Elias Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1863 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-one years as a bookkeeper among the French Quarter counting-rooms, the wharves and the cotton exchange, a quiet man with a pencil behind his ear who was said to know the financial position of half the levee and to have mentioned it to no one. He was the elder son of the carpenter Baptiste Delacroix and of the schoolteacher Georgia Faulkner, and the brother of Nettie Faulkner Delacroix. In 1887 he married the bookkeeper Amelie Delacroix, and they had two sons, Robert Faulkner Delacroix and Alexander Faulkner Delacroix, neither of whom became a hunter. He died in 1914 of pneumonia, aged fifty-one. He was not a vampire slayer, and he knew better than to pretend to be one. He belonged to the House of Delacroix by name and to the Faulkner bloodline of the Red Ledger through his mother, which descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he spent his working life keeping the accounts of the Ledger's Louisiana chapter, in a column that appeared in no other book.
He was born in the front bedroom of the house on Royal Street in the second year of the Union occupation, with a Federal sentry at the corner and his father's workshop on the ground floor full of half-made coffins. The city was hungry that spring. The cotton exchange was empty, the building trade had collapsed, and Baptiste, who took what work he could get, was hammering boards for the fever dead, so that the first sound the child heard, his mother said, was the knock of a mallet and the second was her own voice telling the nurse to stop apologising. His grandfather, the boatman Charles Eaton, had died at Louisville the year before and could not be buried by his daughter, who was teaching, and the boy was named Elias for a Faulkner great-uncle and Delacroix for the house, to keep both branches of the family quiet. He was a solid, fair, solemn infant with his father's size and his mother's look of weighing things.
He grew up in his mother's school. The benches in the front room were his father's work, and the children who sat on them, the sons and daughters of the Ledger's New Orleans cousins, learned English and French, sums on a slate and a short, practical geography with a great deal of river in it. Elias sat among them and listened. He was not a bright pupil in the ordinary sense, but he had a peculiar tidy mind, and by nine he was keeping the school's attendance register in a column of his own, noting not only who was there but who was missing and for how long, a thing that his mother, who kept a green book in the master's drawer, found of considerable interest. He learned the trade of the house from her at twelve, at the kitchen table. She told him plainly what the Delacroix and the Faulkners were, and what the green book was for, and that somebody would have to keep the accounts.
The fever summer of 1878 sent him upriver. He was fifteen, and his mother, who had closed the school to nurse in a fever ward, put him on a steamboat to his grandmother's in Louisville, with a label on his coat. He came back in October taller by three inches and in a mood of calm enthusiasm for barrels. The grandmother's neighbour was a cooper, and Elias, who had spent three months looking at the way a thing was made to hold a great deal and to spill nothing, took to the idea of a container. He went into a cooperage on the levee as a tally clerk. It was the right trade for him. A cooperage sold casks of molasses, sugar, rum and whiskey to the shippers of the wharf, and every cask had to be counted, marked, weighed and billed, and every bill had to be settled against a shipper's credit at the cotton exchange. He was made the firm's bookkeeper at twenty-two.
He met Amelie Delacroix in the shop of her mother, the slayer Monique Delacroix, The Plain Tally, a small dry-goods store in the Quarter that had the most carefully kept ledger in the parish. He had gone in to settle an account for the cooperage. Amelie, who was twenty and kept the books, looked at his bill, and at him, and said that there was an error in the third line. He said that there was not. She showed him. He thanked her, and said that in all the years that he had been looking at books he had never been corrected with such gentleness, and Monique, who was listening in the back, came out, wiped her hands on her apron and inquired whether he was related to the Delacroix of Royal Street. He said that he was. She said that in that case he would do. They were married in 1887, in the Cathedral, in the spring, and the two families, who had been joined on the Faulkner side by his mother and were now joined on the Delacroix by his wife, celebrated with a great many dishes and a rather formal speech by Baptiste, who said that it was the first time that he had seen a wedding in which both bride and groom had checked the arithmetic.
They set up house in the Quarter, in rooms behind the shop, and their sons were born in the first years. Robert Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1889 and lived until 1968, and Alexander Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1893 and lived until 1977. Neither was called, and both grew up among ledgers, in a house where a column that did not foot was treated as a minor domestic disaster. Amelie kept the shop's books and her husband kept the cooperage's, and they kept the Ledger's, in the evenings, together, at the kitchen table, in a cipher that they had devised from the price of molasses. Monique, who lived on in a chair on the gallery until the winter of 1893, used to sit in on the audits and say nothing, in a way that Elias found more alarming than criticism.
The Ledger's accounts were a serious matter. The Red Ledger in Louisiana had expenses, for lamps, silver, passage money, bail, funeral costs for the ones who did not come back, and a great many small kindnesses to the families of the ones who did not, and it had a number of sources of income that were never mentioned. Elias kept all of it. He knew which hunter had been paid, which widow had been fed, which ferryman had been tipped and which merchant had been persuaded, for the sake of his own peace, to carry a certain crate. He knew, to the dollar, the cost of a yellow fever summer, having lived through that of 1878 and several lesser ones, and of the Storyville years, which began in 1897 and sent a steady supply of wounded hunters, pawned guns and unpaid bills to the back door. He said that the new music of the district was the only thing in the city that balanced. He could not, he said, account for it.
His father and mother outlived some of it. Georgia died at her desk in the schoolroom in 1908, after forty-one years of teaching, and Elias, who was forty-five, took her green book out of the drawer and read it through in a single night, and said at breakfast that it was the most complete set of accounts that he had ever seen, since every entry was a person. Baptiste, who lived to 1922, kept his wife's desk as she had left it. Elias took over her register and kept it up.
He was at his desk in the cooperage in the summer of 1914 when the news of the war came through on the wire, and the cotton exchange, like every exchange in the country, shut its doors for several months and let the world's prices fall through the floor. The accounts of the wharves went into confusion. He worked ten hours a day through the autumn, reconciling three sets of books, and caught a cold in November, which went to his chest. He died of pneumonia in December 1914, in his own bed, in the rooms behind the shop, at fifty-one, with his wife at the foot of it and the two books on the table. His sons were twenty-five and twenty-one. Amelie, who outlived him by eleven years, balanced the last page.
Elias Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the bookkeeper of the Quarter, the son of a joiner and a schoolmistress who kept the Red Ledger's accounts without a blot. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet reckoners of the hunting houses, the men and women of the ledger room whose columns paid for the lamps, the silver and the funerals, and who knew that a war is won as much by a balanced book as by a steady aim.
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