Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix was born in 1915 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived thirty-four years as a laundress and, from 1946, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. She was the elder daughter of the railway clerk Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix and the seamstress Alice Goodwin, and the sister of Howard Faulkner Delacroix, and she descended, through the Faulkner side of her father's family, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. In 1932 she married the druggist and slayer Xavier Delacroix, and they raised two daughters, Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1934, and Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1937, neither of whom was called. The family book knows her as The Hard Scythe. It classes her as a Hunter, the plainest of the hunting styles, a person who finds a thing and cuts it down without disguise, and her craft was Falcon's Eye, the trained long sight that picks out a moving shape at distance in poor light and holds it. Her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She died in 1949 beneath a collapsed barn during a night hunt, aged thirty-four, and she had been a hunter for only three years.
The laundry was the family's real business, and the family's cover. Lorraine took it up at fifteen, in 1930, in a back house on Burgundy Street, where her grandmother Nettie's old typewriter still stood on the shelf as an ornament, and she was a better washerwoman than anyone had a right to expect. She had big, quick, capable hands, a high colour and a laugh that could be heard across a yard, and she understood from the beginning that linen tells the truth. A laundress sees what a house has done in a week. She knows who has been ill, who has been bleeding, who has not slept and who has stopped eating, and a good one keeps a ledger of it in her head. By eighteen she had the custom of a dozen boarding houses, two small hotels and a private hospital on St Charles, and she carried, in her round, cheerful way, a map of a quarter of the city in her memory, none of which she had ever been asked to draw.
She was born on a hot June night in her grandparents' narrow house on Burgundy Street, not far from the old Delacroix courtyard. Her grandmother Nettie, who had typed the Ledger's correspondence for forty years, had died ten years before, and her grandfather Sylvain, a retired streetcar conductor of great mildness, was the person who taught her to ride the Canal Street cars for nothing. Her father, Baptiste, was a railway clerk of exactness and few words, and her mother Alice, who had come over from Algiers as a girl, was a seamstress of the plain, hard-working kind, who could cut a dress from a newspaper pattern. The household was quiet. Her brother Howard, two years her junior, was the gentle one, and Lorraine, who took after no one in particular, was the one who climbed the fig tree and came down with the fruit and the scratches. The Faulkner side of the family, Red Ledger people since the days of the Treme, did not discuss the matter at table, and she learned what the matter was, like many such children, by a long and indirect process of noticing what was never said.
She married at seventeen. Xavier Delacroix was twenty-one, a tall, grave young druggist's assistant from Algiers, the son of a milliner who had a name in the family for arranging matches, and Alice, who had grown up across the river and who knew the milliner, brought the two of them together in a kitchen one Sunday in the autumn of 1931. Lorraine, who had been told to be quiet, said that he looked like a man who had been left out in the rain, and he said that she looked like a woman who had never been, and Clemence, behind him, put a hand to her mouth. They were married in 1932, and his mother gave them the room behind her shop, and moved into a smaller one across the yard. Lorraine, who did not mean to sit idle, brought her wash-tubs with her and had them going by the Monday.
The children came quickly. Clemence died in January 1934, a few months before the first, and Lorraine, who had lived beside her for two years and seen her rise at night, to the sound of the ferry bell, to lay lamps on thresholds, understood by then what her husband and her mother-in-law did. She said nothing. She kept the house, made the tea, took in the washing and washed, with particular care, the coat that came home each morning with something on the cuff. Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner was born that year, and Josephine Delacroix Faulkner in 1937. The Depression years bore down on Algiers, and the laundry, which charged by the bundle, kept the family when the drugstore, which gave credit, could not. She was the family's second income, its first line of intelligence and the one who knew where the lint went.
Her mother died in 1945 of a long illness, in the back room of the house where Howard and his wife Vera Butler, a nurse, were living, and Lorraine sat with her through the last month. She came away from the funeral changed, quieter, with a hardness at the corner of the mouth that her husband remembered. In the spring of 1946 she was walking home late, on an errand for a boarding house, by the old churchyard in the Faubourg Marigny, when the bell in the church tower rang once, and then, in the empty dark, something in the churchyard rang back. She never described the sound. She said that it was an answer, that it was in the shape of a question and that it was the voice of nothing that had ever been alive. She stood in the lane for a long minute, quite still, with her bundle on her hip. Then she walked home, put the bundle down, and sat on the edge of the bed and told Xavier. He said that he had been waiting for her to say it.
She went next, at dawn, to her sister-in-law, who was the one person in the family who would not ask her to be careful. Vera heard her out at dawn, with the kettle on, and said that she should learn from her husband and from the cousins. Xavier taught her the rules. But what she took from the teaching was her own, a way of seeing. She had spent her life looking at linen in a bad light, and she turned out to have the eye of a falcon, a sight that could pick out a bundle on a dark road a hundred yards off and tell, from the way it moved, whether it was breathing. She could hold a shape in the gloom at the end of a street for a whole minute without blinking. The cousins called her The Hard Scythe, for the way she would cut the grass in her path, and her laundress's forearms and her plain, unhurried method of going straight at the thing that was in front of her. She was never one for subtlety. She said that a thing was either there or not.
She hunted for three years, mostly in the parishes around the city, with her husband beside her. When the war years ended the soldiers went home and left the camps empty, and the creatures that had followed them stayed behind, and the work was to clear what remained. She learned fast. By the end of 1948 she was one of the three best shots in the House, and she had a record of nineteen clean kills to her credit. In the autumn of 1949 she and Xavier and two cousins went out to a parish farm past the lake, where a thing had been seen going into an old barn at dusk. She went in first, as she always did. The barn was a ruin, its roof held up by a single beam, and the creature, which was cunning, went for the beam. She had time to push the nearest cousin out of the door.
They dug for two days, Xavier and the cousins and a man from the farm, and Vera, who came in her uniform at dawn and stayed. She was found on the second afternoon. She was thirty-four. She was buried in the Faulkner plot, with a plain stone, and her daughters, who were fifteen and twelve, were told that their mother had been brave, which was true, and that she had been very good with a bundle, which was truer. Her husband never married again. He kept the coat that she had last washed, on a hook behind the drugstore door.
Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Hard Scythe, the laundress who answered a churchyard bell and who cut down nineteen of the dead in three years with a pistol and a steady eye. In the Slayerverse she stands for the late-called hunters, the women and men who came to the work in the middle of a plain life and gave it everything they had left.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
