Josephine Delacroix Faulkner

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

Josephine Delacroix Faulkner was born in 1937 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-three years as a nurse who sewed up a good many hunters of the Red Ledger without once being asked a question about how they came by the wound. She was the younger daughter of the druggist and slayer Xavier Delacroix, The Wary Seal, and the laundress and slayer Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, The Hard Scythe, and the sister of Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1934. She descended through her mother from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, and she belonged to the House of Faulkner, and she was not called. In 1961 she married the machinist Wallace Butler, and they had one son, the slayer Neil Butler Faulkner, born in 1963. She died in 2010 of old age, aged seventy-three, two years before her husband. She was not a hunter and made no claim to be one, and in the Ledger's terms she was the other thing that every hunting family needs and seldom admits that it needs, the one who is waiting at the end of the night with a basin, a needle and a clean sheet. Her first memory was of a ceiling. It was the plaster ceiling of the room above the drugstore in Algiers, where her father's counter and her mother's wash-tubs kept the household going and her sister Lorraine slept in the other bed, and she lay and looked at it during the long evenings when the grown people were out. The neighbours of that street, who were railroad men and dockers, said that the Delacroix girls were brought up by the clock. They were brought up by the lamp. Her father came home at dawn with his sleeves rolled down, her mother put a coat to soak in a tub on the back step, and the two girls were taught from the age of four that a coat left on a chair in the morning was nobody's business but its owner's. They learned to say that their parents were out visiting. Josephine, who was a fair, round, grave child with a great deal of her mother's colour, said it better than her sister, with a straight face, and the cousins who came to the door agreed that she would be useful. The great event of her childhood was the night in the autumn of 1949 when her mother did not come home. She was twelve, and she knew by the way that her father put on his hat. A cousin took the girls in to the house of their uncle Howard Faulkner Delacroix and their aunt Vera, and Josephine, who had been put to bed in a spare room, lay awake until dawn and then went downstairs and found her aunt coming in at the back door in a nurse's uniform, grey to the elbows, with her sleeves still wet. Vera Butler was a district nurse, and a hunter of the Red Ledger, and she had been at the fallen barn for two days. She sat down in the kitchen, took off her cap and said, simply, to the child, that her mother had been brave and had died quickly, and that she had had the best nurse in the parish with her. It was untrue in every part, but it was kind. Josephine, who was twelve, made a decision on the spot, and kept it. She asked whether a person could learn to do what her aunt did. She learned. She went into the nursing school at Charity Hospital in 1955, at eighteen, with a letter from her aunt, and she trained for three years on the great open wards of the old building on Tulane Avenue, in a starched cap, a blue pinafore and shoes that her aunt had made her buy a size too big. She learned bed baths, tray carts, injections, the smell of a ward at night, the names of the bones, and the Charity way of keeping a head clear in a corridor in which every bed was taken. She learned that a nurse who is alert has the best seat in the house. By 1958 she was a graduate nurse, on a men's surgical ward, and a very good one. She was calm, quick and exact. The old surgeons said that her stitches were a shade neater than their own, and they said it when she was not in the room. Her sister Lorraine, who in the same years was working at a hospital kitchen and meeting a young high school coach called Charles Trahan, said that Josephine was now the one who knew what to do when a thing went wrong, and that it was a poor reward. She did not hunt, and the Ledger gave her a different place. Hunters need a doctor who does not ask. A cousin would arrive at the door of the ward at three in the morning with a torn arm, a sprung shoulder or a bite that was not a dog's, and she would take him into the linen room, behind a blanket, and clean and close it with the hospital's own catgut, and enter it nowhere. She kept a small shelf of dressings and iodine and tetanus in a locker with her own padlock, and nobody knew its contents but the Ledger and herself. She dressed the wound of the lineman Roy Robichaux, a friend of the Faulkner cousins, more than once, in the years when his side would not close. She sat up with the first case of pneumonia in the family, and with the second. She said that she had never been afraid of the thing that did the damage, only of the damage. Wallace Butler was a nephew of her aunt Vera. He was the son of Vera's younger brother, a tall, shy, long-boned young machinist of nineteen with oil under his nails, who worked at the Michoud assembly plant, in the east of the city, where the great rocket stages for the space programme were being built. He turned up at Howard and Vera's table in the spring of 1961 and asked a great many questions about the human heart, because he had been told that she was a nurse and wished to be agreeable. She told him, for forty minutes, in detail. He was so awed that he proposed that autumn. She was twenty-four. They were married in 1961, in the church in the Faubourg, with her father, who had given her away, weeping into his stiff collar, and with her aunt Vera, who had arranged it all, standing at the back with a straight face and a pistol in her handbag, in case. They took a small house in Gentilly, near the lakefront, and lived there for forty years. Neil was born in 1963, and in September 1965, when Hurricane Betsy drowned the Lower Ninth Ward and half the neighbourhood, she was on a ward at Charity when the lights went out, with a two-year-old at home. Wallace swam the child out of the house on a door. The next morning she walked to the hospital through water to her waist, in her uniform, with a bag on her head, and worked thirty-six hours. She never mentioned it. In the years of the Vietnam war the ward was full of young men from the Gulf Coast who had been flown home to Charity in the hold of a plane, and she cared for them with the same grave steadiness, and wrote letters for the ones who could not. The Ledger's trouble came in the next generation. Neil was called, as a young man, and she took it with an expression that her sister called the weather forecast. She said nothing at all, and that night she cleaned and oiled his pistol. In 1984 he married Rosalie Delacroix, the daughter of the diner waitress and slayer Marguerite Delacroix of the other branch of the House, and Josephine, who was forty-seven, took up what she took to be her duty, and sat with the young couple through the first of their winters, with a kettle and a first-aid kit. In 1990 her sister Lorraine died, and Josephine, who had nursed her brother-in-law Charles through the pneumonia that killed him in 1979, nursed the sister too, and said afterwards that she had now sat at the bedsides of everyone she had ever loved, and that she did not recommend it as a career. She retired from Charity in 1995, after forty years on its wards, and she kept her locker key. She died in the spring of 2010, at seventy-three, in her own bed, of the general failure that the doctors call old age. Wallace, who had been told it was coming, sat with her for the last of it and held the basin, which he had never done in forty-nine years of marriage, and which she directed him to hold properly. He lived another two years. When he was cleaning out her side of the wardrobe, he found a small tin box with a padlock, which had held her dressings, and which now held, in neat rows, forty-one little cards in her handwriting. Each had a date, a name and a number of stitches. There was no word of what had caused any of them. Josephine Delacroix Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the nurse of the Red Ledger, the one who closed the wounds and kept the count and never asked how. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the old bloodlines who were never called and who did, in the linen room and the kitchen, the work that brought the hunters back to be hunters again.