Gaspard Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

On Frenchmen Street, at two in the morning, the man behind the bar at the last club on the block can tell you who is sober, who is lost and who has been standing in the doorway for twenty minutes without coming in, and Gaspard Faulkner is generally that man. He was born in 2002 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in New Orleans, where he works as a bartender in the jazz clubs of the Marigny and the Treme. He is a man of the House of Faulkner and of the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but he was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. He is the only son of the nurse Gaspard Delacroix and of the paramedic Linda Faulkner, who were married in 2000, the grandson of the slayers Francoise Delacroix, The Rough Kestrel, and Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, The Sable Reeve, and the grandson, through his mother, of the late slayer Felix Delacroix, The Red Bridle. The family remembers him as the bartender who knows every musician in the quarter and every door in it, and who pours with one eye on the street. He was born in the autumn of 2002 in the old brick hospital in Treme, in a heat that would not break, to a nurse and a paramedic who had met, as the two trades generally do, in the loading bay of an emergency room. The elder Gaspard, a stubborn, funny, bookish young man of twenty, had been told by his own mother, the librarian, that a family needs someone who is allowed to go to bed at ten, and had trained to be that someone, on night shifts. Linda, who was twenty, a quick-handed, dark-eyed young woman with her mother's chin, drove the ambulance that he rode behind. They were married at eighteen, as the Delacroix always had been, a good deal too young, and the match, as everybody had said, was a good one. When the baby was born they gave him his father's name, which he has carried ever since with the patience of a person who has been called Little Gaspard in a hundred kitchens, and which is shortened, in the neighbourhood, to Gas. He grew up in a cottage in Treme with a back porch, a fig tree and a front window with a candle in it, in the household of his two grandmothers, who lived within walking distance of one another and who took the care of him between them. Francoise, the librarian, taught him to read at four, to find a book at five and to be quiet in the stacks, and by seven he had been shown the secret of the branch library, which was that there is a door at the back of the periodicals room to which only the staff have the key. Lorraine, who waited tables at a diner on Magazine Street, taught him to carry four plates, to remember an order and to leave a tip that he could afford, and when he was nine, in a booth at the back, with a milkshake, she told him with great care that she had known his grandfather Felix, that Felix had been a good man and a better hunter, and that he had died, in 1991, in a car accident when Linda was nine, and that she had kept his hat. He did not understand the first half of what she said. He understood the second, and has never forgotten it. He was three, in the last week of August 2005, when the hurricane came up the Gulf, and what he remembers of the flood is the back of a car, a very long road and the smell of a suitcase full of wet candles. His grandmother Francoise drove him, with his mother and father and a box of the Ledger's papers, to Atlanta, on the Saturday, in a line of traffic that took twelve hours to cover the first hundred miles, and the family stayed there for three months, in a cousin's house with a pool that was not allowed to be used. He was the only one in the car who was perfectly happy. When they returned in the November, to a cottage in Treme with a waterline four feet up the kitchen wall, he stood in the doorway, looked at the line, which was at the level of his chin, and said that the house had been swimming. His father, who was a nurse and had spent the autumn caring for other people's flooded relatives, laughed until he had to sit down. It became a family saying. When anything is badly damaged and cheerfully mended, it is said to have been swimming. He was told what the family was at sixteen, by his grandmother Francoise, in the back of the library, after hours, over a candle, with a plate of pralines. She did it, as the Delacroix do, in a flat, tidy voice. She said that the family had a book, that there was a choice and that his mother and his father had each made theirs. He listened, and then asked her whether he might still come in on Sundays. She said that he might. He thought, privately, that he was probably the only member of the family who had been told the whole truth and had asked for supper. He finished school in 2020, in the first spring of the pandemic years, and the end of it was a parade of one: a diploma handed over in a car park, a trumpet player on a balcony and a city with its clubs shut, its bands on the doorsteps and its streets, for the first time in his lifetime, quiet. He worked that year as a delivery driver for a restaurant that cooked on the pavement and as a volunteer at a food bank run from the back of a church. In the summer of 2021, when the clubs began to reopen, he took a job as a barback at a small, dark, brick-walled jazz room on Frenchmen Street, carrying ice and crates and washing glasses, and was behind the rail by twenty-one, mixing a good old fashioned and a bad sazerac, which was the term of art for the one he had made himself. The owner, an old drummer with a grey beard, told him that the secret of a good bartender was to be as interesting as the furniture. He has never forgotten it. He pours quickly, remembers a face and lets the band be the evening. A jazz club is a good place to see what walks the city at night. It is dark, it is loud, nobody asks a stranger a question and a man who sits in the corner with a glass of water and does not tap his foot to the music is, to a trained eye, as obvious as a ship on a road. Gaspard has learned the eye from his grandmothers. He knows to put a candle on the bar on the nights that the house is quiet, as Francoise does, and to put a customer who seems unwell at the table by the door, with a glass of something bright. He has twice telephoned his grandmother in the small hours, once in the January of 2023 and once on the night before the Super Bowl of 2025, to say that a gentleman had come in out of the rain and had not been willing to take off a glove. He does not regard it as hunting. He regards it as manners. He is twenty-four, a tall, lean, olive-skinned young man with his mother's chin and his father's very black hair, a white shirt and a black apron that he irons himself, and a habit of whistling a few bars of whatever the band is playing under his breath as he cleans a glass. He lives in the upstairs half of a double shotgun house in the Marigny, with a roommate who plays the bass and a small, indignant dog called Sazerac, and he walks to work along the river, through a part of the city that has been under water twice in his lifetime and that he has, to his own surprise, grown to love. He goes every Sunday to his grandmother Francoise in Treme, where he washes the dishes, and on alternate Sundays to his grandmother Lorraine, on the other side of the river, where he is given the dishes to dry. His parents, who are both on shift and who both worry, ring him on Wednesdays. His aunt Crystal, who clerks in the court, sends him recipes. His father says that his one regret about the boy is that he will not sit down. Gaspard Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the bartender of Frenchmen Street, the grandson of The Rough Kestrel and The Sable Reeve who learned the trade of the house and the trade of the club and found that they were the same. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the hosts, the pourers and the keepers of a late-night door, who showed that a warm room with a lit candle in it is the most welcoming ward in a city of ghosts, and that a good barman is a quiet kind of sentry who has never had to draw a weapon to keep the night in order.