Lorraine Faulkner Trahan

Gangster slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Fallow Shuttle. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Lorraine Faulkner Trahan was born in 1964 at Algiers, on the west bank of the river at New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty years as a bookkeeper and, from 1993, as a vampire slayer of the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Fallow Shuttle, the idle shuttle of a loom that is resting between passes and is no less ready for it, and it classes her as a Gangster, a hunter who works by territory, tribute and favours, as a racketeer does, and who keeps a city quiet by being owed by everyone in it. Her craft was Quarry Reading, the art of knowing a hunted creature's habits and hiding places from the small marks that it leaves on a household, and her gear was a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She was the younger daughter of the high school coach and slayer Charles Trahan, The Bitter Furrow, who died in 1979, and of the hospital cook Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, who died in 1990. She never married and had no children. She died in 2014 in an ambush on a lonely road, aged fifty, in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of modern New Orleans that she had spent twenty-one years keeping. The household that she was born into had three Lorraines, and the cousins, after trying a number of schemes, settled on nicknames. Her mother was Lorraine. Her sister, four years older and born in 1960, was Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, called Rainey. She herself was Lolly. She came into the world in a bed in the frame house at Algiers Point in the early spring of 1964, in the middle of a rainy week, within sight of the ferry landing, while her father was at a track meet and her mother was making a pot of gumbo for twenty. It was said that she cried once, at the top of her voice, and then looked at the ceiling for an hour. She was a dark, round-faced, grave baby, with her father's long legs and her mother's appetite, and she took, from the beginning, the habit of seeing where everything was. Her father taught her to read before she could read. Charles Trahan coached track at a high school in Gentilly and had a stopwatch in his waistcoat pocket, and in the cool of the evening, in the back yard at Algiers Point, he taught his daughters the one thing that he knew. A boy who runs, he said, leaves a track, and the person who reads it can tell a great deal. He would take Lolly out to the lane behind the house at the age of five, kneel by a puddle and ask her what had walked through it. She said a cat. He said, a cat that was limping. She said, on which side. It was a game, and for a long time she did not know that it was anything else. In the winter of 1969 she correctly identified, from a scuff on the wet brick of the alley wall, which of the neighbours had been out late, and at what hour, and she said it aloud, at the supper table, to a stunned family. Her father put down his fork and said that she had better start keeping a book. She kept it for ten years. She was fourteen when he died, in the winter of 1979, of pneumonia, which came on slowly over a year, and she was in the house when it happened. She and Rainey, in the spring, ran the half-mile at the memorial meet in his name and came in second and first, and she did not cry until she was back at the changing room and found his stopwatch in her bag. Her aunt Josephine, the nurse, had nursed him to the last. Her mother, who had a weak heart and a very large appetite for work, kept the kitchen of a hospital in the early hours and sat the wakes of the family's dead, and the girl, who was far too young for it, took on the household accounts. It was then, at sixteen, that she became a bookkeeper. She said, later, that she did not choose it. She did the sums because somebody had to, and because the sums were the only thing in the house that came out right. She took a course in accounting at a college in the city in the early eighties, and a post, when she was twenty-one, with a marine supplier on the Harvey Canal that sold rope, paint, chain and fuel to the tugs and towboats of the lower river. It was a good place to learn the city. She kept the books of a trade in which every payment was made in cash on a Friday, in a plain envelope, by a man who would not give his surname, and she found that a ledger of that kind reads like a street. She learned who owed, who was owed, who was leaned on and who was left alone. She learned that the great secret of the river trade is that nothing is free and nothing is written. In the course of ten years she began, in a private notebook, to write what was not. Her sister Rainey married a Delacroix in 1981, and was a widow in 1991. In 1990 her mother died, at the stove, at the end of a night shift, at fifty-six. Lolly was twenty-six, and she did what her mother had done, which was to see to the dead. She sat the wake. She sat through the night with the candle and the coffee and the rosary, and said afterwards that it was the most useful thing that she had learned from the family and that she had never once been frightened, which was not true. She was called in March 1993, when she was twenty-eight, after a storm. It was the great winter storm of that month, which came up out of the Gulf with a high tide and a gale and drove water into every low place on the coast, and which for two days stopped the traffic on the river. On the third morning the marine supplier sent her down the Harvey Canal and out through the cut towards Barataria, with an insurance adjuster and a clipboard, to tally the cargo of a coastal freighter that had been driven aground in the marsh. It lay on its side in the reeds, a hundred yards from the channel, with its hatches open and its lamps out. The adjuster went aboard first. He came back on deck after a minute, and sat down on a hatch cover, and said, in a perfectly level voice, that he thought that she had better look at the crew. There were fourteen. They lay in the mess and in the wheelhouse and on the deck, each in his own place, with his hands at his sides, and not one of them had a mark on him. There were no living men aboard. The ship's papers were in order. The manifest was in order. A bookkeeper, who is trained to look at what does not balance, saw at once that the ship's log had been closed, in a perfectly steady hand, at four o'clock that morning, nine hours after the rest of the crew were cold. She read the quarry. It was the whole of her father's training, in one afternoon, on a wet deck. She read the galley, where one place at the table had been laid for a man who had not been seen to eat, and the scuffs on the hatch coaming, which went the wrong way, and the ship's cat, which sat on the bridge and would not come down. She said, aloud, to the adjuster, that whatever had closed the log was still on the ship, and was, at that moment, in the chain locker. He said that he would rather not. She went and fetched a Faulkner cousin from the Algiers ferry landing, and the two of them, with a service pistol and a borrowed rope, took it in the dark. The family said afterwards that it was a very orderly piece of work. She went home, put her father's stopwatch on the kitchen table, and sat with it until dawn. She worked as a Gangster, and the Ledger understood the meaning of the word. She was not a criminal, and she took no money. She was a hunter who worked as the racketeers of the old river trade did, by territory and by favour. She made friends in every dock gang, towboat crew, bar and lodging house on the west bank, and she did them small kindnesses, a loan, a word with the foreman or a place for a nephew, and she let it be known that she was owed. In a week she could say, to a cousin, where a stranger had been seen on the Algiers batture, and she was never once told a lie, since a man who owes cannot afford it. She kept two sets of books, as a good bookkeeper in her trade must, one for the marine supplier and one, in her father's hand-me-down notebook, for the Ledger. She credited about forty vampires over twenty years, and she fired on very few. She spent the rest of her time at the track, in the stand, with a stopwatch. She was thirty-seven on the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 and was at her desk on the Harvey Canal when the radio said what it said. She went on with the Friday envelopes. In the summer of 2005 she stayed in Algiers Point, which stood above the worst of the flood, and in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina she kept open the family house for any cousin who needed a bed. The flood had brought up what floods bring up. She read four cellars in a week, in the heat, by the light of a lantern, and found in each the track that she was looking for. On a night in the autumn of 2014, driving back alone on the levee road below Pointe a la Hache from a meeting with a cousin of the river trade, she was ambushed in the dark, at a bend where the road ran between a ditch and a stand of willows, and she was killed there at fifty. It was a lonely road. She had read it for years, and the Ledger could find no mark to say that she had missed anything. Her sister Rainey buried her from the church in the Faubourg beside her parents, and the track coach from the high school in Gentilly, a man of seventy, ran the half-mile in her name the following spring and came in last, and was loudly applauded. Lorraine Faulkner Trahan is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Fallow Shuttle, the bookkeeper who read the river like a column of figures and was owed a favour by half of it. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet racketeers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who used the old trade of debts and favours to keep a city safe, and who carried her father's stopwatch into the dark.