Frances Fontenot

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

Ask anyone who has worked a shift under Frances Fontenot what she is like, and they will tell you that she counts. She was born in 1951 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in New Orleans, where she spent her working life as a laundry supervisor and where she has buried a husband and a son. She belongs to no house of the Ledger and is not a vampire slayer, but she married into the Faulkner bloodline that keeps the Red Ledger, and for forty years she has been the woman who washed what the hunters came home in. In 1980 she married the lineman and slayer Leonard Faulkner, The Lone Rook, who died the following spring, and they had one child, the slayer Mark Fontenot Faulkner, born in 1981 and dead in 2006. She has no alias, archetype or craft. What she has is a tag, a chalk mark and an exact memory for every sheet that has ever left her hands, and the family remembers her as the supervisor who never lost a coat, and who never once asked what was on it. She was born in the Irish Channel, in a shotgun cottage three doors from a corner bar, in the heat of a wet July, the third of five children of a dockside family who made their living from the river and spoke of it with some resentment. Her people had come down the bayou from the Fontenot country in the parishes to the west, and it was a household in which the French of the grandmother was understood by everybody and replied to in English. Her father worked on a wharf, her mother took in ironing, and the child, who was a thin, watchful girl with strong wrists, was set at eight to fold the clean linen into piles on the front-room table, by size, by colour and by owner. She did it the way that other children play a game, and she found that she was good at it. At eleven she was sent to the corner laundry with a bundle and came back, an hour later, with a job. The owner had been so struck by her that he had given her a broom and a quarter, and told her to return on Saturday. By fifteen she was a regular Saturday hand at the laundry, by seventeen a full-time one, in a steaming room at the foot of the Irish Channel among the girls from the neighbourhood, with an apron, a mangle and a wage that her mother took half of. It was the great age of the commercial laundry in the city, when the hotels, the hospitals, the steamship lines and the bars all sent out their linen by the cartload, and a girl who could keep it straight was a girl for whom there would always be work. The Vietnam years went past her, the way that wars did in that quarter, in the form of a boy gone from the corner and a gold star in a window. She worked the finishing room, then the sorting tables, then the receiving dock, where the bundles came in with their tags and the drivers with their complaints. By twenty-five she was a floor lady on the night shift, and by thirty a supervisor, at a larger laundry on the west bank, where the cousins of the Red Ledger kept their wash, and where an older woman who had run the place for thirty years, Simone Delacroix, took her on, as the family put it, as a girl who might do. Simone taught her the tags. A family of hunters, the older woman explained, does not send its coats to a stranger, and a bundle that came in at six in the morning with a number that did not match the customer's name was not to be opened on the table or discussed at the break. It was to be washed with more care than the hotel sheets, and mended, and returned. Frances said that she understood. She had understood, in fact, for some time. The women of the floor in that laundry knew a bloodstain at a glance and had a number of private rules about how it was to be treated, and Frances, who had grown up in a house of ironing and a corner of saints, took to them without remark. She learned the cold water and the salt, and the lemon, and the old lye soap that Simone kept in a bucket under the sink, and she learned the rule that was above all the others, that the name on the tag was never to be said aloud. She met Leonard Faulkner in the autumn of 1979, at the loading door of the laundry, where he had come in a power company truck, in a hard hat and a belt, to see to a line that had come down in a storm. He was twenty-four, a tall, dark, rather solemn young man with the Faulkner jaw and a pair of very steady hands, and he asked where he could find somebody to sign for the work. She said that she would sign. He said that he would be much obliged. He came back the following Tuesday with a ledger of repairs that did not require her signature, and the Tuesday after that with a sandwich. They were married in 1980, in the spring, at a church in Algiers, with his sister Ethel Faulkner standing up with her, and a small party of cousins who sat in the back with their coats on and, she noticed, did not come up to the altar rail until the last. In the autumn he was called, in a field after a hunt, and he came home and told her, at the kitchen table, in the order that he had been taught. She heard him through and asked whether he was going to want his coat washed. He said that he supposed he was. He was killed in the March of 1981, in a churchyard, by a blow that his father had taken before him in another one, and she was a widow at twenty-nine, in a rented house on the west bank, with a child on the way. The cousins came. Ethel, who had taken the call that night and said nothing of it, drove her to the funeral, sat with her through the wake and stayed in the spare room for a month. The child was born in the September, a boy, a big, fair, grave baby with his father's hands, and she gave him his father's name for a surname and her own for a middle one, and called him Mark. She went back to the laundry when he was three months old. It was a thing that she had no choice about, and she did not regard it as a hardship. She said that the work was the only place in the world where a thing that was dirty could be made clean by someone who knew what she was doing. She brought him up in the neighbourhood, with the help of Ethel, the cousins and the women of the laundry floor, in a house that smelled of starch and of the gumbo that she made on Sundays. He was a serious boy who liked machines. In the evenings, after the shift, she taught him to sort a bundle by touch and to tell by the weight of a collar who had worn it, and Ethel, who was a hunter of the Red Ledger and his aunt, took him on the weekends and taught him the other thing. When he was called, in the manner of the house, she did what she had always done, which was to wash what he brought home. She says that it was easier to wash than to talk, and that she can tell a great deal from a cuff. He died in 2006. She does not discuss how, and the family has never pressed her. She buried him beside his father, in the Faulkner tomb, with a stone that she had washed herself, and she did not miss a day of work. She had faced the water before then. In the last week of August 2005, when the hurricane that was to wreck the city turned towards the coast, she sent the young women on her floor away on the road to Houston and Baton Rouge and stayed to close the laundry, and then, when the levees failed and the flood came into the neighbourhood, she opened the loading dock to the neighbours who came across the river from the drowned wards, on foot and in whatever would float, and gave them towels, a hot meal and the dry floor of the sorting room, with the book of tags kept safe in a plastic bag under her arm. The west bank, which was on higher ground, stood dry, and the laundry, to the astonishment of the cousins, was one of the first businesses in the city to reopen, with a generator, a boiler and a staff of nine. It washed for the Red Cross, the National Guard and a field hospital that had been set up in a school. In the months after the flood Frances took in more linen than she had in twenty years, and sorted it, as she said, by the usual rule, which was by owner. The city had a great deal of owners just then, and some of them could not be found. She retired in the spring of 2016, after forty-eight years in the trade, with a clock, a plant and a party at which three hundred people stood up to say that she had once saved a piece of their lives. She is living today in New Orleans, in a small house with a porch, a line of washing and a good deal of company, with Ethel in the next street and the cousins coming by on the Sundays. In the autumn, when she hangs out the sheets, she looks down the row at them, as a woman looks at a good account, and she knows without counting that every one is there. Frances Fontenot is remembered in the Faulkner family as the laundry supervisor who washed the Ledger's coats, a woman who married into the line and lost her husband and her son to it and never once let a stain go unattended. In the Slayerverse she stands for the unhunting wives and mothers of the Red Ledger, the ones who stayed at the tubs and the boiler while the hunters were at their work, and who proved that a very clean sheet and a very long memory are part of what a family keeps.