Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner was born in 1934 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-six years as a hospital cook, a woman of the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger who sat up with the dead of her family and fed the living ones. She was the elder daughter of the druggist and slayer Xavier Delacroix, The Wary Seal, and of the laundress and slayer Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, The Hard Scythe, and the sister of Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1937, who was not called either. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, though her father, her mother and her husband all were, and she raised two daughters who followed them. In 1959 she married the high school coach and slayer Charles Trahan, and they had two children, Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, born in 1960 and living, and Lorraine Faulkner Trahan, born in 1964 and dead in 2014, both of whom became slayers in their turn. She died in 1990 of heart failure, aged fifty-six, four years before her father. The Faulkners remember her as the one who answered the door, and who made sure that every one of the family's dead, and every one of its living, had a plate.
She was born in her grandparents' narrow house on Burgundy Street, in the spring of 1934, in a bed that her mother had been born in, a few months after the family had buried her father's mother, the milliner Clemence Delacroix, in the January of that year. Her parents lived in Algiers, over the druggist's counter, and it was thought wiser that a first child should come into the world on the right side of the water, where her grandmother Alice could attend, and a midwife could be fetched from the next street. Her father, who was twenty-three and had been a pharmacist for two years, came over on the ferry with a bottle of tonic and a bunch of violets and found that he had been put in the kitchen. The child was named for her mother, as a Faulkner daughter often was, and it was a name that she was to see a great many times. When she was in her fifties she said that she had spent her life answering to it in three generations.
She grew up behind the drugstore, in the shop, in the rooms above it and in the yard, among the bottles. She knew from the age of four the smell of camphor and the sound of the pestle and the look of a man who has come to the back door at midnight for a bandage. Her mother took in washing in the back house, and she and her younger sister Josephine were put to fold. Neither of them was told. The Faulkners of the Red Ledger had a rule that a child was not to be told until she asked, and Lorraine, who was slow and careful and a good deal more observant than she looked, asked at twelve, at the kitchen table, with her hands in a basin of flour. Her mother wiped her own hands on her apron, and said that she would tell her the whole of it when she was fifteen. She said it kindly. She did not live to do so.
In the autumn of 1949 her mother went out with Xavier and two cousins to a barn past the lake, where a thing had been seen going in at dusk, and was killed under it when the roof came down. Lorraine was fifteen. She was told the truth that week, by her father, in the back of the shop, and it is the only conversation of her life that she was ever known to describe as complete. She did not cry. She went home, put on her mother's apron and made the supper, and she made it every night after that for her father and her sister, in the room behind the counter, without being asked. It was, she said, simply the next thing. Her aunt Vera Butler, her uncle Howard's wife, who was a nurse, came on Sundays and taught her to keep a dressing station. Her grandfather Baptiste, who was a railway clerk, taught her to keep a timetable. Xavier did not marry again, and she was, from fifteen, the woman of the house.
She went to the hospital kitchen at nineteen, in 1953, at the end of the Korean War, and found that she had a gift for it. She had cooked for three for four years and found that cooking for six hundred was, in all essentials, the same, with more pots. She worked her way up through the vegetable room and the diet kitchen to the head of the night shift, and she was a hospital cook, in one place or another, for thirty-seven years. She made the soft diets and the salt-free diets, the bread puddings, the gumbo on Fridays and the milk toast for the old women who could eat nothing else. The doctors, who liked her, called her the best cook south of Charity. The nurses, who loved her, left her notes on the board about the cousins who had come in with something on a sleeve. She said nothing. She sent a tray.
She met Charles Trahan across a counter. He was a tall, loose-limbed young coach of twenty, a plasterer's son from the Treme who coached track at a high school in Gentilly, and who ate his dinner on Wednesdays at the hospital cafeteria because a friend of his was a night orderly. He was a hunter, called at nineteen in the autumn of 1956, in a way that the Ledger records without a house, and he had a grave sort of courtesy, with a great deal of fun beneath it. He asked her once what was in the soup. She said that it was a secret of the House of Faulkner. He said that he would marry the House of Faulkner for the soup, and she said that the House of Faulkner was not in the habit of being proposed to by a man who had never asked for a second helping. They were married in 1959, in the church in the Faubourg, with her father, who had given up the hunt, in the front pew in a dark suit, and her sister Josephine to stand up with her.
She had her hands full. The daughters came within four years, and she named them both for her mother, so that the house on Algiers Point held three Lorraines and, by the cousins' reckoning, a fourth in the ground. The family dealt with it as the Faulkners deal with everything, by a system. The elder daughter, Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, born in 1960, was called Rainey. The younger, Lorraine Faulkner Trahan, born in 1964, was called Lolly. Their mother was Lorraine, and her own mother was the Scythe, and in the family book they are kept straight by the order of the surnames, which is why a stranger who reads it thinks that someone has made a mistake. In September of 1965, when Hurricane Betsy came up the river, she had a baby of ten months and a child of five, a husband on the levee with his pistol and a pot of gumbo for a hundred and sixty. She fed the whole of a flooded school in Algiers for four days, with the stove in the basement and the baby in a drawer.
She sat the wakes. This was her office, and she did not choose it. In the Delacroix and Faulkner families, as among the old people of the city, the dead are not left alone on the night before the funeral, and in a house of hunters it matters a great deal more that nobody who has been laid out shall be left to walk. Somebody, therefore, sits up. It is traditionally a person who is not a hunter, with a candle, a rosary and a pot of coffee, and who knows the rules, and for thirty years the person was Lorraine. She sat for her mother's cousin in 1962, for an uncle, for two Delacroix boys who went to the Vietnam war and came home in boxes, for the Ledger's unknown dead, with a Bible and a flask of coffee, and she sat the whole night each time, in the parlour, in a straight chair, looking at the door. She said that it was the most useful thing she had ever done, and that she had never once been frightened.
Charles died of pneumonia in 1979, at forty-two. She sat his wake herself, which was against every custom, in the parlour of the house at Algiers Point, from dusk to dawn, with his pistol on the table. Her daughters, who were nineteen and fifteen, sat on either side. In 1981 the elder, Rainey, married Felix Delacroix, the son of the laundry supervisor Simone Delacroix, at a Mass in Algiers, and her mother, who had never in her life been so well turned out, wore her own mother's brooch. Felix died in 1991. Lolly lived until 2014. Lorraine, who had a weak heart and a very large appetite for work, was already gone.
She died in the spring of 1990, of heart failure, at fifty-six, at the end of a night shift, in the diet kitchen, standing at the stove, with the soup on. She had told the girl at the next counter that she was tired. Her father, who was seventy-nine, outlived her by four years. Her daughters buried her from the church in the Faubourg, and a cousin, a retired nurse, sat the wake, and said afterwards that it was the quietest she had ever kept.
Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the cook of the night shift and the sitter of the wakes, the one who stayed on the safe side of the door and kept it. In the Slayerverse she stands for the ones in the hunting families who were never called, who stood watch in the parlour and the kitchen, and who made sure that the dead stayed down and the living were fed.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
