John Trahan

Spouse of Sarah Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

John Trahan was born in 1866 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and lived fifty-five years as a bookkeeper, most of them in the wharf offices of the French Quarter of New Orleans. He came of an Acadian family of the Vermilion country and of no hunting house, and he was not a vampire slayer. In 1889 he married the typist and slayer Sarah Faulkner, of the Red Ledger, and they raised two children, Ida Trahan Faulkner and Augustus Trahan Faulkner, of whom the son became a slayer. He died in 1921 of pneumonia, aged fifty-five. He never carried a pistol, a craft or an alias, and he was the first to say so. But for thirty-two years he kept the household running while his wife was out at night, and kept the books of a ship chandler's where the Ledger's hunters bought what they needed without being noticed, and the family remembers him as the quiet Acadian who did the sums so that Sarah could do the rest. He was born in the small, flat, cane-and-cattle town of Lafayette, which his grandfather still called Vermilionville, on the prairie between the Vermilion River and the swamps of the Atchafalaya. It was an Acadian place. French was the language of the market and of the church, the men wore straw hats and kept pirogues, and the year that he was born, the first after the war, was a hungry one, with the cattle thinned out by two armies and the sugar mills standing idle. His father was a small farmer and a part-time cooper, who had come back from the Confederate army with a bad foot and a good opinion of schooling, and his mother, a Broussard by birth, kept the house, the garden and the parish priest in order. John was the fourth of seven. He was a thin, freckled, serious boy who liked to stay in, and who was found at ten, to the general astonishment, working out the interest on a neighbour's mortgage with a stick in the dust. He went to the parish school, and then, by the kindness of the priest, to a commercial class at the Jesuit college in New Orleans, where for two years he learned double entry, French and English business letters, and the art of writing a clear hand. He lived in a room on Burgundy Street and ate in the Market. At eighteen he took a place as junior clerk in the office of a ship chandler on Decatur Street, a long, dim, tarry shop hard by the levee that supplied the river boats and ocean steamers with rope, lamp oil, tar, blocks, biscuit and canvas. The firm's owner, a stout Breton named Le Goff, who was short of eyesight, gave him a stool and a pile of old day books, and told him to find out where the money went. He found out. It went, he discovered in a fortnight, in a dozen places, most of them honest. He reconciled the day books, caught a dockside pilferer, corrected a dreadful error in the firm's account with a coffee importer, and was kept on. At twenty-one he was head bookkeeper. He was a fair, patient, exact young man of few words, and he was known along the wharves as a person to whom it was safe to say nothing. The chandler's shop became his world, and within a few years it was the best-run office on Decatur Street. His wife came into it in the spring of 1888 with a typewriter. Sarah Faulkner, who was twenty-five, a long, dark, thoughtful young woman with a quiet voice and a pair of very direct eyes, had been hired by Le Goff for the season to copy out the firm's shipping lists, and she was given a desk by the window across from John's stool. She had been born in a rented room on Dumaine Street in 1863, in the middle of the war, the eldest child of the river pilot Augustus Faulkner and of the herbalist Sarah Foster, and she was, although he did not yet know it, a slayer of the Red Ledger. She typed fast and never made a mistake. He had never heard anyone move so quietly. It was perhaps three weeks before he noticed that she came to work, on certain mornings, with a thorn scratch on her wrist and mud on her hem, and another week before he noticed that on those mornings the night watchman's report was missing a page. She told him in the autumn. It was a practical arrangement. The chandler's shop, she explained over a plate of red beans at a stall in the French Market, sold the things that a hunter needs and could sell them by the quantity, and a new head bookkeeper who could be trusted would make a great difference to a good many people. He listened to the whole of it without a word. Then he said that in Lafayette there was an old woman on the Bayou Vermilion who had sworn all her life that the night that her brother went to the swamp he had seen something stand up in the water, and that nobody had believed her, and that he, John, had always thought that she was right. Sarah put down her fork. She asked him where he had got the word of the old woman. He said from his grandmother, who had been her cousin. It was, she said later, the first time that she had been sure that the family had found a husband. They were married in the spring of 1889, in the church of the Treme, a fortnight after her father's death, with her brother Hippolyte Foster Faulkner as groomsman and her sister Clara holding the lamp. It was a small wedding and it was a sad one, but it was a decision that the old pilot had made himself, and he had given them his blessing in his last week, in the front room on Dumaine Street, with the river at the window. They took two rooms above the chandler's shop, and then a narrow house on Bayou Road. Ida Trahan Faulkner was born in 1890 and Augustus Trahan Faulkner in 1891. The children took their mother's surname, which was the usual arrangement in a house that kept the Ledger, and kept his as a middle name, which, he said, was the only part of him that would ever be written in full on a stone. He did the house. It is a sentence that the family has turned over many times, because it is both the simplest and the truest thing that can be said of him. Sarah hunted at night, and what a woman leaves behind when she goes out to hunt is a kitchen, a lamp, two small children and a long wait, and John, who had never wanted to be anywhere else, was the man who stood in it. He put the children to bed. He warmed the soup. He sat up in a chair by the front window with a ledger on his knee, doing the accounts of the chandler's shop, and when she came in at three in the morning with her boots in her hand he looked up, looked at her, and asked whether she would like the stove lit. It was not an enormous thing. It was said afterward, at the Ledger's Louisiana table, that in thirty years not one of Sarah's kills had been harder than her going-home. The boy was called in his turn. Augustus Trahan Faulkner, a long, dark, watchful child like his mother, carried his mother's lantern from seventeen, and his father, who had been dreading it for years, gave him a packet of sandwiches and a pocket watch. Ida, the elder, was not called. She took to the chandler's shop and learned her father's books, and he taught her, on the long evenings after the Storyville district opened behind Basin Street in 1897 and the neighbourhood was full of noise, to keep an account so clearly that a stranger could follow it. He did not insist on anything. He said that a good book was a form of manners. The Great War came in 1917. The chandler's shop was kept busy supplying the army transports, and John, who was fifty-one, did the work of three men and was so careful of his figures that the quartermaster's inspectors, who were suspicious of everyone, went away without a question. The Storyville district was closed by order of the navy in the autumn of that year, and his wife and son, who had been following a matter in that part of the town for a decade, found their work both easier and harder. The influenza of 1918 came in October and filled the Quarter with crape. He caught a bad cold that month and did not shake it. It came back with the winters, and in January of 1921 it turned to pneumonia. He died in his own bed, at fifty-five, on a Sunday, with Sarah holding the lamp and his daughter reading him the week's figures, which he asked to hear. John Trahan is remembered in the Faulkner family as the bookkeeper of Decatur Street, the Acadian who stayed at the kitchen table and kept the lamp lit. In the Slayerverse he stands for the husbands and wives of hunters, the ones who did the sums and the soup, and who proved that the hardest work in the Red Ledger was done by the person who waited up.