Oscar Faulkner

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

The herd that Oscar Faulkner drove into Gretna in the dry October of 1889 was short by eleven head, and he was the only man on the trail who could say exactly where they had gone. Oscar Faulkner was born in 1858 in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and lived seventy-three years, most of them as a cattle drover on the prairies west of New Orleans and on the roads and ferries that led into the city. He was the son of the circuit preacher Caleb Alden Faulkner and of the milliner Effie Alden, and the younger brother of Louisa Faulkner. He did not marry, and the Red Ledger records no children. He died in 1931 of old age, aged seventy-three. He was not a vampire slayer and never claimed to be one. He belonged to the Faulkner bloodline of the Red Ledger, which descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he served it in the ordinary way of a man who spends his life out of doors and misses nothing, as a counter of heads, a reader of roads and a carrier of word. He was born at Thibodaux because his father's circuit happened to be there. Caleb rode the sugar and bayou parishes on a horse with his Bible in one saddlebag, and Effie, who followed him in the early years, took a rented parsonage on the bayou for the lying-in and had the child there in the spring of 1858, a year and some months after his sister. He was a cheerful, lanky, sunburned infant who slept through church. His mother carried him home to the shop on Magazine Street before the summer, in a hatbox lined with flannel, which she said was the only occasion on which a customer's order had been delivered alive. He grew up in the rooms behind the hats, among feather dusters and bonnet blocks, learning to count change and to keep quiet when a customer mentioned a name. What he liked was not the shop. It was the levee. From the age of seven he was to be found at the foot of Canal Street among the cotton drays, the mule traders and the drovers who brought beef on the hoof into the city, and he watched them with the fixed and respectful attention that other boys gave to soldiers. Reconstruction had left the parishes short of money and long on cattle. The Attakapas and Opelousas prairies ran thousands of head of half-wild stock, and every few weeks a herd came down the old roads to the ferries at Algiers and Gretna, where the butchers of the French Quarter and the wharves waited for it. The yellow fever of 1867 shut the wharves for the summer, when he was nine, and he spent it in his grandmother's house in the Treme, where he learned from an old drover named Pelletier, who was convalescing in the back room, that a good herdsman can tell the health of a country by the mood of the cattle crossing it. At sixteen he was put to work as a clerk at the cotton exchange, and later as an agent for a cattle broker who bought beef for the butchers, and he was, by the family's account, a quiet and exact young man who was better informed than he ought to have been. He did not like the desk. The yellow fever of 1878 found him twenty and in the city, hauling coffin-boards for a neighbour and keeping his mother's shop open, and when the frost came he asked his father, who had ridden in to bury the dead, whether a preacher's son might be allowed to go outside. Caleb said that the Lord had made a great deal of outside, and he gave him a horse. By the spring of 1879 Oscar was riding for a prairie drover, and by thirty he had his own string of ponies, a cook and a tally book. The tally book was the thing. A drover is paid by the head, and he counts constantly, at fords, at fences, at dawn and at dusk, and Oscar counted with a thoroughness that made the prairie ranchers trust him with their books. He also wrote down what the count did not explain. A steer was found on the Opelousas road in 1884, standing, dead and as white as a candle, with not a mark on it but two small ones behind the ear. A herdsman who had ridden with the outfit for years failed to appear at a ferry and was not mentioned again by his friends. A certain stretch of cane country, near a burned-out chapel, turned the cattle back every time, bawling and wide-eyed, however they were pushed. He entered each of these in the margin of the tally book in his mother's price-of-feathers cipher, and left the page on the counter of his sister's shop on Royal Street, as he passed through, between two bolts of ribbon. Louisa, who did not ask, carried it to the cousins. It was thus that the Red Ledger's New Orleans chapter came to regard him as its eye on the prairies. He never carried more than a drover's pistol, and used it on snakes and lame horses. But a drover passes every ranch, every ferryman and every boarding house between the Sabine and the river, and he hears the talk, and the hunters who could not be in six parishes at once had the habit of sending for Oscar when a rumour reached them. He would come in from the road, eat in silence, draw a rough map on the back of a feed bill and say where he thought they should look. He was wrong twice, in forty years, and each time he offered to pay for the damage. His work took him farther than his sister thought proper. In the nineties, when the Texas herds had gone north and the Louisiana trade was thinner, he spent several seasons at the stockyards and railheads of Kansas City, and a winter in Chicago, where he said the cattle were treated as if they had already been declared dead. He came home in 1899, to a city that was changing. The Storyville years had begun, the district between Basin Street and the railway was full of music, and the drovers' wages were being spent there, and he noted, with a dry precision that his nieces found alarming, that the new music was a great deal better organised than the old trade. He sat on a bench by the stock landing in the evenings and listened to it come across the rooftops. He said that a herd and a band were the same thing, since either could be led by anyone who did not ask it to do too much. His parents were gone by then, his mother in 1899 of a stroke at her counter, and his father two years later of pneumonia, on the road between two churches, and he was the one who sat in the cemetery of the Treme with his hat in his hands, for it fell to a drover to arrange a funeral at a moment's notice. He lived with his sister Louisa in her rooms in the Quarter for a good part of his old age, which she endured, since he told her every evening how many cattle he had seen that day, and the answer was always correct. He gave up the trail at sixty, in 1918, and became the keeper of a small feed store near the Gretna ferry, where the older drovers sat by the stove and talked over old crossings. He died in 1931, of old age, at seventy-three, in his sleep, in a chair by the window of the feed store, with the ferry bell ringing across the river. The tally book that was found in his coat was a small one, with a greasy cover, and its last entry, dated three days before, recorded the number of head that had crossed that morning and, in the margin, that the third steer from the left was favouring a foot. Oscar Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the drover who counted everything, the preacher's son who rode the prairies and wrote the country down. In the Slayerverse he stands for the listeners and counters of the Red Ledger, the men of the open road who were not hunters but who could say, to the head, what had been there at dawn and what was gone by noon.