Howard Faulkner Delacroix

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

Howard Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1917 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-eight years as a railway clerk in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of the city, a man of the House of Delacroix and the Red Ledger who never hunted and who married a hunter. He was the son of the railway clerk Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix and the seamstress Alice Goodwin, and the younger brother of the vampire slayer Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix. In 1937 he married the nurse and slayer Vera Butler, and the marriage was childless. He descended, through his grandmother Nettie, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, and he carried the family's habit of orderly books. He died in 1975 of a car accident, aged fifty-eight. The Delacroix remember him as the clerk who knew which freight car was carrying what, and who never once, in thirty-nine years at the same desk, reported that he did. He was born in the narrow house on Burgundy Street where his father, his grandfather and his grandmother Nettie had lived, in the back bedroom, on a hot night in the first week of August, with the shutters closed and a fan turning the heat from one side of the room to the other. His grandmother, a typist who had spent thirty years typing the Ledger's Louisiana letters in a clear, exact hand, stood at the foot of the bed with a pad and wrote down, to the minute, the time of the birth. His mother Alice, a seamstress from the Marigny, who had been in labour for fourteen hours and had sewn two shirts in the first ten, said that he could have it, and went to sleep. He was a thin, sandy-haired baby who did not cry. His sister Lorraine, then two, regarded him over the side of the cot and said, it is recorded, that he was no use. It was a household with a good deal of method in it. Baptiste, who had been named for a carpenter and who had left the plane for the clerk's stool, was a freight clerk in the great dim railway office on Poydras Street where Aristide Delacroix also worked, and he came home at six, ate at six-fifteen and read the paper until eight. He was a mild, dry, absent man who had been the second of two children and had decided, early, that he would be a quiet one. Alice made the shirts, the dresses and, on a good week, most of the street's wedding clothes. She was brisk, small and ironic, with a mouth full of pins, and she brought up her two children in the belief that there was nothing in the world that could not be mended with the right thread. They were not, in the usual sense, a hunting household. They were a Ledger household, which in the Delacroix manner meant that the cousins knew where to find them. Lorraine was the hunter. She was called in her teens, in the winter of 1931, and took up the work at the edge of the family with a fierce and cheerful competence that astonished everybody, her father most of all. Howard, who was fourteen and who had not been called, and who knew it, took the thing in his stride. He was a patient, a sunny and a slightly lazy boy who liked jazz and baseball, who played a battered cornet in the school band and who was happiest on a stoop on a summer evening with his sister's beaux and a bag of peaches. He asked her, once, whether it frightened her, and she said that it did, a little, and that it was better when someone was waiting up. He said that he could wait up. It was, in a sense, the beginning and the end of his vocation. He went to work at eighteen, in 1935, at the railway offices on Poydras Street, where his father had put in a word, and was set to copying bills of lading under the eye of the chief clerk of the tracing desk, who was Aristide Delacroix. The old man took one look at him, saw a boy who could sit still, and gave him the least interesting desk in the room. It was the one at the end of the row, by the door. Howard discovered, in the course of a year, that it was the best in the house, since every parcel, every crate and every unusual consignment that came into the city by rail was entered on a slip that passed across it. He had a good eye and a straight hand. By twenty he could tell from a manifest what a car had contained, where it was headed and whether it was likely to be opened at the other end by a customs man or by something less welcome. He met Vera Butler in the spring of 1936, at a dance in a hall on Rampart Street, where the band was playing a great deal of Dixieland and a number of sailors were losing at dice. She was a nurse at Charity Hospital, a tall, brown, calm young woman of twenty-two, with strong hands and a slow smile, who had come out with a friend and was standing by the wall, watching the room with an expression that Howard recognised, from his sister, at once. He asked her to dance. She said that she would, if he promised not to look at her feet. He promised. They danced, and then they sat down, and he told her about the tracing desk, and she told him about the night ward, and by the end of the evening they had established, in the quiet way of two people who both know what to listen for, that each of them was on the same side. She was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger by calling, and had been since she was nineteen, and she did not hide it. He was a clerk. They were married in 1937, in the church at the end of Dauphine Street, on the same Saturday that his cousin Josephine Delacroix married Norman Thorne, which had been done, it was said, to save on the flowers. They lived in a small flat on Esplanade, above a pharmacy, and the marriage was a happy one and a childless one, which the family did not discuss. Vera worked nights at the hospital and hunted on her days off, and Howard, who worked days, did the other half. He kept her lamp lit. He kept her accounts, her bandages and her pistol, and in the war years, when the city filled with soldiers and every ward was full, he sat up in the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a railway timetable and followed, on the map on the wall, the things that she had told him to follow. The railway kept him exempt from the draft, and he regarded it with some embarrassment. His sister Lorraine, who was in the work, said that it was a matter of arithmetic, and that a clerk who could trace a missing car was worth three men in a trench. He was never a hunter, and he said so, and he did something that the Delacroix valued more than a pistol, which was that he kept a list. It was a private list, in a school exercise book that he carried in his jacket, and it recorded, in his square, even hand, the freight cars of the city that had come in from the north and had not been collected, the odd consignments of fresh earth to a warehouse on the levee, the crates marked as medical supplies that went nowhere near a hospital and the late-night special that left the Poydras yard on the first of every month. He gave it to Vera on Sundays. For thirty years the list was the best intelligence that the Red Ledger had on the railway, and it was entered in the family papers, with a certain pride, under the plain heading of Clerk's Notes. His mother Alice died in 1945, at fifty-three, in the last month of the war, and Howard, who had never seen his father cry, saw it then. Baptiste lived on for twenty-one years, a thin, silent old man in a rocking chair, and died in 1966, in the autumn after the great storm. Hurricane Betsy, which had come up from the Gulf in September of 1965 and drowned the Lower Ninth Ward and half of Gentilly, had found Howard and Vera at their post. They had worked for three nights ferrying neighbours out of the flooded streets in a borrowed boat, and Vera, who was a nurse before she was anything else, had set up a ward in a school gymnasium. He lost his bicycle, his hat and a good many exercise books, and said that it was a small price. His father, in the same week, had been carried out of the house on Burgundy Street in a rowboat, in his armchair, with the newspaper in his lap. He retired from the railway in 1974, at fifty-seven, after thirty-nine years, with a clock and a medal for long service, and he was killed the following year, on a wet night in October, in a car accident on the Airline Highway, when a truck coming the other way lost its load on a bend. He was fifty-eight. Vera, who was driving the car, was thrown clear and was not badly hurt, and it was she who sat by him on the road until the ambulance came, and who has been described, in the family's one account of that night, as saying nothing. She lived on until 1980. She is said to have kept the exercise books. Howard Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the clerk who sat up and waited, the man who kept the lamp lit and the freight list for a wife and a sister who went out into the dark. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ones who waited up, the Delacroix kin who did not take the field and whose patient, accurate habit of noticing was, quite often, the first and best weapon of the Red Ledger.