The lamps on the barge were lit, and that is how Neil Butler Faulkner's story begins in the family book, though the book is a good deal drier about it. He was born in 1963 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in New Orleans, where he has worked for thirty years as a high school coach and, since 1983, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, the Faulkner line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. The family book knows him as The Quiet Heron and classes him as a Hunter, the plainest of the hunting styles, a person who finds the thing and goes straight at it. His craft is Falcon's Eye, the long sight that sees a whole field at once and a small movement in it, and his gear is a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. He is the only son of the machinist Wallace Butler, who died in 2012, and of the nurse Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, who died in 2010, and in 1984 he married the seamstress and slayer Rosalie Delacroix, with whom he had two daughters, Marguerite Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1987, and Susan Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1988. Rosalie was killed in 2016, and he has not remarried.
He grew up in a small house in Gentilly, near the lakefront, with a lathe in the garage and a nurse in the kitchen, and he was a round, quiet, watchful child who looked at a room before he went into it. His father made things. He made the silver rounds that the Ledger's hunters carried, though the boy was told, until he was ten, that his father made valves, which was also true. His mother came home from Charity Hospital at dawn in a starched cap with other people's blood on her cuffs, and said that it had been a busy night on the ward. He had the usual childhood of that part of the city, with bicycles on the levee, a crawfish boil on Sundays, and a good many aunts. He was two when Hurricane Betsy came up the river in September 1965, and he was carried out of the house on a door by his father, and he said, when old enough to be told it, that he remembered nothing except the smell of the door.
The great figure of his boyhood was his uncle Charles Trahan, who was married to his mother's sister Lorraine and who coached track and basketball at the high school in Gentilly where Neil was later a pupil. Charles was a tall, mild man with a stopwatch, and he took the boy to the stand on Saturdays and taught him, without saying that he was teaching, to look at the field. He would say that a boy who is going to fall out of a race does it at the second bend, and that the way to tell is to watch his shoulders. Neil was fifteen when Charles died in the winter of 1979, and he stood at the memorial meet in the spring and watched his cousins run the half-mile in their father's name. It was then that he decided that he would coach, though he did not yet know that coaching and the other thing were one trade.
He took a degree at Southern University at New Orleans in physical education, and, to pay for it, a night job with a barge-fleeting firm on the west bank, walking the towpath beside the Harvey Canal with a lantern and a thermos. It was a lonely, dull and wet occupation, and he was good at it. A fleeting yard is a place where scores of barges lie tied in tiers, going out and coming in with the tugs, and a man who walks it every night learns the tiers as a goalkeeper learns the posts. He learned which line was frayed, which tow was due and which deckhand slept in his cabin on a Tuesday. He had begun, without knowing, a method. He would stand at the end of a tier, at dusk, and look at all of it at once, and then at the whole again after an hour, and say what had altered.
He was called in the autumn of 1983, when he was twenty, on a night of low cloud, on the canal towpath, when a barge drifted in with its lamps still lit. He was at the end of the third tier, where there was no tug due. He saw it come out of the dark, moving very slowly on the current, with no hand at the sweep and no tow, a great black flat-topped hull with a deckhouse lamp lit, and a lamp at each end, and a cabin window with a yellow light in it. It was a perfectly ordinary barge. He stood and watched it for some minutes, and then he saw what was wrong, which was that the lamps were burning as steadily as if they had just been trimmed, and had not flickered once in the wind. Nobody had been aboard for a day. Somebody had lit them. He did not call out. He put his lantern on the towpath, stepped back into the shadow of a piling and waited, and in the third quarter of an hour he saw a movement on the deck that was not the wind. It was a tall figure in a dark coat, who came up from the cabin, looked along the tier, and stood as a man stands who has been waiting a long time for a ferry that is not late.
He went home on the first bus and told his father, who put down a micrometer, and said that he had been wondering when. Wallace did not argue. He asked only whether his son understood what he was undertaking, and whether he might keep the moulds. Neil said yes to both. His mother, who had been told the news at the kitchen table, said nothing at all, and that night cleaned and oiled his pistol. She went on, for the rest of her life, to watch him with the expression that her sister called the weather forecast. He found his craft in his own time, from the old Ledger entry on Mary Lowry Faulkner, a seamstress of Kentucky, who had divided a field into nine parts and looked at each in turn and then at all nine together. Neil, who had been looking at a tier of barges for two years in exactly that way, found that he had done it before he had read it. From then on he hunted with Falcon's Eye. He sat. He chose a point, a pier or a roof or a corner of a stand, and he watched all of it, and a hunter of the Red Ledger who has a watcher at the end of the block is a hunter who does not get taken in the dark. He is credited with some thirty vampires over forty years. He shot very few of them himself.
In 1984 he married Rosalie Delacroix, a seamstress of the House of Delacroix whose mother Marguerite served a diner on Claiborne, and the two mothers, in hats, stood at the back of the church in the Faubourg and agreed on everything. Rosalie was eighteen and he twenty-one. They had a small house in Gentilly and, in 1987 and 1988, two daughters, who were never called, and who were taught by their father, as he had been taught by his uncle, to look at the field. Rosalie was called herself, in 1999, in a cellar, and the household, which had been a hunter's and a seamstress's, became for a time a house with two guns in the drawer. They were very happy. They hunted in their own ways and compared notes at the table, with the girls doing their homework between the sugar bowl and the pistol.
He coached for thirty years. He took a post at a high school on the west bank in 1986, teaching physical education and coaching baseball, and he was an outfield coach in the strict sense, a man who stood on the third-base line with a clipboard and could tell, from the position of one fielder's feet, that a ball would be hit to left. He had a good record. He was known for not shouting, and for a habit of looking at a boy for a long time before saying a word. On the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 he was in a classroom with the television on, and he turned it off and said that they would do a drill. In the autumn of 2005 Hurricane Katrina and the flood that followed put the school under four feet of water, and he spent the following months on a borrowed boat and then on the roofs, with a pistol and a good many rescued people, and found, as everybody in the Ledger found, that the flood had brought up a great deal.
Rosalie was killed in 2016, at fifty, in an ambush on a lonely road, and he buried her from the church in the Faubourg. Marguerite, her mother, died three years later and Josephine and Wallace had gone before. He took leave from the school for a semester, sat in the stand at an empty field and did nothing but look. In the pandemic years he coached by telephone, and walked the levee at dusk, and found it, as he said, no different from the barge yard. His daughters visit on Sundays. Marguerite and Susan are grown, and neither was called, and both are known to look at a room before entering it.
Neil Butler Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Quiet Heron, the coach who stood very still on a towpath and saw the lamps that should not have been lit. In the Slayerverse he stands for the watchers of the Red Ledger, the hunters whose patience was a weapon, and who did the work of the sentry from the stand and the pier as much as from the field.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
