Marguerite Delacroix Faulkner

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

Marguerite Delacroix Faulkner was born in 1987 at New Orleans (Treme), Louisiana, and is living today in that neighbourhood, where she works as a line cook in a Creole kitchen a few streets from the house in which she was born. 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 of her own beyond a set of knives, a side towel and a good pair of clogs. She is the elder daughter of the high school coach and slayer Neil Butler Faulkner, The Quiet Heron, who is living, and of the seamstress and slayer Rosalie Delacroix, The Narrow Quill, who died in 2016, and the sister of Susan Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1988. She has not married and has no children. The family remembers her as the cook of the second line, the one who feeds a funeral, and who has the quickest hands on any line in the neighbourhood. She was born in Treme and not in Gentilly because her mother went home to be confined. Rosalie, who was twenty-one, had a hard last month, and her own mother, the waitress and slayer Marguerite Delacroix, who had two rooms in the Treme and a firm view of how a baby ought to be delivered, sent a message by a neighbour's boy that she was to come and be looked after. Rosalie came on the bus with a bag and a pincushion. Neil, who was twenty-three and had a barge yard to walk at night and a school to coach by day, rode over each morning on a bicycle and slept in a chair. The baby was born in the back room on a wet night in the spring of 1987, with a trumpet being played softly in the next house, and the grandmother, who had been up for twenty hours, said that the child had a look of the Cold Falcon. She was named for her. She weighed six pounds, did not cry and was found at dawn staring at a fly on the wall with the expression of a person who has seen something that she meant to remember. She grew up in Gentilly, in the small house near the lakefront with the garden at the back and the sewing machine in the front room, in a family that ate together at six. The table was the thing. Her father, who had coached all day, sat at one end, with a clipboard that he did not use; her mother, who had stitched all day, sat at the other, with a measure round her neck; and the two girls sat between them and were asked what they had seen. It was the Ledger's way of training a child, and the girls did not know that they were being trained. Susan, who was a year younger, said the plain things. Marguerite said the odd ones: that the new teacher walked on his toes, that the neighbour's dog had stopped barking at a particular car, that the man at the bus stop had not blinked. Her father looked at her for a long time over the rice and said that she should write them down. She did, in a school notebook with a blue cover. It is the only thing from her childhood that she has kept. She learned to cook from her grandmother. On Saturdays, from the age of seven, she took the bus across the city to the diner in Treme where Marguerite Delacroix had worked for thirty years as a waitress, and was put to shell peas at the back table, to stand on a milk crate at the flat-top and to watch. The cook, a thin, cheerful, silent man from Lafayette called Mr Theriot, taught her the first rule of a line, which was that a ticket is a promise. He taught her to hold six orders in her head, to feel with the back of her wrist when a pan was ready and to put a plate in the window just as the waitress came for it. The grandmother, who could tell a man to his face that he had had enough, told her that a diner is a room where everyone is, for twenty minutes, at his most honest, and that a cook who listens through the pass-through learns the weather of a city before the newspapers. She was eighteen in the last week of August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina came, and her parents sent her, with Susan and her grandmother, on the Sunday, in a cousin's car, to a house in Lafayette. The house in Gentilly took five feet of water. Her father and mother, with a borrowed boat, took in thirty neighbours and a cat. Marguerite, who could not sit still in a stranger's kitchen, cooked for forty people in Lafayette on a gas ring, three meals a day, for the whole of a September, and discovered, as she says, that she could do it without being frightened. When she came back in the November, to a city in which half the restaurants were closed and the others were short of hands, she was hired on the spot at a Treme kitchen that had lost three cooks to Houston. She was the youngest person on the line, and the only one who did not ask for a day off. She worked eighty hours a week, for a year, and learned the whole of the Creole kitchen, the roux and the trinity and the gumbo and the grillades, from a woman of sixty who had worked in it since the war. She has been on the line for twenty years, in four kitchens, and she is now the sous chef of a restaurant on the edge of Treme, a tall, fierce, quiet woman of thirty-nine with burn scars along both forearms, who is known for a way of saying nothing for a whole service and then, at the close, putting down the last plate and saying, to the room, that it was a good night. She cooks fast and she cooks without waste. She also cooks for the Ledger, which is the part of her life that does not appear on the menu. When a hunter has come off a night in the river parishes, and has no dinner, she sends a plate out of the back door. When a cousin has died, she makes the red beans. The Louisiana chapter lists her, in a column of its own, as the person to call for a funeral supper for a hundred, and she has done thirty-one, from the French Quarter to the bayou. She does it for nothing and does not wish it noted. Her mother was killed in 2016, in an ambush on a gravel levee road in the river parishes, at fifty, and she was twenty-nine and on the line when the call came. She finished the service. It was, she says, the only thing that she could think of to do with her hands. The next morning she and her grandmother, who was seventy-nine, put on their aprons together and cooked the breakfast for a church hall of two hundred, and neither said a word about it. The thimble that her mother had kept on the dresser is on a hook by her stove, and her sister has the matching needle case. Her grandmother, who had lost her only child, died in 2019, and Marguerite cooked for that funeral too. In the pandemic years the restaurants shut. She was thirty-two and out of work for the first time in fifteen years, and she spent the spring of 2020 cooking, from her own kitchen, for the nurses and paramedics of the city, with Susan, who delivered the pots, and her father, who stood in the road and counted the cars. She says that she has never been so tired or so content. She does not mind that she is not a hunter. Her father, who is living, looks at her and Susan across the Sunday table and says that he never saw a pair of daughters who looked so carefully at a room, and her sister says that she supposes it is hereditary. Marguerite Delacroix Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the cook of the second line, the elder daughter of the Quiet Heron who fed the mourners of the Ledger and kept her mother's thimble by the stove. In the Slayerverse she stands for the cooks and kitchen-keepers of the Red Ledger, who were never called to the hunt, who learned from a grandmother that a ticket is a promise, and who proved that a hot plate at the back door is part of every night's work.