Linda Faulkner

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

Linda Faulkner was born in 1982 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in that city, where she works as a paramedic on the night rotation of an ambulance service and has done so, with one interval, since her early twenties. She belongs to the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but she is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype, craft or gear beyond a stretcher, a jump bag and a very steady pair of hands. She is the elder daughter of the insurance adjuster and slayer Felix Delacroix, The Red Bridle, who died in 1991, and of the diner waitress and slayer Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, The Sable Reeve, who is living, and the sister of Crystal Faulkner Delacroix, born in 1984. In 2000 she married the nurse Gaspard Delacroix, and in 2002 they had one son, Gaspard Faulkner, who has not been called. The family remembers her as the one who gets there first: the member of the Ledger whom the dead, the hurt and the frightened of the city meet before they meet anyone else. She was born in the spring of 1982 in the narrow house on Algiers Point, in the same room and the same bed as her sister two years later, with the Delacroix midwife in attendance, a stout aunt who said that the child had come into the world looking as though she wished to speak to the management. It was a house of two timetables. Her father Felix, who was twenty-four, talked his way round insurance claims by day and, by night, round things that were not on the claim form at all. Her mother Lorraine, who was twenty-two, carried plates at a diner on Magazine Street and had not yet been called. Linda was a solid, grave, dark-eyed baby who did not cry much and who, by the time she could stand, had a habit of going to whoever else was crying and standing next to them. The aunts remarked on it. Her grandmother Simone, who ran a laundry floor and had firm views on temperament, said that it was a gift for turning up and that it was worth more than most. Her father died in the autumn of 1991 on the Westbank Expressway, in the rain, when she was nine, and the memory she kept of him was less a face than a voice, which was warm, a little too fast and always in the next room. She remembered the red scarf that went into the coffin and the stone that her grandmother washed. She remembered, too, that the house was full for a month, and that a number of cousins she had never met took it in turns to sit in the kitchen, as the Ledger does, until the widow told them to go home. Her mother went back to the dinner shift on the Monday. Linda, who was nine and could count, noticed that the grown people were all talking to her mother and that nobody was looking after the person who looked after her sister, and so she took up that post herself, and kept it for some years. She learned to make coffee, to find a missing school shoe in the dark and to tell, from the sound of a latchkey, what sort of night her mother had had. At fifteen she was sat down at the kitchen table by Lorraine and told the truth in a flat and careful voice: that the family had a business, that it concerned the dead who would not lie down, that her father had been good at it and that she was free to take it up or leave it alone. The family, her mother said, would think no less of her either way. Linda asked what a person did who was no good at hunting and wished to be useful. Her mother said that there was a great deal of that. She did not feel a calling and did not pretend to one, and she remembers, with some pride, that nobody was disappointed. In the spring of the following year she met, on the steps of a church hall in Treme, a bookish, funny, long-boned boy called Gaspard Delacroix, the son of the librarian Francoise Delacroix, who had been given the same speech by his own mother and had answered it with a request for the date of the next family dinner. They were married in 2000, at eighteen, in the old Delacroix manner, which is a good deal too young, and the match was a good one. Francoise, who had known the girl since she was in a pram, said that she had been waiting to get her into the family. They took two rooms in Treme and then a double cottage on the same street, and Linda, who had taken a year's work at a dental surgery in Gretna to pay the rent, found that she disliked it intensely. A dentist's chair is a place where people lie back and endure. She wanted a place where they sat up and were helped. She took the emergency medical technician course in the evenings, and was on an ambulance by the autumn of 2001, a nineteen-year-old with a thermos, a new wedding ring and an unmentionable condition, which was that she was expecting a child. She was ordered off the road in the winter and taught the dispatch desk instead. Gaspard Faulkner was born in the spring of 2002, a long, silent, wide-eyed baby who, like his mother, was found to be calmest when somebody else was in distress. The attacks of September 2001 reached New Orleans as a silence. She was on the dispatch floor with a headset on, and the radios, for about twenty minutes, said nothing at all, and she has said that it was the only time in her working life when she wished that somebody would call with a chest pain. In Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, she and Gaspard left on the Saturday for Atlanta with his mother and their three-year-old son and a box of the Delacroix papers, and she lasted in Atlanta for four days. She had heard on a radio that the city's ambulances were being asked to send crews back, and she presented herself at a depot in the second week of September, in borrowed boots, and rode into the flooded streets with an Atlanta strike team. She worked the Gentilly roofs, the bridge, the convention centre and the long ugly weeks after. The flood, as every hunter in the Ledger found, had stirred up a great deal, and she did not ask what the call that she took in the Ninth Ward on a night in October had really been. She put a shaking man on a stretcher, and the man, who had been bitten, thanked her very politely and said that it was not so bad. She rang her mother, who rang a cousin, and the cousin was there within the hour with a stake and a bad temper. That is her whole relation to the work, and it is more than it sounds. A paramedic is a person who comes at the bad hour, goes into any house and is let in without a question, and she sees, by the nature of the trade, a great deal of what the night does to people. She has been the first on the scene of a house fire with something odd about it, a cellar with a locked door and a patient who would not allow the window to be opened. She does not investigate. She writes down what she saw in the language of the run sheet, and she tells her mother, or her mother-in-law, and on a good many nights in twenty years a hunter of the Red Ledger has arrived at a door a quarter of an hour after her ambulance. The Ledger's Louisiana chapter says that she has saved more lives that she did not know were in danger than any three hunters put together. She would say that she has driven a van and sat in the back with a stranger's hand in her own. In the pandemic years she worked every shift that she was offered, in a mask, a visor and a gown that she dried on a line in the yard, and she slept in the shed for six weeks in the spring of 2020 so as not to carry anything into the house. Gaspard, who is a nurse on a medical ward, did the same on the other side of the wall, and their son, then eighteen, left plates of food at the door. The two of them have been married for twenty-six years. They keep the cottage in Treme, a bicycle each and a long and shared habit of falling asleep at the table at three in the afternoon. Her mother Lorraine, who is living, still takes the dinner shift on Magazine Street and sends Linda a slice of pie in every week. Her sister Crystal is a court clerk, and the two of them, who were raised by the same exhausted and exacting woman, telephone each other every evening to say what they have eaten. Linda Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the paramedic of the Point and of Treme, the daughter of the Red Bridle who never took up the bridle and who was always the first to arrive. In the Slayerverse she stands for the first responders of the Red Ledger, the people who were never called to the hunt, who met the night's victims in the road with a blanket and a calm voice, and who proved that to be the first person who speaks to a frightened stranger is a form of courage that the hunters have always depended upon.