Milton Faulkner was born in 1927 at Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-one years as a cotton factor and, from 1959, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Sure Shuttle, the ferry that leaves the landing on the minute and arrives on the minute, and it classes him as a Soldier, a hunter who works by drill, by ground and by orders that have been thought through in advance. His craft was Night Trapping, the setting of snares, lamps and closed roads so that a creature of the dark walks into a place it cannot leave, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He was the eldest child of the bootlegger's driver and slayer Lucius Faulkner, The Delta Cutter, and of the seamstress Ada Allen, and the brother of the slayers Clara Allen Faulkner and Marguerite Faulkner and of Thelma Faulkner, who was not called. In 1952 he married the typist and slayer Beatrice Seneca, and they raised two children, Ethel Faulkner, born in 1954 and living, and Leonard Faulkner, born in 1955 and dead in 1981, both of whom became slayers in their turn. Milton died in 1978 from a blow taken in a churchyard, at fifty-one.
He was born across the water because his mother went to a cousin. In the middle of March of 1927 the river stood high against the levees and the city was frightened of it, and Ada Allen Faulkner, who lived in two rooms on Tchoupitoulas Street above a ship chandler and whose husband was away on the Gulf Coast with a load he could not leave, took the ferry to Algiers to lie in at the house of a Faulkner cousin who had a midwife, a spare bed and a kitchen on higher ground. The baby arrived on a Sunday, punctually, which his mother thought a poor sign in a Faulkner and which proved, in the end, to be the only fixed trait he ever had. He was named for his great-grandfather, the cotton factor Milton Cormier, who had lent the family his good name at the bank. Six weeks later, when the levee below the city was cut, he was carried in a rowing boat from the foot of Tchoupitoulas Street to that same cousin's house, with a sewing machine and a sack of coal, and he slept through the whole of it.
He grew up in the shadow of a man he saw mostly at dawn. Lucius Faulkner came in from the bayou roads smelling of rye and gunpowder, put a sack of coffee on the table, and went to sleep with his boots on, and the boy learned early to tell from the sound of the door whether there had been trouble. He was a neat, sober, deliberate child, unlike his father in every way that a child can be unlike a father, and he lined up his shoes. His mother, who made all his clothes, noticed that he would not wear a shirt until the buttons had been counted. His father, who was a man for improvisation, said that the boy was a clerk, and said it kindly. Ada died in 1943, when Milton was sixteen, and it was Milton, rather than anyone older, who took the household book from her bedside table and kept it, and who sat up the night with Thelma, who was eight. His grandmother Clara Faulkner, who was seventy-five and had run a boarding house for forty years, looked at the way he did the sums and told him that he would end on Carondelet Street.
She was right. He left school at seventeen, in the last year of the war, when the city was full of soldiers and sailors and every office on Carondelet Street was short of boys, and he went in as a runner to a firm of cotton factors, carrying samples, sale slips and bills of lading between the Cotton Exchange and the wharves. A factor in those years was something between a banker and a salesman. He advanced money to the planters against the crop, sold the bales to the mills, and took a commission for being trusted by both, and Milton, who was never late and never lost a paper, was a junior partner by thirty. He rode the Algiers ferry to the office every morning of his working life, and the deckhands, who set their watches by him, gave him the name that the family later adopted.
Beatrice Seneca was a typist at the next firm along the street, a tall, dry, deliberate woman of twenty-nine who had been called to the work before he was, and who knew what his father had been long before he said so. They met at a window in the Cotton Exchange, where she had come to ask why a bill of lading had been typed with a stake on it, which was a joke of the clerks. She wrote the Ledger's letters for the Louisiana chapter in her spare hours, and she hunted on the nights that a typewriter could not do the work. They married in 1952, in the church in the Faubourg, with Lucius, who had not worn a collar in twenty years, giving a short and surprisingly warm speech, and they took a small house in Algiers, near the ferry. Ethel was born in 1954 and Leonard the year after, and the house filled with the noise of two children who had been told that the pistol in the hall closet was not a toy and who therefore thought of nothing else.
Lucius died in 1957, and the whole of the Ledger came to the church. Milton, who was thirty and a married man with a mortgage, stood by the coffin in a good black suit, and in the spring of 1958 he gave his sister Marguerite away at her wedding to the lineman Roy Robichaux, with Clara as bridesmaid, and said afterwards that he had never been so afraid of a hat. He had still not been called. He was not envious.
The calling came in the autumn of 1959, on a road at dusk, when the fear left the animals before it left the people. He was driving back from a gin in the river parishes with a sample case on the seat. For a mile along the levee the cattle stood bunched at the far end of every pasture, with their rumps to the road. The dogs, which usually ran out to bark at a car, lay under the porches with their noses on their paws. At a crossroads store, where he stopped for a drink of water, the man behind the counter told him, in the tone of a man discussing the weather, that nobody had gone along the lower road for three days. Milton drove down it. He found a car with the door open and the lamps lit and no one in it, and he sat in his own for a full quarter of an hour with the engine running, doing what a factor does, which was to add up what he could see. He was not frightened, he said. He was extremely interested. The figure that came out of the cane was in no hurry at all.
He did not shoot it. He drove home, put the case on the table, and told Beatrice that he thought he should be told what his father had known. She had been waiting, she said, for two years. His father's notebook, which had been left with his grandmother Clara, was brought out, and in it, in a crabbed hand, was a sentence that Lucius had said all his life: that a creature would come to a lit window or a lone traveller as a catfish comes to bait, and that the work was not a better pistol but a better place to stand. Milton read it twice, and found the whole of his vocation in it.
Night Trapping, as he practised it, was a soldier's craft in the ordinary sense. He walked the ground first. He chose a road, a stretch of levee, a churchyard wall, and he paced it in daylight, with a notebook, and then he arranged it as a regiment arranges a field, with a lamp at one end, a closed gate at the other, a rope across the ditch and a place for himself and a place for his wife. He took forty-four vampires in nineteen years, of which Beatrice, who could shoot better than he could, took a number that she never admitted. He was never in a hurry and never alone.
Beatrice died in 1965, and the family papers give the date and the name and no more. In September of that year Hurricane Betsy came up the river and the levees below the city failed, and Milton, who had two children, aged eleven and ten, took the rowing boat out of the shed in Algiers, as his mother had once done, and crossed the flooded streets with Ethel in the bow and Leonard at the oars, to bring out a neighbour's family. He taught them both to read a road. In the years of the Vietnam war, when the boys of the parish were drafted and the cotton trade went to the synthetic mills, he kept his firm going and his children close, and he brought them into the work the way a sergeant brings in recruits, by assignments, with a place for each and a lamp at the end of the road.
In the autumn of 1978 he went out to a churchyard behind a parish church in St Bernard, where a creature had been taking the new graves, and set his trap in the usual manner. It held. But the thing, which had not read his orders, came over the wall and struck him a single blow, and he walked to the gate and sat down with his back to it, and Ethel, who found him at dawn, said that he had been dead for some hours and that the lamp was still lit. Leonard followed him three years later, and Ethel, who is living, keeps the notebook.
Milton Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Sure Shuttle, the cotton factor who rode the same ferry every morning for thirty-four years and who was never once late for the dark. In the Slayerverse he stands for the soldiers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who won by ground, drill and a lamp left burning at the right end of the road.
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