Mildred Rogers Faulkner

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

Mildred Rogers Faulkner was born in 1943 at Los Angeles, California, and is a laundry supervisor in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West. She is living today in Los Angeles. She was the elder child of the newspaper compositor Charles Rogers, who set the Red Ledger's western pages in type, and of the telephone operator Lorraine Faulkner Carter, The Slow Rook, a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, and she is the sister of Eugene Faulkner, who is also living and who took up the hunting that she did not. She never married and has no children. She belongs to the House of Faulkner, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger, and descends, through her mother, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. She was never called and has never pretended to want to be. For something over fifty years she has run the wash of other people's hospitals, hotels and ships, and the family regards her as the best keeper of linen, schedules and confidences that the West has produced, and the only Faulkner who reads a laundry docket for evidence. She was born in the spring of 1943 in Los Angeles, in the worst of the blackout, in a county hospital ward lit by one shaded bulb, where her grandmother Ada Rogers, who was a nurse on that floor, had arranged for her daughter Lorraine to be admitted. Charles Rogers, who was working the night shift at his paper, set the birth notice himself in eight-point type, and asked the foreman to put it on page nine. The baby was small, dark and sharp-eyed, and was said by her grandmother to look at the nurses' watches. In 1945 her father took a better post on a Denver paper, in a brick building near the rail yards, and for a number of years the family lived in two places at once, between the Highland Park house that her mother would not give up, with its dim kitchen and its compositor's clock, and the Colorado street with the lilac hedge. She learned at an early age that a household could be run from two ends of a long railway line, and that the thing that held it together was a timetable. She was a practical child. Her brother Eugene, who was born in Denver in 1946, was dreamy, and she was the one who found his shoes. At seven she could run the hand-press in her father's garage, a battered iron machine on which he had printed thirty copies of the Ledger's western pages, and he taught her, on summer Saturdays, to ink the forme, lay the sheet and pull the bar. It was her first lesson in work that had to be exactly right. She enjoyed it, in a quiet, flat, matter-of-fact way, and she was proud, though she never said so, to be allowed. She was also the only child in the house who noticed that her mother went out at night. At nine she asked her father why her mother's good shoes were always wet. Charles, who did not lie, said that her mother walked in the washes. It was entirely true, and she left it there. She was told the rest at sixteen, on the back porch at Highland Park, by her mother, in the plain voice of an operator giving a number. Lorraine Faulkner Carter had been called in 1941, after a winter fever that took a whole household in Boyle Heights, and had been a slayer for eighteen years, a Soldier of the Ledger, a hunter of drill and discipline who read a creature's trail by the marks it left. She asked her daughter whether she had any questions. Mildred asked one. She asked who did the laundry. It was, said her mother later, the most intelligent thing anyone had ever said on the subject. A hunter's clothes were a record, and a hunter who did not have someone to read them lost half of what she had learned. Lorraine, who had been washing her own coat since 1941 and had been, in her own phrase, too proud to ask, said that it was a good question. Mildred said that she would see to it. She did, for fifty years. She left high school in 1961, took a job in the linen room of a hospital in Los Angeles at sixty-five cents an hour, and by twenty-five was a supervisor, with a crew of thirty women and a seven-day schedule. It was a heavy trade. A large hospital's laundry in those years turned over some thirty thousand pounds of linen a week, in steam, noise and a heat that made the plaster sweat, and a supervisor was responsible for every sheet, gown and drape, for the count of each, for the temperature of the washers and for the temper of the women who fed them. Mildred, who was brisk, fair and exact, found that she was good at it. She did not raise her voice. She wrote everything down, on a clipboard she kept for forty years, and she could tell, at a glance, from a returned bundle, which ward had been short of hands and which of the washers had a bad seal. In the Vietnam years she worked at a naval hospital on the coast, where the wounded came in by the planeload and the linen came out by the cartload, and the work did not stop. She kept the wash for the surgical wards, three shifts a day, and she learned in that time more about blood and how to take it out than any other woman on the West Coast. She learned, too, the other thing that laundresses of her family had always known, which is that a laundry is a place where a great deal passes through a person's hands that nobody else sees. She noticed, as the Faulkner laundresses had noticed for generations, the particular stain on a sheet that did not come from a wound, the bundle that came back from a boarding house, unused, with the creases sharp, the pattern of a household that sent out its linen late, and she wrote it on a slip, and put it in the post to her mother. Lorraine, who read these slips in the chair by the window, said that her daughter had the best eye for a sheet in the western Ledger. She lost her father in 1979, in a car accident on a wet road outside Denver, on the way home from the night shift, and she flew to Colorado that night. She and her mother identified him together, and she found in his coat the final proof sheet of the week, and read it, and said that there was not an error in it. It was a thing the family still talks of. Her mother died in 1984, in the Highland Park house, in the autumn, and Mildred was by then a senior supervisor and was at the bedside, with her brother, who had driven down from the north. She took the hand-press home. She has it still. When a cousin needs a page of the western Ledger reprinted, an old register, a list of names and a map, she runs it off, in a spare room, on an evening, and posts it. She reads the proofs herself. The errors in them have been, over forty years, fewer than six. She never married. She says that she had her chances, and that the particular man was never available at the appropriate time. She lived for many years in a small stucco house in a quiet part of the city with a lemon tree, and in the great wash of the later decades, as the laundries went to contractors and the hospitals to chains, she moved to a commercial laundry that served the hotels and cruise ships of the port, and ran it, in her sixties, with a system of colour-coded tickets that the owner described as the only thing between him and ruin. She was at work on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the television in the break room showed what it showed, and she told the crew to finish the load. Then she sent them home, and rang her brother. She is a short, upright, grey-haired woman, with spectacles on a chain, a clipboard and a habit of looking at people's cuffs. She is still living, and the family says, with some alarm, that she is still working. Mildred Rogers Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the laundry supervisor of the West, the careful daughter of a compositor and a slayer, who kept the press, the linen and the schedule running and noticed what the sheets had to say. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were not called, the ones who ran the ordinary machinery of the world with such care that the hunters could trust it to be there.