Milton Kincaid Faulkner

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

Milton Kincaid Faulkner was born in 1823 in the Treme quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived seventy-six years as a printer and a storekeeper on the lower Mississippi and the Ohio. He was the elder child of the printer Lewis Thayer Faulkner and the seamstress Naomi Kincaid of Frankfort, and the brother of the schoolteacher Naomi Faulkner. He was not a hunter, and was as firm on the point as his father. He trained as a printer in the Louisville shop that his father kept, went south in 1848 to take over his uncle's business, and for fifty years kept a general store in the New Orleans Treme, where he sold nails, lamp oil, rope, hinges and a great many other things, including, at cost, anything that the Red Ledger's cousins required. He died in 1899 of a sudden collapse, at seventy-six, behind his own counter, having lived through the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, the Civil War and the long, unsettled years of Reconstruction, and having kept, through all of them, a perfectly legible ledger. He was born in New Orleans by the custom of the Faulkner women. His father and mother, who had been married in 1820, lived at Frankfort, Kentucky, where Lewis worked at the town's newspaper and Naomi ran a dressmaker's shop with a bow window. But Naomi, who was a practical woman, preferred to have her children delivered by a midwife whom the family knew and trusted, and the only one of that description in the lower Mississippi valley was a woman of the Treme who had brought every Faulkner baby into the world since 1804. In the winter of 1822 she took passage downriver on a steamboat, with a trunk, a cat and a letter of introduction, and was received by her father-in-law, Silas Faulkner, the river hunter known as The Flatboat Falcon, in the house on the edge of the quarter that he had occupied since 1804. She was looked after by his daughter Eliza, who was seventeen and who had opinions about everything, and in a room at the back of the house, in the last week of January, a son was born. He was named for a poet. His father, who had been told by letter, took the next boat. They went home in the spring, the child in a basket, and he grew up at Frankfort, in the small house over the dress shop, in a world of bolts of calico, trays of type and the long, slow, brown river. His mother had, in her bow window, a sign reading Plain and Fancy Sewing. His father had, in the newspaper office, a composing stick, a font of long primer and a stained apron. The two trades met at the supper table, and the boy, who was a quiet, thoughtful, rather exact child, took an interest in both. He learned to read from the proofs that his father brought home. He learned to count from the bills that his mother made out. At seven he could set a line of type, upside down and backward, and at nine he could pin a hem. The family moved in the 1830s to Louisville, where his father bought a printing shop of his own, and Milton was put to work. He swept the floor. He damped the paper. He carried the forms. He was an exacting apprentice, in a shop in which exactness was the first virtue, and he took to the printer's trade as though he had been born to it, which in a sense he had. By fifteen he was setting a page a day. By eighteen he was reading proof. He was a tall, thin, sallow, bespectacled young man, with his father's long nose and his mother's steady grey eyes, and he stood at the case with a faint frown, in the habit of a man who expected to find an error. He was told the truth about the family at the age of eighteen, in the composing room of the shop, by his father, who did it with the aid of a great deal of preliminary throat-clearing. Lewis Thayer Faulkner explained that the Faulkners had been a family of hunters for three hundred years, that his own father had been one, that his brothers Caleb and Silas were, and that he was not. He said that there was no shame in it. He said that a printer who set the notices of the Red Ledger was doing as much as a hunter who fired the gun, and that it would be a great help if the boy would not mention the subject to the customers. Milton said that he had supposed there was something, because the notices were always set in a particular type. His father, who had not realised that he had been so transparent, blushed. He printed the notices. For ten years he set them, in the same small, unremarkable face that his father had used, on the same grey paper, and sent them out, in the same plain wrappers, to the cousins of the Red Ledger from the Ohio to the Gulf. They listed the routes, the safe houses, the names of the trustworthy and the warnings against those who were not. It was a task that required exactness. A single wrong name could cost a life. Milton, who read every line back to himself three times, never made such an error. In 1848, when he was twenty-five, his uncle Caleb Thayer Faulkner, the storekeeper of the Treme and a slayer of the Red Ledger, asked for help. The business, which was the largest hardware and chandlery shop in the quarter, had grown beyond a single man's management, and Caleb's own son was only fourteen. Milton, who had often thought of the warm country where he had been born, came down the river in the spring. He took over the account books. He learned the stock. He learned the language of the quarter, which was three languages and a good many dialects. And when Caleb, in 1851, decided to take a smaller shop near the Esplanade, Milton took over the original store, on the corner of Rampart and Dumaine, and made it his own. He was a storekeeper for forty-eight years. It was a career that suited him better than the press had, because it let him deal with people, which he had previously avoided. He was still a silent man. But he learned, behind the counter, to ask a question, and to listen to the answer, and he found that a great many people in the Treme had a great deal to say. He became a trusted figure. The free people of colour, the Creole families, the German and Irish immigrants and the planters' agents all came to him, for nails, for advice, for a loan, and he gave them all the same careful, dry, unhurried attention. He kept his ledger. It was the admiration of the quarter. It was bound in black leather, ruled by hand, and filled, in a small, upright, perfectly legible hand, with the record of every transaction made in the store for half a century. He could tell, from a glance, what a customer had bought, when and at what price. He could tell, from the pattern of purchases, what was wrong. A family that suddenly bought a great deal of lamp oil and candles, and a good many nails, and boards, might have a fear. A man who asked for silver tacks, and paid in old coins, might be something else. He noted them. Each month he took a copy of the entries that interested him to a cousin, and in this way the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter acquired a neat, accurate and indispensable register of the quarter's unusual purchases. He was in New Orleans for the great events of the century. He lived through the yellow fever summers, closing the store and working in the wards. He watched the volunteers leaving for the war with Mexico. He saw the Union fleet come up the river in 1862, and the city's surrender, and the occupation. He was thirty-nine, too old for the army, and too American for the Confederacy, and he kept the store open, selling on credit to anyone who would promise to pay. He took, in those four years, some nine hundred promissory notes, and was paid on seven hundred. He said that it was a better record than the government's. He never married. His sister Naomi, who came to live in the city in the 1850s, kept house for him, in the rooms over the store, and the two were devoted. He said that the ledger was his family. It was a joke, but it was not altogether one. He lived for his customers, his cousins and his sister, and he had, in the course of it, a large and warm and well-ordered life, with very little of the drama that made the lives of his uncles. His aunt Clara, the herbalist of the Treme, who had known him since he was a boy, said that he was the calmest man in Louisiana. His mother's death in 1873 and his father's in 1881 were the two great losses of his later years. He went up to Louisville for both. He closed the store for a week, each time, and left the ledger with his sister. On the second occasion he brought back his father's composing stick, which he kept on a shelf behind the counter, and used, in the evenings, to set a line or two of type, for his own pleasure, in the old face. He died in the spring of 1899, at seventy-six, of a sudden collapse, in the middle of a transaction. A customer who was standing at the counter, buying a pound of tacks, said afterward that Mr Faulkner had put the tacks in the scale, looked at the dial, said, quite clearly, that the weight was correct, and sat down on the floor. The last entry in the ledger, which was found open on the counter, was for the pound of tacks. It was in his usual hand, and was quite correct. Milton Kincaid Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the storekeeper of the Treme, the printer's son who kept the ledger. In the Slayerverse he stands for the clerks and keepers of the Red Ledger's commerce, the men who noted what was bought and sold and who, by the exactness of their books, made it possible to see what the dark was buying.