Marius Delacroix

Detective slayer of House of Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Sable Anvil. Craft: Crowd Charm.

Marius Delacroix was born in 1936 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty-four years as a bus driver and, from 1965, as a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix. He was the only son of the typist and slayer Aurore Delacroix, The Amber Drover, whose father the family papers do not name. The Delacroix book knows Marius as The Sable Anvil and classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works from evidence, who reads a scene and a timetable and finds the thing by reconstructing what it must have done. His craft was Crowd Charm, the art of holding, steering and quietly emptying a crowd by one calm voice, which he took from his mother, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. In 1961 he married the hospital cook and slayer Clara Allen Faulkner, a daughter of the Red Ledger, and they had one child, the slayer Cynthia Faulkner Delacroix, born in 1962. Clara died that same year. Marius died in 2020 of a stroke, aged eighty-four. He drove a bus for forty-one years and was, by the reckoning of the people who rode with him, the most patient man in the city. He was born in a rented room at the lower edge of the Garden District, a few doors off Magazine Street, in a house of five families and one stair, and his mother, who was twenty-six and in business as a typist, called him Marius and did not say whose son he was. It was the kind of silence that a child can hear. He was a quiet, square, dark-haired boy with a calm manner and a habit of counting things, the steps of the stair, the cars on the street, the people on the Magazine Street streetcar, and by seven he could tell his mother how many were on it without turning round. She thought that this was a gift and told him that it was a duty. He was brought up in a household of two, among ledgers and carbon paper, with a neighbour's cat and a great many cousins who dropped in and went away, and he learned, as the son of a Broker, that the way to know a place is to stand still in it. The Korean War, which began when he was fourteen, took three of the boys from the street, and his mother kept him out of the way of the recruiters and taught him to drive. He took a job on the buses in 1957, at twenty-one, a year before his mother died, with the New Orleans Public Service. A bus, as he said, is a moving crowd, forty strangers who agree for a quarter of an hour to behave. He drove the St Charles and Tulane Avenue routes, then the long St Claude line out to the Ninth Ward, and on all of them he practised what he had learned by listening to his mother's evenings. He talked quietly to his passengers. He kept the time. He found that a driver who greets each rider by name, or at least by a tone, can steer a full vehicle like a swing door, and that a bus on which a drunk is beginning to quarrel will go quiet in a moment if the driver, without turning round, says a few calm words to the whole of it at once. The company gave him a commendation for it in 1960. He framed it, and hung it on the wall of the room where his daughter was born. His mother died on a winter night in January 1958, on a watch by the river, and he buried her on a hard-frozen morning with a half-dozen cousins and a priest. He knew, then, what she had been. He had known, in the way that a boy knows what is kept from him, for a long time, and when the cousins came to him after the funeral to ask whether he intended to take up the work, he said that he did not think that he had the right temper. They said that they would wait. Xavier Delacroix, the druggist of Algiers, whom the family called The Wary Seal, and who was Aurore's cousin, came to his door that spring with a bottle of tonic for his cold, and sat in the one chair and told him a story about the second line, and left the bottle. He had the habit, after that, of going to Xavier on Sundays, and of being given, on the pretext of a medicine, a lesson in the art of being useful to everyone at once. He married in 1961. Clara Allen Faulkner was twenty-eight, a short, strong, good-humoured woman who ran the kitchen at Charity Hospital with a ladle and a very low opinion of the dietician, and she had been a slayer since she was nineteen. He drove the Tulane Avenue bus, which stopped at the hospital gate, and she took the habit of coming out at the end of her shift with a plate wrapped in a cloth for the driver, whom she addressed, for the first fortnight, as the quiet one. He said that he was not quiet, he was listening. She said that she had noticed. Her sister Marguerite and her brother-in-law Roy Robichaux, who was a lineman, and her brother Milton Faulkner, and her younger sister Thelma, who had come down from the Plains by train for the day, were all at the wedding, in the church in the Faubourg, and Roy carried the cake. It was said at the party that no two people had ever been so evidently suited, and that the cousins who had arranged the match had had nothing to do with it. Clara was a slayer of the Red Ledger and Marius, at that time, was not, and it was a curious household. She went out at night with a bag. He sat up, with a pot of coffee and a street map, and, because he could not help it, he began to work out where she had been. He kept a book, with a column for the dates, a column for the streets and a column for what she had told him. By the spring of 1962 he could tell her, from the pattern of her own reports, where the next one would be. She told the cousins. They were astonished. Cynthia was born in the autumn of 1962, and Clara died that same year. It was a bitter, ordinary blow of the kind that the Ledger takes, and Marius, who had a baby and a bus run, kept both. Roy and Marguerite took the child for the first Sunday dinners, Thelma came from Midland to see to the accounts, and a Delacroix cousin on Royal Street found him a night nurse, and in three weeks he was on the St Claude line again at the usual hour. He was called in the autumn of 1965. Hurricane Betsy came up from the Gulf at the beginning of September, and drowned the Lower Ninth Ward and half of Gentilly, and the St Claude line was out for ten days. Marius drove an evacuation bus, taking old women and children to a school on higher ground, and when the water went down a night watch was set up on his old route, in the wrecked streets, against looters. On the first morning of the watch a body was found in a flooded lane. The police took it away. On the second morning it was in the same place, in the same position. On the third morning it was there again, with the same look of mild surprise, and the watch, five men and a bus driver, stood in the wet and looked at it. Marius, who had counted everything since he was seven, said quietly that it was a different body, in the same clothes, and that he would like to see the previous two reports. He sat down in the lane with a notebook. By noon he could say in which house the creature had its bed, by working out, from the height of the water mark on three walls, where it had been when the water had been highest. He never lost the habit. As a Detective, he was a hunter of the desk and the timetable, who spent more time with a map and a notebook than with a gun, and who took his cases from police blotters, hospital admissions and the lists of the missing. Crowd Charm was the craft of his mother, and he had learned it before he had known it, on the bus, and what he had to learn now was to use it for the dead. He cleared a dance hall on Rampart Street in the autumn of 1966 in six minutes, by announcing a bus strike. He emptied the whole of a Carnival route to let a creature walk alone for three blocks. The cousins gave him the name of The Sable Anvil, for the dark of his coat and for the way he sat, perfectly still, and let the dead come to him. In the Vietnam years he drove two hundred of the young men of the Ninth Ward to the induction centre and, in his own time, brought some of them back. He did not marry again. Cynthia, who had her mother's temper and her father's patience, grew up on the buses, riding behind the driver's seat with a book, and became a slayer in her own turn. He retired from the company in 1998 with a gold watch and a pension, and went on riding the St Charles line, as a passenger, every morning for twenty years, with the paper, to see who was on it. He had a stroke in the summer of 2020, in a pandemic year, at his kitchen table, with a notebook open, and he died in the hospital a few days later, at eighty-four, with his daughter beside him. The funeral was held in the open, in a churchyard, with the cousins standing apart. They said that it was the quietest service they had ever attended, and that Marius would have counted the mourners. Marius Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Sable Anvil, the bus driver who could quiet forty strangers with a sentence and who solved the dead by counting. In the Slayerverse he stands for the detectives of the old houses, the hunters who found their quarry by patience, arithmetic and a notebook, and who handed the work on from a mother to a daughter without ever raising their voices.