Lorraine Trahan Faulkner was born in 1960 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in that city, where she has waited tables in a Magazine Street diner for more than forty years and, since 1989, has been a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Sable Reeve, the black-coated steward who walks the boundary of a manor to see what has strayed across it, and classes her as a Hunter, the plainest of the hunting styles, a person who finds the thing and goes straight at it without disguise, cover story or crew. Her craft is Long-Watch Tracking, the patient art of sitting a night out in one place until a creature's habits give it away, and her gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She is the elder daughter of the high school coach and slayer Charles Trahan, The Bitter Furrow, and of the hospital cook Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, and the sister of Lorraine Faulkner Trahan, born in 1964 and dead in 2014, who was also a slayer. In 1981 she married the insurance adjuster and slayer Felix Delacroix, born in 1957 and dead in 1991, and they had two daughters, Linda Faulkner, born in 1982, and Crystal Faulkner Delacroix, born in 1984, neither of whom was called. She belongs to the House of Faulkner and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486.
She was called on a market day, and the family tells the story the way she tells it, which is without ornament. In the autumn of 1989, a Saturday, she was twenty-nine and went with a basket to the French Market to buy shrimp and okra, because the diner's order had come short. The market in those years was a long, loud, low arcade of stalls beside the river, with the smell of coffee, fish and wet cardboard, and a crowd on a Saturday morning that moved like a slow current. She was at a vegetable stall, counting change, when she looked up and saw, in the stream of people on the far side of the aisle, the face of Mrs Odette Gaudet, a seamstress of Algiers who had taught her to hem and who had been buried from the church at the Point in the spring. She had been at the funeral. She had carried a candle. Mrs Gaudet, in the same brown coat in which she had been laid out, with her hat pinned the way she always pinned it, was walking among the shoppers at an even pace, looking at nothing, and the shoppers parted for her without noticing that they had.
Lorraine did not cry out. She had been brought up by a man who read a track before he looked at a thing, and she did what he had taught her, which was to stand still and read the household. The coat was dry, though it had rained. The shoes were wrong. The crowd gave way a half-step before she touched it. She picked up her basket, paid for her okra and followed at the length of a block, for two hours, through the market, past the cathedral and along the levee, down the ferry ramp and across the river on the same boat, and in all that time the figure did not look round. At the Algiers landing it turned up Opelousas Street and went in at a gate. Lorraine sat on the kerb opposite until dusk with her basket on her knees. At nine, when it came out again, with a bundle, and went down the street, she walked home and told her husband. Felix, who had been a slayer since the age of sixteen, heard her to the end and said that he was a good deal more frightened for her than for himself. Then he took down a book and said that he would show her the rest.
The learning of it was slow, and Long-Watch Tracking was not her father's craft, though she had learned his habit of looking. Charles Trahan, The Bitter Furrow, had read quarry from the small marks that it left, but the long watch, the practice of sitting out a night in one place until a creature's routine betrays it, had been the art of Roy Robichaux, a lineman who had died in 1968, and it was Roy's widow, Marguerite Faulkner, the schoolteacher who hunted after class and who was her mother's cousin, who taught it to her. She did it in a series of Thursday evenings in the parlour of the house near the Industrial Canal, with a thermos, a chair and a clock, and a rule that Lorraine was to sit without moving, without speaking and without looking at the clock, for three hours, and tell her afterwards what had gone by the window. At the end of the first month she could name every car. At the end of the second she could name the drivers. Marguerite said that Roy would have thought her a promising pupil, and that the main thing was to want nothing. Mrs Gaudet was taken in the second week of November, by a bridge on the levee at three in the morning, with Felix on the ramp and Lorraine in the dark on the roof of a shed across the road, where she had sat for four nights with a flask and a pistol and waited for the creature to cross at its own hour. She fired once. She said afterwards that it had looked, at the last, a good deal less like a seamstress and a good deal more like a very tired woman.
She had been a waitress since 1978, which she regarded as the oldest long watch in the world. A waitress sits a shift in one room and sees who comes in, who sits with his back to the wall and who comes back every Thursday and does not eat, and she knows the hour of every regular to the minute. In the diner on Magazine Street, where she took the dinner shift in 1981 and has kept it ever since, the cook for the last thirty years was Leonard Washington, who fed her in the summer of 1995 on a night when she came in white to the lips, and who never asked what had happened. She worked the room as she worked the street, which is to say that she looked at every face. Every hunter of the Red Ledger in the city has at one time or another sat in her section. In thirty-five years she has taken, by the family's count, nineteen vampires, of whom she shot eight. The rest were found, and the finding, as her cousin Marguerite always said, was the work.
Her marriage to Felix Delacroix had begun in the spring of 1981 in the church at Algiers, at a Mass attended by two hundred cousins and his mother Simone, in a blue dress that she had made herself. Felix, who was twenty-three, was a quick, stubborn, dark-eyed man who adjusted insurance claims for a firm on Poydras Street and could tell from a burnt shed whether it had been a fire or a visitor. They bought a narrow house on Algiers Point and filled it with children and cousins. Linda was born in 1982 and Crystal in 1984, in the same room, in the same bed, with the same midwife, a Delacroix aunt who had delivered a number of the Ledger's babies and said that each had arrived with the same expression of mild reproach. Lorraine had not yet been called and Felix had, and the household had two timetables, the adjuster's and the hunter's, which met at breakfast. In 1991 Felix died, at thirty-four, and the family papers say no more, in the manner of the Delacroix when a matter is closed. His mother buried him in the tomb with a small stone. Lorraine was thirty-one, with two girls of nine and seven, a mother who had died the year before, a sister two streets away and a dinner shift that began at five. She went to work on the Monday.
The girls grew up in the long, noisy, mixed household of the Point, with their aunt Lolly, who was a slayer and who died in 2014, and with their grandmother's cousins on every Sunday, and they were not called. Linda became a paramedic and Crystal a court clerk, and each of them, at fifteen, was sat down at the table by her mother and told the truth, in the same words: that there was a family business, that she had a choice, and that no one would think less of her for it. They chose to keep the Ledger's Sunday dinners. Their mother has never regretted it. In the attacks of September 2001 she waited tables through the morning and watched the faces of a room that did not eat. In Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, the west bank stood on higher ground and was spared the worst, and she took in nineteen relatives and a parrot, and kept a long watch from the roof of the house for six nights against what the flood had stirred up. In the pandemic years she served in a mask, behind a plastic screen, and said it was the first time in her life that her customers had been unable to hide their faces.
She is sixty-six, tall, level-eyed and grey, and still on the dinner shift, on her feet from five until close. She keeps her father's stopwatch on a nail by the register. She says she has no plan to retire, since there is no one on the east bank who can be trusted to look at every face.
Lorraine Trahan Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Sable Reeve, the waitress who watched the whole room and followed a buried woman across a river without once being seen. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who found the work late, who took on a craft from a widow and a habit from a father, and who understood that to want nothing for a whole night is the hardest part of the hunt.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
