Ida Trahan Faulkner

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

Ida Trahan Faulkner taught arithmetic to the children of the Algiers and Marigny parishes for forty-four years, and it was commonly said that she had never been seen to raise her voice, only her eyebrows. She was born in 1890 in New Orleans, in the Algiers quarter, Louisiana, and she died in 1970 of cancer, aged eighty, a retired schoolteacher with a house full of former pupils' Christmas cards. She was the elder child of the bookkeeper John Trahan and of the typist and vampire slayer Sarah Faulkner, The True Mantle, and the sister of the slayer Augustus Trahan Faulkner. She never married and had no children. She was not herself a hunter, and that was her own choice, made quietly at the age of nineteen and never regretted. She belonged to the House of Faulkner and to the Red Ledger by her mother's name, a line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and what she gave the Ledger was a school: for four decades she taught the cousins' children their letters and their sums, kept their records in a small clean hand and gave the hunters of the Louisiana chapter a set of eyes that could be trusted with a column of figures. She was born in Algiers because her mother was in no condition to be anywhere else. Sarah Faulkner, who was twenty-seven, had gone across the river on the ferry in the first week of March 1890 to visit the shipyard Aldens, her father's cousins, and was overtaken at their kitchen table, at tea, by a sudden and decisive labour. The child arrived in the back bedroom overlooking the drydocks, just before the six o'clock whistle. Her father, who was fetched from the chandler's shop on Decatur Street by a boy in a skiff, reached the house in a state of great agitation and was handed a ledger by an Alden aunt, who told him to sit down and count something. He counted the tiles on the hearth. It was said in the family that Ida had arrived in time to be entered in the books, and that her father had checked the entry twice. She grew up in a house of two silences. Her mother was out at dusk and often late, in a good plain coat, and came in smelling of river water and coal smoke with a notebook in her bag, and her father sat up with a lamp and a day book on his knee and kept the kitchen in order. Ida, who was a quiet, grave, brown-haired child with her father's freckles and her mother's long, pale, straight look, had them both. She did not need to be told what the household was. By six she had noticed that her mother's coat had a pocket in it that never held a handkerchief. By nine she had noticed that on the nights her mother went out her father wound the clock twice. She asked neither of them a single question. Her father said, a good many years later, that of the family's secrets she had been the only one that was kept by being understood. She was taught her sums at his elbow. John Trahan, who held that a good account was a form of manners, put her on a stool in the back office of the chandler's shop on Saturdays and let her check his additions, and by eleven she had found three errors in his books, which he declined to mention to his employer. She learned French from her grandmother in Lafayette, English from the nuns and a quiet, careful method of explaining a thing from the one person, her father, who never explained anything twice. It was the method that made her a teacher. Her own mother, who was an excellent shot and a hopeless pedagogue, once tried to show her how a pistol cocked and found that she was better at teaching the child to follow a line of print. She said that she had never in her life met anyone so adept at making a difficult thing sound plain. She was called, in the sense of the family, to nothing. The Ledger put it to her at nineteen, with great delicacy, over a supper at which three cousins ate more than they said, and she gave the answer that she was to give all her life. She said that she would like to be of use, and that she did not think she could do it with a stake. Her mother, who had looked for an inclination for a decade and found none, put down her fork and said that in that case there was a good deal else to be done. There was. The chapter's children needed teaching. A hunter's child who is taught at an ordinary school will, sooner or later, be asked what its father does at night, and the Ledger, which wanted its young to be able to say that he worked on the river, had never had a teacher of its own. She trained at the normal school on Esplanade Avenue and in 1910 took a post at a parish school in Algiers, a long, low, whitewashed building two streets from the ferry, with a bell and a stove and fifty children in four grades. It was a rough place. The pupils were the sons and daughters of shipwrights, dockers, ferrymen and the people who did the laundry for the yards, and many of them could not speak English and some could not speak at all, being possessed of a strong belief that a silent child is a safe one. She taught them anyway. She read to them in the afternoons, stories out of the French readers and the Bible, and a long, slow version of Robinson Crusoe that she took thirty-one weeks to finish. By the end of her first year she had the school in the palm of her hand. Her pupils included, over the years, some who were later hunters of the Ledger and a larger number who were its quiet friends, and she told the secrets of none of them. She taught, in the corner of the schoolroom, with the door a little open, the plain facts that a child of the Ledger needed to know and that the ordinary books did not contain. She taught the safe houses of the city by their street numbers, in a rhyme. She taught the names of the herbs that a hunter's family kept in the kitchen. She taught the children, in a spelling lesson that her mother had devised, to recognise a lantern signal from across a street, and on the day that the inspector of the parish visited the school she taught, with a perfectly straight face, the multiplication table. The Storyville years went on around her. Storyville was closed in 1917 and the music that had been confined to a few streets of the district spread across the whole city, so that on warm evenings in the Algiers schoolyard she heard a cornet from across the river and a clarinet from the next block. She said that the new music was a very good argument against sorting children by rank. In the autumn of 1918, when the influenza closed every school in the city, she did not close hers. She moved it into the open air, in the yard, in November, in coats and shawls, and taught the children in rows with a space between each, and they were, to a child, spared. The board of the parish, who wanted to be cross, gave her a medal. Her mother died in 1927 on the stair of the Algiers ferry landing, at dusk, in a fall that the family has never fully explained, and Ida, who was thirty-seven, took over the notebook in her bag and read it in a night. It was the most conscientious account of a city's evenings that she had ever seen. That spring the Mississippi rose and the whole low country waited for the levees, and she took in eleven children from a flooded settlement on the west bank and taught them in her kitchen for a fortnight. Her brother Augustus, who was a cotton factor on Carondelet Street and had carried his mother's beat since 1923, came over by skiff with a barrel of flour and a pair of oars, and stayed to help her teach the sums. Her brother's calling in 1923, and his death in 1933, were the two great sorrows of her life, and she bore them in the manner that she bore everything, by going to school the next morning. The Depression years were hard for her pupils. She fed the hungry out of her own pocket, begged shoes from a shop on Canal Street and kept a box of chalk and a box of apples in the same drawer. She stayed on to teach the sons and daughters of the soldiers, shipbuilders and sailors who filled the district in the war years, when the city was crowded with young men in uniform, and the Algiers school, which had had fifty pupils, had a hundred and ten. She retired in 1954, aged sixty-four, and a hall full of former pupils, most of them grandparents, came to say goodbye. The cancer was discovered in the autumn of 1969. She took it as she had taken the Mississippi, with an inventory. She wrote out a list of what remained to be done, in a clear hand, and did it. She sent the notebook that she had inherited from her mother to a cousin of the chapter, with her own entries added, and wrote to her pupils. She died in the spring of 1970, at eighty, in the house that her father had taken in the Marigny, with a window open to the river and a pile of exercise books on the table. They were marked, to the last, in red. Ida Trahan Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the schoolmistress of Algiers, the daughter who chose a piece of chalk where her mother had chosen a pistol. In the Slayerverse she stands for the teachers of the Red Ledger, the women and men who raised its children to be careful, kept their secrets by teaching them well and proved that a classroom can be the safest house on the river.