Hippolyte Delacroix was born in 1807 in Thibodaux, in the Lafourche bayou country of Louisiana, and lived fifty-two years as a cane and truck farmer, a husband and a father in the House of Delacroix. He was the son of the midwife and vampire slayer Adele Delacroix, called The Still Mantle, and he married Eliza Faulkner, the sister of two Faulkner slayers, in 1828, binding the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre to the Red Ledger. He had four children, one of whom, Augustus Faulkner, became a slayer. He was not a hunter himself. He died in 1859 of old age, at fifty-two, worn out, by the reckoning of his family, by thirty years of the two heaviest labours known to Louisiana, which are farming in the summer and being related to the Delacroix.
His mother, Adele Delacroix, was born in 1772 in the same bayou settlement and died in 1840 in an accident, having been a midwife for fifty years and a slayer for thirty. The family papers do not name his father, and the silence is an old Delacroix habit. The family house was a long, low, raised cottage of cypress and brick, with a deep gallery, shuttered windows and a steep shingled roof, on the bank of Bayou Lafourche, a few miles above the settlement that was then called Thibodauxville. Its cane fields ran back from the water in strips, in the French way, each a few hundred feet wide and a mile deep. The soil was black and heavy, the air was thick with mosquitoes, and the people of the bayou lived by sugar, rice, fish, moss and trapping, speaking French, Spanish, English and a mixture of the three.
He grew up among women. His mother was a figure of authority in the parish, whose opinion on a birth, a burial or a boundary dispute was regarded as final, and who was absent on night calls for days at a time. Her sisters and cousins filled the house. They taught him to read, to count and to cook. They taught him to tell the difference between a cottonmouth and a water snake and to paddle a pirogue up a bayou without a ripple, and they taught him, in an aside that he never forgot, never to go out by himself on a foggy night when the lamps of the cane were lit.
He did not learn the family trade. His mother's work, which was that of the slayer of the Delacroix house, was handed to those who had the gift for it, and Adele, who had a sharp eye for such things, had concluded by the time he was twelve that her son was not among them. He was too open. He liked people, he laughed easily, and he found it hard to lie. He had the temperament of a farmer, patient, sanguine and fond of the weather, and he found his calling in the cane. She did not try to change him. She said that every house needed someone who could be trusted to do an honest day's work, and that in a family of hunters it was usually the one who did not hunt.
At seventeen he took over a strip of the family land and began to farm it on his own. Sugar, in the 1820s, was a hard business. The cane was cut in October and November, hauled to a mill and boiled down in great open kettles in a race against the first frost, and a crop could be lost in a night. Hippolyte grew a good deal of cane and a good deal of everything else. He kept a kitchen garden of unusual size, with okra, peppers, eggplant and yams, and a pen of ducks, and sold the produce to the market in the town. He was cheerful, honest and careful, and his neighbours found him a pleasant man to deal with. By twenty he was known as the best farmer on his stretch of the bayou.
He met Eliza Faulkner in the winter of 1827, in New Orleans, where he had gone to sell a boatload of vegetables to the French Market. She was a widow of twenty-two, a tall, dark, grave young woman, the daughter of the Faulkner boatman Silas and the sister of the printer Lewis and the storekeeper Caleb, who had come to the city with her first husband, a physician of the Creole quarter, and had lost him in the fever of that summer. She had stayed on, in a small house on the Rue Dauphine, and took in sewing. He called on her with a basket of peppers. She remarked that it was an unusual way to pay a visit of condolence. He said that he had not been able to think of a better. She smiled for the first time in a month.
They were married in 1828, the same year as her brother Caleb and Caleb's wife Clara, in a double ceremony in the cathedral. It was the first formal alliance between the Delacroix and the Faulkners, and the two families regarded it with some interest. The Delacroix saw in Eliza the granddaughter of a frontier line with a reputation for stubbornness. The Faulkners saw in Hippolyte a cheerful young farmer with a mother who could read a room at a glance. Adele, who came from the bayou to the wedding, in her dark cloak, and looked at her new daughter-in-law for a long time without speaking, said at last that she would do.
The couple settled at the family house on the bayou. Eliza, who had been raised among hunters, was quickly at home. She took over the kitchen, managed the household accounts and, when the occasion demanded, kept a loaded gun by the bed. Their children arrived in a steady procession. Sarah Delacroix Faulkner was born in 1830 and lived until 1912. Effie Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1835 and lived until 1907. Augustus Faulkner was born in 1837 and lived until 1889, and became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, born three years before his grandmother Adele died, and who took up her dark cloak when he was grown. Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix, the youngest, was born in 1846 and lived until 1910, and became a blacksmith in New Orleans; the farm passed to him on paper and was worked on shares by a cousin.
Hippolyte was a devoted father. He taught his sons to plant and his daughters to keep accounts, and he rose every morning before daylight to walk the fields with a lantern, counting the rows. The household over which he and Eliza presided was a happy and noisy one, full of French, English and song. He was a large, brown, sunburned man with a thick moustache and a habit of humming, and his neighbours said they could tell the time of day by the tune.
He was not cut off from the work of his family. His mother and, later, his son used the farm as a base. The Delacroix and Faulkner hunters who passed through the parish were lodged in the back gallery, fed on gumbo and rice, and sent on their way with a basket of provisions and a pirogue. The farm's fields lay on the edge of the great swamp, where a good deal of what had to be done could be done out of sight. Hippolyte asked no questions. He did, once or twice, take a gun and a lantern and stand at the end of a row, at night, for an hour, in case of need. It was, he said, only what a neighbour would do.
The years of his middle life were marked by the great yellow fever summers. In 1837, 1847 and 1853 the fever came up the bayou from the city, on the sugar boats, and carried off a number of his neighbours. He and Eliza nursed the sick. They turned the sitting room into a ward, put up a dozen cots, and fed anyone who came to the door. In the summer of 1853 he lost his sister and two nieces. The war with Mexico, which had caught the country's attention in the late 1840s, made little impression on the bayou, except that the price of sugar went up and three of his cousins went to Texas with a volunteer company.
His mother's death, in 1840, in an accident on the road, hit him hard. He had been very close to her, in spite of the difference in their callings, and he had the strange sensation for some months of hearing her step on the gallery. He buried her in the family plot on the bayou, under a cypress, and had a stone cut with a mantle and the words Still Waters.
He died in the autumn of 1859, at fifty-two, of old age, as the family put it, meaning that his heart and lungs had worn out. The farm passed to his youngest son. Eliza lived on for eighteen years. He was buried beside his mother, and the field workers, who had been fond of him, brought a sheaf of cane to the grave.
Hippolyte Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the farmer of Lafourche, the cheerful son of a grave mother, who married the Faulkners into the house. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ordinary households that sheltered the hunters, and whose open doors and full tables were as much a part of the long war as any weapon.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
