Nettie Cormier

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

Nettie Cormier was born in 1898 in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the tall boarding house behind Basin Street where her mother kept the lodgers and her father kept the accounts, and she lived fifty-five years as a shopkeeper in the city that raised her. She was the eldest child of the cotton factor Milton Cormier and of Clara Faulkner, the keeper of a boarding house near the district the city later called Storyville, and the sister of Lucius Faulkner, Wilma Faulkner Cormier and Ralph Cormier Faulkner. She never married and had no children. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, although she was born into the Red Ledger through her mother and spent her life within arm's reach of it. She died in 1953 of a sudden collapse, aged fifty-five, at her own counter. The Faulkners remember her as the sister who kept her brothers' books, the daughter who kept her mother's, and the proprietor of the one shop in the Vieux Carre where a hunter could buy a blank ledger without being asked what he meant to put in it. She grew up in a house that ran on arithmetic. Her father, who had spent his youth learning to judge a bale of cotton by the thumb and the nose, believed that the first duty of a child was to be able to add a column in her head, and Nettie, who was the first child and therefore the first experiment, could do it before she could skate. At six she was allowed to sit at the end of the kitchen table on Saturday nights, when her mother and father went through the week's receipts with a pot of coffee between them, and she learned that a house is a thing that can be read, like a page. She was a sturdy, pale, deliberate child with her mother's steady grey eyes and her father's habit of saying nothing until she was sure. Her sister Wilma, who was loud and quick, said that Nettie thought in carbon copies. The boarding house taught her the rest. It stood in a street that the city was about to draw a line around, and by the time she was nine the music from the district could be heard over the dinner dishes. The lodgers were commercial travellers, cotton buyers, cornetists with irregular hours and, now and then, a cousin of her mother's who stayed three nights, ate very little and left before it was light. Nettie noticed the cousins. She noticed that they signed a different book from the other lodgers, and that her mother kept that book in the flour bin. She asked nothing, for it was not a house in which a question was welcome, and at eleven her mother, who had been watching her not ask, sat her down in the kitchen and explained what the Red Ledger was, who had kept it for four centuries, and what the cousins were doing in the back bedroom. Nettie listened to the end. She then asked who kept the accounts of the work, and was told that nobody did, properly, and went away looking thoughtful. Her father died in the spring of 1916, when she was seventeen, and it was Nettie who took the firm's last ledgers upstairs when the hurricane of the previous September had loosened the roof, and Nettie who sat with him in the evenings in his last winter, reading him the cotton prices until he stopped listening. The firm on Carondelet Street did not long outlast him. His partners were decent men and bought out the widow at a fair price, which Nettie, who read the agreement twice, got raised by a tenth. The money went into the boarding house, and into the education of her brothers, and a small part of it, with her mother's consent, into a lease. The shop opened in the autumn of 1919, on a narrow stretch of Royal Street between a pharmacist and a dealer in secondhand furniture. It sold stationery, ledgers, ink, pens, sealing wax, pencils, blotting paper, string, penny notebooks for the schoolchildren of the Quarter and a certain quantity of bound cashbooks in green and red cloth. It was not a romantic business. A shop of the kind lives on the steady purchases of clerks, lawyers' offices, convent schools and the cotton houses, and Nettie, who was twenty-one, stood behind the counter in a grey dress with her hair pinned flat and knew the price of every item to the cent. She stocked a heavy foolscap ledger with a rule down the centre of each page, which she bought in bulk from a bindery in Baltimore. The Red Ledger's cousins bought it, in twos and threes, from the first month. Nobody in the Quarter ever remarked that the Faulkners' shop sold more red-bound books than any in the city. She had by then been told the plain truth about her brothers. Lucius, who was eighteen in 1918, and Ralph, who was thirteen and impatient, were both marked for the work, and their sister, who was not, took the news without envy and with a great deal of practical attention. She did not wish to carry a pistol. She wished to know where her brothers were. She kept a wall chart at the back of the shop, in pencil, on a sheet of the Baltimore foolscap, in a hand that nobody could have read who did not already know the code, and on it she recorded the beats that they were walking, the nights on which they were due back, and the nights on which they were late. When one was late, she telephoned the right houses. When one was very late, she put on her hat. She never once found it necessary to tell either of them that she had been worried. The influenza of the autumn of 1918 closed the schools and the theatres of New Orleans, and for six weeks the shop was kept open only for the sale of pencils and ink to the clerks who had been sent home to write their wills. It was the first time that Nettie had seen death at a counter. She sold, in those weeks, a great many black-edged notepapers, and she wrapped them in brown paper, tied them with string and said nothing, because there was nothing to be said. Her mother, whose boarding house was filled for the first time with sick lodgers, found that her daughter had quietly moved the Ledger's papers out of the flour bin and into the back of a stationer's stock room, where nobody would think to disturb them under the foolscap. The Ledger's records for the Louisiana chapter were kept there, in a locked cupboard marked as paper samples, for thirty-five years. The shop grew slowly, as a good shop does. By the twenties she had two assistants, a boy to carry parcels and a window that was changed every Monday, and she had made, to the amusement of her sister, a small success of a line of marbled endpapers. Her mother's house prospered with the music. Her brothers took up their work. Wilma married a telegraph operator in 1925, and Nettie, who stood up beside her in a lavender frock, kept the accounts of the wedding breakfast and found that the baker had overcharged by eleven cents. She was an aunt in 1926. She spoilt her niece Ethel with coloured pencils, a blank sketchbook every Christmas and a ruler engraved with the child's name, and she told her at six that the secret of drawing a straight line was to keep your eye on the end of it and not on your hand. The great flood of 1927 put two feet of brown water into the lower rooms of the Royal Street shop, and she spent a week carrying stock up the stairs in her stockinged feet, a ream at a time. The Depression was worse. People stopped buying stationery before they stopped buying bread, and she kept her assistants on at half wages and sold the marbled paper at cost. She survived it by the same method that her father had used in the worst winter of the cotton market, which was by looking at every figure and refusing to be frightened by any of them. Her mother died in 1944, in the boarding house, in her own bed, and Nettie, who had managed the final accounts, found that she had left her the flour bin. She was a shopkeeper for thirty-four years and not one customer, it was said, had ever left without his change. When the Korean War began she sold ledgers to the draft board and ink to the schoolchildren, and she wrote, every week, to a nephew of her friend's who was in the army, because someone had to. On a morning in the spring of 1953 she opened the shop at eight, counted the till, set out the day's pencils, turned the sign and sat down on the stool behind the counter to write out an invoice. The boy who carried the parcels found her at nine, with the pen still in her hand and the figure carried over to the next line. The doctor said that it had been very quick. The ledger on the counter, which was in order to the last cent, was balanced. Nettie Cormier is remembered in the Faulkner family as the stationer of Royal Street, the sister who kept the books so that her brothers could keep the watch. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and shopkeepers of the Red Ledger, the unarmed and exact ones who sold the paper, stored the records and counted the hunters in and out, and who showed that a hunted family is held together as much by a locked cupboard and a sum that adds up as by any pistol.