Edwin Rutledge

Spouse of Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Edwin Rutledge was born in 1824 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lived fifty-four years as a farmer on the low ground above and below New Orleans. He married the seamstress Sarah Delacroix Faulkner in 1854, raised two children with her, Benjamin Faulkner and Emma Rutledge, and died in 1878 of a stroke, aged fifty-four, at the end of a hot day in his own cane rows. He was not a hunter, was not born to the Faulkner line or to the House of Delacroix, and never once in twenty-four years of marriage claimed to understand the half of the family business that was done after dark. The Faulkners of the Red Ledger remember him as the man who fed the New Orleans chapter, the farmer who sold vegetables at the French Market at dawn and was never asked why he took his wagon home by the longest road. Baton Rouge in 1824 was a small river town on the first bluff above the delta, a place of about a thousand souls, a barracks, a market square and a steamboat landing, with the Mississippi running broad and brown beneath it. The Rutledges were Scots-Irish people who had come down from Tennessee a generation earlier to take up land in the Florida Parishes, and they farmed cotton and corn on a few hundred acres east of the town. Edwin was the fourth of seven. His father was a hard, silent man who believed that a farm was a war against weeds, and his mother, who kept the bees, believed that most problems could be solved by waiting. He inherited something of both. He worked the fields from the age of eight, learned to plough a straight furrow by ten and to read a sky by twelve, and he had the farmer's habit of saying nothing at all until he had something to say. He was a big, slow, sunburned young man, with a broad face, light eyes and a slight stoop from leaning over handles, and he had no ambition to inherit a fraction of a cotton farm that six brothers were already waiting for. When he was twenty-one he took his wages, a horse and a letter to a cousin, and went down the river to the country below New Orleans, where the land was cheaper and the market was at the door. The war with Mexico had just begun, and the city was full of volunteers and army contractors, and the price of vegetables and forage was going up. He rented forty acres on the Metairie ridge, put in a crop of beans, squash, cabbage and sweet potatoes, and sent his first wagonload to the French Market at four in the morning on a June day in 1847. It sold out by six. He said afterward that he had known then what he was going to be. It was at the market that he met the Delacroix. The stall beside his was kept by a cousin of the bayou family, a stout woman who sold thread, ribbon and notions, and on Saturdays she was helped by a tall, dark, quick-fingered girl who had come in from Thibodaux and was learning the dressmaking trade in a shop on Chartres Street. This was Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1830 in New Orleans, the eldest daughter of the cane farmer Hippolyte Delacroix and of Eliza Faulkner of the Red Ledger's Kentucky and Louisiana line. She had been born in the city by a custom of the family, in her uncle Caleb's house in the Treme, where the women of the Faulkners went for their confinements, and she had spent her girlhood on Bayou Lafourche and her apprenticeship in the Vieux Carre. She sized him up in a morning. He was the only farmer in the market who did not try to cheat her cousin, and the only one who took his hat off to do it. The courtship took six years. It was conducted over the bean baskets, at the market, in a mixture of English and the bayou French that he was learning with great effort and in which he made, to her delight, a great many mistakes. He brought her a bundle of asparagus every Saturday, which she took home to her mother, and in the third year she mended a coat for him, and in the fifth she told him that if he wished to ask her anything he had better do it while her father could still give his blessing, which she thought would not be for long. Hippolyte Delacroix, who had been ill for some time, gave it in the spring of 1854, and lived to see the house on the ridge; he died in 1859. They were married in 1854, in the church of the Treme, with both families in the pews, and he went home, for the first time in his life, to a house with a woman in it. He was told the secret at the wedding feast by his new uncle by marriage, Caleb Thayer Faulkner, who took him aside with a glass of claret, watched him for a minute, and said that there was something about the family that a man ought to know. Edwin said that he supposed there was. He had noticed that every man at the table had a coat that hung oddly on the left side, and that nobody drank more than one glass. Caleb told him in six sentences. The Faulkners and the Delacroix, he said, were slayers, and were in a war that had lasted since 1455, and Sarah's brother Augustus, who was sitting opposite, was one of them. Edwin listened, nodded and asked one question, which was whether the hunters would want the use of his wagon. Caleb said that he hoped they would. They did. A farm wagon that goes to market at dawn, with a load of vegetables and a driver who is known to everyone, is one of the most useful things in a city, and the Red Ledger's chapter made use of it for twenty years. He carried silver shot in a flour sack. He carried stakes among the stakes that held up his beans. He carried, more than once, a hunter who could not be seen on the streets, lying in the bed of the wagon under a load of cabbages, and set him down where he was wanted, at the back of a warehouse or a church, without a question. The market women, who knew every wagon in the city, said that Rutledge's was the only one that had never been stopped by the watch, and Edwin, who did not see what there was to explain, went on driving. Their children were born in the first years of the marriage. Benjamin Faulkner was born in 1855, a big, slow, fair boy like his father, and lived until 1923, and became a telegraph operator, and did not hunt. Emma Rutledge was born in 1857, a dark, sharp, laughing girl like her mother, and lived until 1937, and she never married, became a seamstress, and did not hunt either. The house on the ridge was a plain frame cottage with a gallery and a kitchen garden, and Sarah took in sewing, and on Sundays the family sat down to a dinner that was half Scottish and half bayou, which is to say that there was a great deal of gravy and a great deal of pepper. The war changed the farm. When the Union fleet came up the river in the spring of 1862, the city fell, the market was closed and the wagon was commandeered, and Edwin, who was thirty-eight and had two small children, spent a summer hiding his horses in a cypress swamp and selling vegetables from the back of a borrowed mule. He took the loyalty oath, because he had to, and did what he could for the people he knew, on both sides, and was never once accused of taking a side. The occupation years were hard. Prices rose, then fell. A yellow fever epidemic took four of his neighbours. He buried one of them himself, because nobody else would, and went home and washed in lye. Reconstruction was the worst of it, and the best. The farm, which was on the edge of the city and on the wrong side of a drainage ditch, flooded three times in six years, and a bad harvest in 1874 took the last of his savings. But the market reopened, and the people came back, and in the late 1870s he had fifty acres, two wagons and a hired man, and was said to be making more than he had in his life. He worked as he always had, from before dawn until the light went, and his wife said that he was not a man who could be told to rest. He died in the summer of 1878, at fifty-four, of a stroke. It was a Thursday, in August, in the heat of the afternoon, and he was walking up the last row of cane with a hoe on his shoulder when he stopped, put the hoe down carefully and sat in the furrow, as though he wished to think about something. He was found by the hired man, sitting upright, with his hat on his knee. He was buried in the cemetery of the Treme, beside the Delacroix, and his widow, who lived on for thirty-four years and sold the wagon, said that he had been the only man she had ever met who could be silent and be heard. Edwin Rutledge is remembered in the Faulkner family as the farmer who drove the wagon, the husband who asked no questions and carried what he was given. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people of the ordinary trades who married into the Red Ledger and served it with a plough, a cart and a steady pair of hands, and who were rewarded with very little except the knowledge that the dark had a harder time crossing their fields.