Milton Cormier

Spouse of Clara Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Milton Cormier was born in 1865 in New Orleans, in the Garden District, and lived fifty-one years as a cotton factor on Carondelet Street and a figure of quiet consequence on the cotton exchange. He was a man of the American side of Canal Street, born to no hunting house, and he was not a vampire slayer. In 1897 he married the boarding-house keeper Clara Faulkner, of the Red Ledger, and they raised four children, Nettie Cormier, Lucius Faulkner, Wilma Faulkner Cormier and Ralph Cormier Faulkner, of whom the two sons became slayers in their turn. He died in 1916 of a long illness, aged fifty-one. He was not born to the Faulkner line and never carried a pistol or a craft, but for nearly twenty years he did the one thing that the Red Ledger's Louisiana chapter could never do for itself, which was to give it a good name at the bank, and the family remembers him as the factor who lent the cousins his credit and never once asked what it was for. The Garden District in 1865 was a neighbourhood of new wealth and old fear, laid out on the old plantations above Canal Street by Americans who had done well out of cotton and sugar and who meant, in the half-decade after the war, to go on doing so. The Cormiers had come down from Natchez a generation before, Protestant, frugal and careful of their dignity, and Milton was born in a white house on Prytania Street with a cast-iron gallery, a magnolia and a cook who had been free for three weeks. His father was a commission merchant and his mother a great keeper of accounts, and the boy grew up in a house where credit was spoken of in the same tone as religion. He was a solemn, tidy, slow-speaking child, with a stammer that disappeared whenever he was handed a column of figures. At nine he corrected the cook's arithmetic. At twelve he was found in the library with the firm's ledgers, and was not scolded. He was sent at sixteen to the firm's office on Carondelet Street, to learn the trade from the bottom, as a sampler's boy in the cotton warehouses along the river. It was hard, dusty, dangerous work, and he learned the thing that all good factors learn, which is to judge a bale with the thumb and the nose. He learned the grades, the staples, the ways in which a planter could doctor a sample and a buyer could doctor a receipt. By twenty-five he was a junior partner. A cotton factor in those years was banker, broker, agent and confessor to the planters of the upcountry, who sent their crops to him, borrowed against the next year's harvest and trusted him with their sons' tuition, and Milton, who could be trusted with anything, did well. He was not a rich man in the Garden District sense, but he was rich enough to be left alone. He met his wife by accident and by appointment. In the spring of 1896 a planter of his acquaintance, a widower from the Attakapas country, asked him to find a decent lodging in New Orleans for a daughter who was coming down to a dentist, and Milton, who did not know the Quarter, asked at the exchange and was given an address in a street behind Basin Street, near a district that the city was about to draw a line around and call Storyville. It was a tall, clean, frugal boarding house, kept by a young woman of twenty-eight with a pair of steady grey eyes and a ledger, and it was run, as far as he could see, better than the exchange. He brought the planter's daughter to the door, and he was asked to wait in the hall. He stayed, in the end, for an hour and a half. The keeper, Clara Faulkner, was the daughter of the river pilot Augustus Faulkner, The Levee Warden, and of the herbalist Sarah Foster, and she had been holding the family's lamp since the night of her mother's death at eighteen. She looked at him, and at his shoes, and said that the planter's daughter could have the back room. He called again, on business, for a year. They were married in 1897, in a small church off Esplanade, with Hippolyte Foster Faulkner standing up as groomsman, and the Garden District, which had a very good memory, stayed away. Milton's mother sent a silver tureen and a note, and did not come. Clara, who was not the woman to be wounded by a tureen, put it on the sideboard in the boarding house, and served soup from it for thirty years. It was Clara who told him what the boarding house was for. She told him in the second year of the marriage, in the kitchen, at midnight, with a pot of coffee and the ledger between them, as her mother had told her father. He listened. He asked, in the flat voice of a man who has been told of a bankruptcy, how many, and how long, and who paid. The answer to the last question was that nobody did, and he was quiet for a time. Then he asked to see the books. He looked at them for an hour. He said, with the unmistakable satisfaction of a specialist who has found the disease, that the house was carrying its hunters on credit that it did not have. He set it right. It was the kind of help that the Ledger had never had. He opened an account at the exchange bank in a false name, which was not quite false, for the house on the edge of the district, and he put the Ledger's funds, in small, regular sums, through the cotton market, so that a cousin on the road could draw a hundred dollars at any planter's bank between Natchez and Galveston on a factor's letter of credit. He taught Clara to read a bill of exchange. He taught the hunters who stayed in the house to say, if asked, that they were cotton buyers. He was, in short, what the Faulkners had been lacking since the days of the Treme, an honest man who looked exactly like one, and whose name was in the directory. He was never once questioned. Nobody asked a cotton factor what he did with his money. The children came in the first years. Nettie Cormier was born in 1898, Lucius Faulkner in 1900, Wilma Faulkner Cormier in 1902 and Ralph Cormier Faulkner in 1905. The two boys took the Faulkner name, at their mother's request, because she intended them for the Ledger and could see that the work would be easier under a name that the cousins recognised. Milton, who had spent eight years learning the family's business, did not object, and said only that it was a fine thing to have two names in the firm. Nettie and Wilma were not called and were not meant to be. Nettie kept the books of the boarding house and, in time, of her father's firm, and Wilma, who was quick and loud, learned to cook. He taught all four of them to add in their heads. He did not, he said, wish to stand by a hunter's graveside and find that the boy had never learned to count his change. The house by Storyville had its difficulties. The district opened in 1897 and within a year had every sort of trade, the piano-players, the madams, the sporting men and the cornetists, and the Ledger's cousins, who had been ordered to keep a watch on the place, found the boarding house the best possible lookout. Milton, who had been brought up to think that such a neighbourhood ought to be shut, was astonished to find that he liked the music. He took his sons to hear a brass band on a Sunday afternoon and explained to them that a factor is a man who listens to every buyer in the room. Then he took them home to their supper. The long illness began in 1912, in the chest, and was called by the doctors a wasting of the lungs. He went on working. In 1914, when the war in Europe broke out and the price of cotton dropped by a third in a week, he spent a month on the exchange floor and kept three planters and the Ledger's funds afloat, and then went home and lay down. He did not go out again after the summer of 1915. He watched from his bed, in September of that year, the great hurricane take the slates off the roof of the house on Esplanade, and asked only that the ledgers be moved upstairs. He died in the spring of 1916, in his wife's house, with the window open, and his sons were at the bedside. He had not lived to see the country enter the war, or the closing of Storyville the following year. Milton Cormier is remembered in the Faulkner family as the factor of Carondelet Street, the man who lent a hunted house his good name and asked nothing back. In the Slayerverse he stands for the bankers and brokers of the old houses, the dry, careful men who kept the money moving and the doors open, and who proved that a column of honest figures can stand between a family and its enemies as well as any stake.