Louisa Faulkner

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

In the summer of 1905, when yellow fever came back to New Orleans for the last time, a grey-haired nurse named Louisa Faulkner walked into a house on Barracks Street at two in the morning, looked at the man on the bed, and said that he did not have the fever. He had been bitten, and had a sheet over the mark. She was forty-eight years old at the time and had been a nurse for nearly thirty years. Louisa Faulkner was born in 1857 in Thibodaux, Louisiana, the daughter of the circuit preacher Caleb Alden Faulkner and the milliner Effie Alden, and the sister of Oscar Faulkner, who was born in 1858. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, through the Red Ledger line of the House of Faulkner. She was not a vampire slayer. She died in 1935 of a fall, aged seventy-eight, and the family remembers her as the nurse who patched the hunters. Thibodaux in 1857 was a sugar town on Bayou Lafourche with a courthouse, a Catholic church and a great many cane fields running back to the swamp. Her father was a Methodist circuit preacher, which meant that he rode a district of small bayou congregations on a horse, preaching in barns, cabins and the occasional schoolhouse, and was at home perhaps one week in four. He was a tall, lean, patient man, a son of the Faulkner hardware family of the Treme, who had chosen the saddlebag in place of the store counter and never regretted it. Her mother was a cheerful, practical milliner, who made bonnets for the planters' wives and the free women of colour in the town alike and was paid, in a hard year, in eggs. Louisa was the elder of two. She was born in a rented parsonage on a Thursday in March, in a thunderstorm, and was carried, at three days old, in a saddlebag, to be blessed at a church twelve miles off. She grew up on the circuit. It was a childhood of wagons and ferries, of a different bed every week and a different congregation every Sunday, and it made her self-reliant, unfussy and extremely good at sleeping on a bench. She learned to read by the light of a church lamp. She learned to make a bed in a room she had never seen, to cook on a fire built by a stranger and to tell in ten minutes which members of a household were well and which were not, because her mother, who kept a rough chest of remedies, made her the dispenser. By ten she could dress a cut, set a finger and bring down a fever with a cold cloth, and by twelve she had sat, for three nights, at the bedside of a dying deacon while her father was away, and had not been frightened. It was her first nursing. It was also, she said, the night she decided that nursing was the only kind of work that she could do without being bored. The war and the Reconstruction years were a time of hardship for the circuit preachers. Congregations scattered, churches were burned, and the bayou country, in which a Federal garrison and a Confederate raiding party might both pass in a week, was no place for a travelling minister who was unwilling to bless either. Her father went on riding. Her mother took in work in a dozen towns. Louisa, who was a girl in the worst of it, learned to keep a small, sharp lookout for trouble and to say nothing at all to soldiers, and she grew up a thin, dark, watchful young woman with her father's height and a way of looking at a patient that suggested she had already made up her mind about the diagnosis. She was right more often than not. She was twenty-one in 1878, the year of the great yellow fever epidemic, and it was then that she found out what she was. The fever moved up the river in July, and by August it was in New Orleans and in the towns of the Lafourche, and the Howard Association, which ran the city's volunteer relief, sent out a call for nurses. She went down. She was not trained, and she was not immune, which was the great qualification, but she was willing, and nobody else was. For eleven weeks she nursed in the wards and the private houses of the lower city, in the terrible heat, among the dying. She saw four hundred patients. She caught the fever herself in September, and recovered, and went back to work. When the first frost came in November and the epidemic ended, she was offered, by an astonished physician, a permanent post. She took it. She trained afterward, in the early 1890s, when the city's Charity Hospital opened its school for nurses, and was one of the oldest in her class and among the first to graduate, and she nursed at Charity for twenty years. It was a huge, noisy, overcrowded place, with wards of sixty beds and a mortuary that was never quite empty, and she loved it. She had a way of moving down a ward, in a white cap and a grey dress, with a lamp in her hand, that made the patients stop moaning. She was a short-tempered, exact woman who said exactly what she thought. She was also a woman who could be relied upon to keep a secret. The Faulkners of the Red Ledger discovered her in 1881, on a night when a hunter was carried into the receiving ward at Charity with a wound that no surgeon could explain. She was the nurse on duty. She looked at the wound, which was not the work of a knife, and at the man, who was awake and watching her face, and she asked him, in a low voice, whether he was a relation of a preacher called Caleb. He said he was a cousin. She said that in that case he had better lie still, and she took him, on her own authority, into the linen room at the end of the ward, where she kept a bed made up behind the sheets. He stayed there for nine days. Nobody asked. The linen room became, after that, a known address, and for a generation the hunters of the Red Ledger who were hurt in New Orleans were taken to Louisa Faulkner, who closed the door. She was good at it. She was a careful dresser of wounds, a fine sewer of the bites that could not be shown to a doctor, and she understood, better than most physicians, what a hunter needed, which was food, sleep and to be left alone. She kept a small private ledger of her cases, which was not the White Ledger or the Red, and in which she set down, in a plain hand, the name, the wound and the day, and what had been given. It runs to some two hundred entries. A number of names in it are also to be found, with a cross, in the Faulkners' own book. The city changed around her. The epidemic of 1905, the last, found her at forty-eight at the bedside of the people of the French Quarter, and the Storyville years, which began in 1897 and ended in 1917, sent her a steady supply of knife wounds, fevers and shocked young women, whom she treated with the same bleak courtesy as the bankers. She heard the new music coming out of the district in the evenings and thought it a very bad thing for the nerves. Her father died in 1901 and her mother, who had gone before him in 1899, lay beside him in the Treme. Her brother Oscar went north. She retired in 1917, at sixty, and lived on in a two-room flat in the Quarter, where she was visited by a steady stream of cousins and nurses and, on Sundays, by a great many hunters. She died in the winter of 1935, at seventy-eight, in a fall on the wet steps of the Charity school, where she had gone to give a talk to the students. She had told them that a good nurse stood still, and she was standing, on the top step, when she went. Louisa Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the nurse of the linen room, the preacher's daughter who mended the Red Ledger's wounded and never wrote their names where a stranger could read them. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers and carers of the hunting families, who could not take the dark but could take its victims, and who held the door.