Georgia Cole Faulkner

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

Georgia Cole Faulkner was born in 1879 at Thibodaux, Louisiana, and lived fifty-four years as a nurse, mostly in the wards and sickrooms of New Orleans, where she grew up among hat forms and telegraph sounders. She was the elder child of the telegraph operator Benjamin Faulkner and the milliner Mary Cole, and the sister of Benjamin Cole Faulkner, who followed their father onto the wire. She belonged to the Faulkner line of the Red Ledger and was not a hunter, and she did not marry. She died in 1933 of kidney failure, aged fifty-four, of the same complaint that had taken her mother, in her own house on Esplanade Avenue, in the back bedroom, with the window open onto a yard of banana trees. The family remembers her as the nurse who patched up the people the Ledger could not take to a hospital, and who did it in the same quiet and unhurried manner that her father had sent his telegrams and her mother had carried her hatboxes. She was born at Thibodaux because her father was working there. In the autumn of 1879 the operator at the depot in that small cane town on Bayou Lafourche fell ill at the start of the grinding season, when every sugar planter in the parish was wiring prices to New Orleans, and the company sent down, by the morning train, the one man in the office who could take a message from three planters at once. Benjamin Faulkner went down for eight weeks. Mary, who was twenty-two and expecting her first child in the winter, refused to stay in the rooms on Dauphine Street, on the ground that a husband who was going to be away should be away with a wife. She took the bench with her. Georgia was born in a boarding house across from the depot, on a night in October that smelled of boiled cane, to the sound of the sounder in the next room, and her father, who had been on duty, sent the news to his own sister by wire before he went up the stairs. The message, it was said, was the only one of his career in which he had to be asked to repeat a word. She was a dark, practical, bright-eyed child, small like her mother, and she was put on a stool at the bench at six. By eight she could wire a brim, and by ten she could make a flower from a scrap of silk that her mother said could be sold. She was also the child of the house who watched the sickroom. The yellow fever summers of the 1880s frightened her mother more than she let her father see, and Georgia, who was five, was kept indoors with the shutters shut and the sulphur burning, and she learned to tell a fever from a flush by the colour of a neighbour's lips at the door. She said afterwards that she had decided to be a nurse on a wet afternoon in August, at seven, when a woman on Dauphine Street had a fit on the gallery and her mother had held the woman's head and told her to fetch water. She fetched it. Nobody told her off. She kept to the bench because the bench was needed. Her mother's shop prospered in the nineties, and the two of them made hats for the wives of the cotton factors, for the nuns of the Ursuline convent and, after 1897, for the ladies of the district that the city fathers had laid out and named after an alderman, Storyville, who were good customers and paid in cash. Georgia delivered the parcels. She was a slim, quick girl in a dark dress, with a hatbox on her arm, who could pass through the front door of a house on Basin Street in the afternoon and be gone by the back in ten minutes. She knew, from the age of sixteen, that the crown of a hatbox could carry a good deal more than a hat, and she learned what her mother and her father were, without being told, in the same way that she learned the rest, by noticing where things went. The jazz came out of the same district, and she heard it from the start. She did not care for the dance halls, but she admired a good cornet, and she was often to be seen, at a funeral, on the corner of Rampart Street, in a hat of her own making, listening to a brass band play a slow dirge on the way to the cemetery and a fast one on the way back. She said that the city had the only funerals in the world in which the dead were seen off with a joke. She was twenty-five when she first patched up a musician, a cornet player of the district who came to the back door at two in the morning with a bullet in his shoulder and a story about a dispute over a piano. She took it out. She did not ask his name. The man sent her a cornet solo, by way of thanks, in the form of a message scribbled on a card, and it was the first, and the last, of the notes that she kept. Her mother's death in the autumn of 1909 settled the matter. Mary Cole died in the back bedroom of a kidney complaint, at fifty-two, and Georgia, who was thirty, nursed her for the last eleven months, with her father on the night shift at the wire and her brother at the exchange. She did it well. She learned, in the course of it, every tone of a failing kidney, and she learned, too, that she could sit through the small hours with a sick woman without a single tired word. After the funeral she closed the bench, gave the stock to a cousin and entered the training school at Charity Hospital, where the Sisters, who liked a mature probationer, put her straight on the wards. She was, in the matter of hat-making, sorry to have gone, and said that she would make a hat only for her own funeral. She never did. She qualified in 1912 and took private cases, first in the Garden District and later in the wards of the Hotel Dieu, and she found that the life of a nurse in New Orleans had a good many uses for the skill of a milliner. A sickroom, like a hat, is a matter of arrangement. She had a steady hand, a good memory for a dosage and an instinct for the thing that did not belong in a room. In the summer of 1913 she sat up for five nights with a cotton broker's widow who would not sleep, and at the end of the week, without consultation, had the window nailed shut. The widow recovered. The Red Ledger, which had an interest in the matter, sent her a note, through her father's wire, in a commercial cipher that said that cotton had been firm. It was as a nurse that she served the Faulkners. The hunters of the Red Ledger in New Orleans were men and women who took hurts in the night, in cellars, on the levee and in the swamp, and who could not go to the doctor in the ordinary way. Georgia had a bag, and a room, and a way of asking nothing. She sewed a wound in the back of a rented kitchen, she kept a clean bed in her own house for a man who had been cut and could not go home, and she quietly saw to it, through the trade, that the Ledger's cousins in other parishes knew which doctors could be trusted. She was not paid. She said that she had been paid in advance by the sulphur. Her father, who was fifty-eight in 1913, was retired on a small pension in 1915 and came to live in her house on Esplanade Avenue, where he spent the rest of his life listening to a borrowed sounder and reading her patients' charts over her shoulder, which he did not understand and declared to be the best code he had seen. The Great War took her to the wards of the Army's training hospital at Jackson Barracks, where she nursed soldiers who were being made ready for France, and the influenza of 1918 filled the wards of the city to the roof. She worked for ninety days without a full night's sleep. She nursed, in the autumn of that year, sixty-one patients, of whom forty-four lived, and she kept a small book of the others, with their names, in her own hand, which she wrote up on the last night of the epidemic and put in a drawer. She said that a nurse's first duty was to write down who had been there. Her father died in 1923, in a fall on the stair of her house, as he went down to fetch the paper. She was in the house at the time, in the kitchen, and heard the sound, and reached him in under a minute. She sat with him on the stair until the doctor came. His hat, it was noticed, was on his head. The last ten years of her life were quiet. She worked on through the twenties, a neat, grey, erect woman in a nurse's cap, attending the old families of the neighbourhoods and taking an occasional case on the floodplain, where the great river and the lake together made a perennial problem of water, and she saw the flood of 1927 from the roof of a hospital. The Storyville district had been closed by the Navy in 1917, and most of her jazz had gone to Chicago, but the brass bands still played on Rampart Street on Sunday, and she listened. Her brother Benjamin, who lived at the other end of the city and worked the wire, came on Sundays and they sat on the gallery together. Her own kidneys began to fail in 1931. She nursed herself, she said, with the contempt of a professional for an amateur patient. She died in the autumn of 1933, aged fifty-four, in the back bedroom, with her brother and two old colleagues at her side. She was found to have left her bag packed, with the usual dressings and the small bottle of carbolic, by the door. It was given to the Sisters. Georgia Cole Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the nurse of Esplanade Avenue, the daughter of the hatmaker and the telegraph operator who kept the Red Ledger's wounded alive. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses and healers of the Faulkner line, who bound up the hurts that could not be shown to a doctor and who asked nothing more than clean linen, a locked door and a cup of tea at the end of the night.