Monica Haddad

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

Monica Haddad has spent thirty years in the clerk's office of a New Orleans court, and in all that time she has never lost a file, including the ones that were under four feet of water. She was born in 1978 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in New Orleans, where she works as a court clerk in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of the modern city. She is a woman of the Faulkner bloodline by marriage, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger, and the Ledger lists her as unaffiliated. She is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype or craft. In 2000 she married the nurse and slayer Mark Fontenot Faulkner, The Bright Lamp, the son of Leonard Faulkner and Frances Fontenot, who died in 2006, and they had two daughters, Melissa Haddad Faulkner, born in 2003, who was not called, and Wendy Faulkner, born in 2004, who is a slayer. The family remembers her as the widow who dried the paper, kept the post and raised a hunter without once telling her what to be. She was born in the spring of 1978 in a hospital in Mid-City, the second of three children of a Lebanese-American family that had kept a grocery on Magazine Street for two generations, and she grew up above it. The flat smelled of cardamom, coffee and floor polish, and downstairs there was a long dark shop, with a pressed-tin ceiling, jars of olives, a bin of dried apricots and a cat named Habibi who slept in the window on the day's bread. It was a household of three languages, Arabic from her grandmother, French from the street and English from the radio, all spoken at once, and she grew up with an ear for the exact word. She was a quick, neat, dark-haired child with a loud laugh and a ruler, and she was found at the age of seven correcting the spelling on the sign over the shop. Her father, who had been proud of the sign for twenty years, said nothing, and changed it. The city of her girlhood was a place of church fairs and second lines, of brass bands on Sunday afternoons, of the river moving slowly past the foot of every street, and of long humid evenings in which the whole of a block sat on its steps and talked. She loved it with the uncomplicated love of someone who has never lived anywhere else. She went to the convent school, where the nuns taught her that a fact was either right or wrong, and she went, at eighteen, to a clerical course at the community college, because she liked a system and because a court, her mother observed, was a place where a girl who could spell would always be wanted. In the autumn of 1996 she took a post as a junior clerk in the records office of a district court in the city, a high, noisy, fluorescent room full of metal shelves, rubber stamps and women who had worked there for thirty years, and she found within a month that she had come home. It was the work that suited her. A court clerk holds the paper of the city's trouble, every summons, every judgment, every name and date, in a form that cannot be argued with, and she liked that the record was either in the file or not in the file. She learned the filing codes in a week. She learned that every court has a language of its own and that those who speak it can make a stranger feel at once that his case has been understood. She was, from the first, very good at being kind to people who were frightened, and she saw to it that every litigant who came to her counter left knowing what to do next. A clerk, she said, is a person who tells you where to stand. She met Mark Fontenot Faulkner in the summer of 1999, at a crowded club on Frenchmen Street where her cousin's band was playing and where he had come, in a plain shirt, on some errand of his own that she did not then understand. She was twenty-one and he was seventeen, which she mentioned, and he said that he was very mature for his age, which she did not believe, and a tall, fair, quiet, slow-smiling boy with a good deal of shoulder asked her whether she had a pen. She had. He wrote the number of the nursing school on a napkin. They were married in 2000, in a church in Algiers, with his aunt Ethel standing up with the bridegroom and his mother Frances sobbing into a pressed handkerchief, and with her own mother in a green dress and her father, who had by then decided to like him, standing at the back of the church with the cat in a box. She was told what the Faulkners were the evening before the wedding, on a bench under a live oak in the churchyard, by her future husband and his aunt, in turn, in plain sentences. She heard it to the end and said that she had been waiting for the catch. It turned out to be the best-kept bargain of her life. She married a nurse and a soldier, a man who went out at dusk with a lamp and came back at dark, who held a post in his own neighbourhood for nine years and who did not once, in her hearing, explain what he had seen. She never asked. She knew the route. She knew the hour. She had a drawer in the kitchen with a lamp, a flask, a clean towel and a card with the telephone number of Ethel, and she kept the supper in the oven until he came in. In 2003 and 2004 she had two daughters, Melissa Haddad Faulkner in the spring, a round, calm, dark-eyed child with her father's hands, and Wendy Faulkner in the autumn of the next year, a small, restless, watchful one who looked at everything as if it owed her an answer. In the last week of August 2005, when the hurricane turned, she took the girls to Houston in a cousin's car with a suitcase of birth certificates and a cooler of sandwiches, and Mark, who was on the floor of his hospital, stayed. She did not hear from him for six days. She sat in a motel room with two small children and a television, and watched the city that she had been born in go under, and in the second week, when the water began to go down, she did what a clerk would do, which was to ask where the paper was. The records of her court, which had been stored in a basement, were under six feet of brown water. She drove back to the city with a convoy of other clerks, in a borrowed truck, on the first day that the roads were open, and she spent three months in a refrigerated trailer in a car park, helping to freeze and thaw and dry, one box at a time, thirty years of case files, because she had been told that the only way to save wet paper was to freeze it before the mould, and that if a thing could not be saved it was to be listed. She listed them all. She lost her husband the following year. Mark died in November of 2006, in the front room at Algiers, of the old wound that he had taken in the flood weeks and that had never closed, at twenty-five, with her beside him and Ethel in the doorway. She was twenty-eight. She had a three-year-old and a two-year-old, a job and a house with a leaking roof, and she had on the kitchen table a pen, a list and a box of tissues. She did the arrangements. She wrote the notices, found the priest, told the cousins, and then she went into the bedroom and shut the door, for ten minutes, by the clock, and came out and made the girls their supper. Her mother-in-law Frances, who had buried a husband in the same churchyard twenty-five years before, came across the river with a pot of gumbo and stayed a month, and Ethel took the girls on Saturday mornings so that she could sleep. She says that it was the people who did not ask her how she was who saved her, and that she has tried to be one of them for everyone since. She raised her daughters in the house in Algiers, in a neighbourhood that she does not mean to leave, with a drawer in the kitchen that she has kept as it was. Melissa, who was never called, grew up a steady, practical, dry-humoured girl who took after her mother and became the person to whom everyone brought a problem. Wendy was called in her turn. Monica, who had been told what to expect by Ethel, heard it in the kitchen on a Sunday, and did what she had once done with Mark, which was to ask whether the young woman had eaten, and then to find a lamp. She has never tried to tell her daughter what to be. She tells her what time supper is. In the pandemic years the court moved to a screen, and she became, with some indignation, the person who told judges how to find the button. She is forty-eight now, a quick, neat woman with dark hair cut short, a ruler in her bag and a pen behind her ear, and she still corrects the spelling on menus. Frances lives in the next street, and Ethel a few streets further, and on Sundays they eat together. Monica Haddad is remembered in the Faulkner family as the Algiers court clerk who dried a city's paper in a refrigerated trailer and kept the supper warm for a hunter who did not always come home. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the Red Ledger who were never called, the clerks, keepers of the record and widows of the hunt, who held a household and its documents together after the lamp went out and who proved that an exact list and a steady voice can carry a family through a flood.