tear out the roots before the seed goes in, and it classes her as a Soldier, a hunter who works by drill, by a post to be held and by orders that mean what they say. Her craft was Falcon's Eye, the long sight that sees a small thing move at a great distance in a bad light, and her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She was the elder daughter of the bootlegger's driver and slayer Lucius Faulkner, The Delta Cutter, and of the seamstress Ada Allen, and the sister of the slayers Milton Faulkner and Marguerite Faulkner and of Thelma Faulkner, who was not called. In 1961 she married the bus driver and slayer Marius Delacroix, of the House of Delacroix, and they had one child, Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix, born in 1962 and living, who became a slayer in her turn. Clara died in 1962 after a long night on the marsh, aged twenty-nine. She had been a hunter for a little over a year.
She was born in the bayou country because her father was working. The spring of 1933 was the bottom of the Depression, when Prohibition had a few months left to run and a bootlegger's driver who was prudent kept off the New Orleans roads, and Lucius Faulkner, who had a load of rye for a gentleman in Houma and no wish to be seen in the city, took his wife with him in the cab of the truck to lie in at the house of an Allen cousin in Thibodaux, on the Bayou Lafourche. Ada was nine months gone and said, with dignity, that she would rather give birth on a kitchen table than in a delivery truck, and was as good as her word. The child arrived on a night of heavy rain, in a back room above the cousin's feed store, with the sound of the bayou against the pilings, and was named for her father's mother, the boarding-house keeper Clara Faulkner, who had run a house behind Basin Street for forty years and who sent, by return of post, a christening shawl and a recipe for gumbo.
She grew up on Tchoupitoulas Street in the two rooms above the ship chandler's, in a house of sewing and silence. Her mother made every stitch that the four children wore, and her father came in at dawn, and her brother Milton, who was the eldest and the most orderly, kept the shoes in a row. She was a plain, sturdy, long-sighted child who could read a street sign at the end of the block when her sister Marguerite could not see the lamp post. Her mother died in 1943, when she was ten. She remembered it, in later life, as an afternoon in March when she was kept from the room and sat on the stairs with a heel of bread, and Thelma, who was eight, put her head on her knee. It was her grandmother Clara Faulkner, then seventy-five, who came to take charge, with a black hat and a ring of keys, and who said, in a voice that nobody argued with, that the children would eat at her table. She was not a woman who comforted. She put a wooden spoon in Clara's hand and showed her how to stir a roux, and said that if she stirred it long enough the trouble would burn off. Clara stirred it for the rest of her life.
She was a cook by instinct and a good one. She took a place in the kitchen of one of the great hospitals at seventeen, in 1950, at the start of the Korean War, as a vegetable girl, and she found that a hospital kitchen was a place where nobody asked her what she thought and where she could see every door. She worked in the corner by the window of the dish room, which looked out on a lane and the yard of the boarding house opposite, and she watched. This was the whole of her gift, and at that stage she did not know it was one. A girl who spends five hours a day scraping plates at a window develops an eye for what is at the end of the lane. She could tell, at a hundred yards, which of the porters was carrying a parcel that he should not, which of the nurses had been crying, and which of the figures at the corner was standing still in the manner of a man who is not waiting for a bus. She was the best-sighted cook the hospital had had.
Her father died in 1957, at fifty-seven, and the Red Ledger came to the church. The family stood in the front pew in black, and Clara, who was twenty-four, held her sister Marguerite's hand and watched the man who carried the left side of the coffin, a young lineman named Roy Robichaux, who bore it better than anyone else. A year later she was a bridesmaid at Marguerite's wedding to the same man, in the church in the Faubourg, with Milton giving the bride away. In 1959 Milton was called, and told her. She was not surprised. She had known what her father was since she was nine. She asked her brother, simply, what the work was, and he said that it was a matter of holding a post. She said that she could hold a post.
She was called two years later, in the spring of 1961, in a boarding house. She had moved, in the winter, into a room on the second floor of the house opposite the hospital's lane, the very house she had watched from the dish-room window for eleven years, a long, shabby, three-storey place run by a widow named Mrs Pruitt, with six lodgers and a cat. The newest lodger was a tall man in a long coat who had taken the back room in March and paid, on the first of the month, in coins. They were silver Spanish dollars, bright and worn, with the head of a king. Mrs Pruitt showed them to Clara at the kitchen table, delighted, as a curiosity, and Clara turned one over and saw the date. It was 1792. The house had been built in 1890. She asked the widow, in a level voice, how long the man had lived there, and what he ate, and the widow said that he had come in a month before and had never once come to the table. Clara, who had stood at a window for eleven years watching what people did not do, found that she could say at once that she had never seen him eat, at any hour, at any meal. She was a cook. She would have noticed.
She watched him for eleven nights. She went up to her room after the evening shift, put out the lamp, sat at the window with her pistol on her knee, and kept her eyes on the lane, and on the twelfth night she saw him come down the back stair and stand in the yard, looking up at the second-floor window of a girl who was a lodger and a nurse. He stood there, quite still, for an hour. Clara did not move. At dawn he went back to his room, and she walked to the church and sat at the back until the first Mass, and then she went to the telephone and called her brother. Milton came over on the ferry in his office suit with a case under his arm, and the two of them sat in the cook's room all that day and made a plan, and that night, with her at the window and him in the lane and a rope across the yard, they took him. It was the first night's work of The Bitter Harrow. She did not fire a shot. She gave the word, from the window, at the moment she had picked, and the rope was drawn, and
Falcon's Eye, in her hands, was the craft of the sentry. She was set at the end of a road, on a levee, at the top of a church tower, in a pirogue at the mouth of a bayou, and she held the post. She did not move. She could see a figure at a quarter of a mile in the dark and tell by the way that it walked whether it was breathing. In the summer of 1961 she met a young man named Marius Delacroix on the Magazine Street bus. He was twenty-five, a driver, a quiet and watchful fellow with his mother's good ear and her death three years behind him. He said afterwards that he had noticed her because she was the only passenger in nine months who had counted the stops. She had noticed him because he looked in the mirror at every corner. They found out what each was within a fortnight, and they were married in the autumn, with Marguerite and Roy to stand up with them and Milton in the front pew, and they took a small house in Algiers.
Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1962, and Clara, who had gone on her post until the week of the birth, went back on it in the summer, with the baby at her sister's. In the autumn, in the middle of a cold week, the cousins were short of hands, and she took a watch on the marsh at the edge of the lake, in a duck blind, in the rain, from dusk until dawn. It was a long night. When Marius came for her at first light he found her sitting upright with her eyes on the water and her pistol dry. She had been right. She had seen the thing at midnight, and given the word, and it was taken, and she had not moved for eight hours in a wet coat. She said that she was cold. She walked home beside him, lay down on the bed with her boots on and did not get up. She was twenty-nine. Marguerite took the baby home that afternoon.
Clara Allen Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Bitter Harrow, the hospital cook who held the post at the end of the road and never left it. In the Slayerverse she stands for the sentries of the Red Ledger, the hunters who saw first and said little, and who gave their short years, and a daughter, to the work.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
