Crystal Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1984 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in that city, where she is a clerk of court, one of the people who sit at the front of a courtroom with the file, the docket and the exact time of everything. She was entered in the Ledger as of the House of Delacroix and the Faulkner bloodline, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but she is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of her own. She is the younger daughter of the insurance adjuster and slayer Felix Delacroix, The Red Bridle, who died in 1991, and of the diner waitress and slayer Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, The Sable Reeve, and the sister of Linda Faulkner, born in 1982. In 2006 she married the security guard Brian Pham, and in 2008 they had one daughter, Angela Faulkner Pham, who has not been called. The family remembers her as the keeper of the record, the one who writes down what was said, in the order it was said, and who has never been known to get it wrong.
She was born in the narrow house on Algiers Point in the spring of 1984, in the same room and the same bed as her sister, and was, from the first week, a different sort of child. Linda had been grave and solid. Crystal was small, bright, sharp-tongued and quick, with her father's dark eyes and her mother's level stare, and she talked before she walked, in complete sentences, to anyone who would sit still. Her father Felix, who could talk a room into a wall, said that she had inherited the whole of the family's stock of persuasion and that it was a good deal more than he had ever been allowed. Her mother, who watched the diner floor for a living, said that she had never seen a child who listened so carefully to what was being said, and so little to how. At four Crystal was found correcting a visitor's account of an event that she had witnessed, with the date.
She was seven when her father died, in the autumn of 1991, on the Westbank Expressway in the rain, and she was the only person in the house who asked, in the car afterwards, what time it had happened. Nobody could say. She looked it up, in a week, in a report that a cousin of the Ledger had borrowed, and wrote it in pencil in the front of a school exercise book, with the road, the truck and the weather, as one writes down a thing that must not be forgotten. Her mother found the page years afterwards, and said nothing about it, and put it back. The cousins who came to sit in the kitchen found the child at the end of the table with her pencil. They said that she had been to the funeral as a reporter, which was true.
At fifteen she was sat down by her mother at the kitchen table and told the truth about the family, in the same words that her sister had been given two years before. She heard it through, asked three questions in a precise order and, at the end, said that she would think about it and give her answer in writing. She did. It ran to a page, and it declined, politely, and gave the reasons, which were that she was no good in the dark, that she did not much care to be hit and that she had noticed that the family always lost people at about the same age. Lorraine read it standing at the stove, and put it in her apron pocket, and has it still. The household, which had a number of members who did not trust paper, was astonished to find that it was the best-organised refusal in its history. Linda said that she had done it in a very Crystal manner.
She left school in 2002, went through a community college by night and took a post as a ward clerk at a hospital on the west bank, where she learned that a place where people are ill is a place that runs on forms. She was good at it. She could find a lost chart, reconcile a bill and soothe a husband in four minutes without once raising her voice. In 2004 she took the examination for the clerk's office of the criminal court in the city, passed it first and was assigned, at twenty, to a courtroom on Tulane Avenue, to the person who calls the roll, swears in the witnesses and takes down the minute entries. It is a job in which a young woman with a clear voice and a retentive memory can see a good deal. She saw, in the first year, a defendant whose shadow fell the wrong way in the afternoon light from the high windows, and a witness who would not be sworn on any book that had a cross on it. She wrote down each in the minutes in the neutral language of the court, and she told her mother. Lorraine, who had found the finding to be half the work, went down to the court, sat in the back for a week and took the thing that had been in the witness box.
In the summer of 2005, in the last days of August, Hurricane Katrina and the flood that followed came over the west bank less heavily than elsewhere, and she sat out the worst of it in the house at the Point with her mother and nineteen relatives and a parrot. The courthouse took water, and the criminal court records, which were her whole working life, stood in a basement in a foot of brown water for the better part of a month. When the city began to open again, she was one of a handful of clerks who went in at the first, in boots and a respirator, to pull the files. She worked ten weeks in a borrowed trailer, drying paper with a fan and a clothesline, and she is credited, in the clerk's office, with having saved something like four thousand dockets. A man on the evening security detail, a young guard named Brian Pham, who had been brought in to watch the building after the flood, brought her coffee every night on a Styrofoam tray and said that the place had never looked so clean.
She married him in 2006, at twenty-two, in the church at Algiers, in front of two hundred cousins, with her mother in the front pew in a dark blue dress that her mother-in-law Simone had made her. Brian, who was nineteen when they met and twenty when they married, was told the truth about the family on the second Sunday of the courtship, on her mother's porch, by Lorraine, who gave it in fewer words than anyone before or since and asked whether he would care for a pork chop. He took the chop. He had, as she says, the great virtue of never asking a question that he had not already thought about. Angela Faulkner Pham was born in 2008, a quiet, observant baby whom the household, who had been bracing for a talker, found that it could not read.
She stayed at the court, and she has risen in it. She is now the senior clerk of a section, a woman of forty-two with a tidy desk, a pair of reading glasses on a chain and a memory that the judges consult. In the pandemic years the court closed, opened, closed again and moved to a screen, and she held it together from a spare room with a laptop, a headset and a clothes airer of paper, and sent out, by the thousand, the minute entries of a city that was waiting. She was the only person in the building who could tell, from the order of the filings, which lawyers had been well, and which had not. She took the Ledger's calls on the nights when her mother's hands were full, and typed the particulars into a notebook of her own, by date and by hour, as she had done since she was seven.
She and Brian live in a house in the Garden District, in a street of oaks, and her mother, who is living, has the dinner shift on Magazine Street and the Sunday table, at which the sisters and their families meet. Linda, the paramedic, and Crystal, the clerk, are the two women whom the cousins of the Red Ledger call when they want a fact and when they want a hand.
Crystal Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the clerk of the Point, the younger daughter of the Red Bridle who put down in writing what had happened, and who declined the hunt on a single page. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of the record, the clerks and recorders of the old houses who were never called, who knew that what is written down in order and in the right place is as strong as a lock, and who held the memory of the Ledger when the people in it could not.
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