Ralph Cormier Faulkner was born in 1905 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived forty-four years as a cotton factor on Carondelet Street and, from 1931, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. He was the youngest of the four children of the cotton factor Milton Cormier and the boarding-house keeper Clara Faulkner, and the brother of Nettie Cormier, Lucius Faulkner and Wilma Faulkner Cormier. He descended, through his mother, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, and he never married and left no children. The family book knows him as The Iron Drover. It classes him as a Hunter, which is the plainest of the hunting styles, a man who finds the thing, follows it and kills it without any disguise, and his craft was Night Trapping, the setting of ambushes, snares and bait lines in the dark, with silver wire and a great deal of patience. His gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He died in 1949 of an old wound that never closed, aged forty-four.
The Garden District was the wrong address for a Faulkner, which is why the family tells the story of his birth so often. His father's mother, a Cormier of Prytania Street who had stayed away from the wedding in 1897 and sent a silver tureen instead, had held her position for eight years. In the last week of Clara's confinement, when the boarding house on Esplanade was full of lodgers and a summer fever was in the Quarter, the old lady sent her carriage and a note, and Clara, who was thirty-seven and not too proud to be driven, went. Ralph was born in the white house with the cast-iron gallery and the magnolia, in the room in which his father had been born, and the grandmother, who had meant to stay stiff, held him for an hour and then asked, in some confusion, whether the child would be christened Cormier. He was christened Ralph Cormier, and he took his mother's family name besides, as his brother Lucius had, so that the cousins of the Red Ledger would know him when he walked in.
He was ten when his father died. He remembered the great hurricane of September 1915, when the slates came off the roof on Esplanade and Milton, already sick, asked from his bed that the ledgers be carried upstairs, and it was Ralph, small for his age, who made eleven trips up the back stairs with an armful of black-bound books each time and was told afterwards that he had saved the firm. He never forgot being thanked. He stood at the bedside in the spring of 1916, in a collar too stiff for him, and was told by his mother to count the candles on the mantel, which was her way of keeping a child's mind on something that could be added up. There were six. He said so, and Clara said that he was a good boy and a good Cormier, and then, a little later, a good Faulkner too.
The household that raised him was a house of women, hunters and lodgers. Clara ran the boarding house with a ledger and a steady grey eye. Nettie, seven years older, kept the books and later a small shop of her own. Wilma, who had been born at Thibodaux, where Clara had gone to a cousin for her lying-in, grew up quick and loud and went to the telephone exchange. Lucius, the oldest boy, took to the road in the twenties as a bootlegger's driver who hunted vampires between deliveries, and came home at odd hours smelling of the Delta, with a story that his mother pretended not to hear. Ralph was the one who went to the exchange. He left school at sixteen, in 1921, to begin as a sampler's boy in the warehouses where his father had begun, and by the time he was twenty-five he was a junior partner, with his father's thumb for a bale and his father's way of not answering a question until he had checked it.
He was twenty-two in the spring of 1927, when the great Mississippi flood sent the river over half the state and the city lived for weeks on the knowledge that a levee might be cut below it. He spent three weeks sleeping in the warehouse on the river side, in his boots, moving cotton to the upper floors in a rain that did not stop, and he spent three nights, with Nettie and a skiff, bringing lodgers from a flooded street to the house on Esplanade. It was a good school for a man who was going to spend his evenings in the dark. He learned that water makes a landscape unreadable, that a rescue is mostly counting, and that the dead in a flood are not always drowned, a thing he told no one then and did not understand until later.
He was called in 1931, at a crossroads. He had gone upriver in October, as a factor does, to look at a planter's crop, and was driving back at dusk by a country road between two cane fields when he came to a tinker's cart standing across the junction with the horse still in the shafts. The horse was warm. It stood without moving, with its head low and its flanks going, and it did not flinch when he put his hand on its neck. The tinker was behind the cart, sitting against a wheel among his pots and kettles, drained to the colour of candle wax, with his hat on his knee and a ladle in his hand. Ralph, who had never seen a dead man outside a funeral parlour, stood there for a long minute. Then he did the thing that his family recognised afterwards as the mark of a hunter. He looked at the road, and at the ditches, and at the lie of the grass, and saw exactly how the thing had come and where it would have to go, and he was angry in a cool, orderly way that surprised him. He drove to the nearest farmhouse, and telephoned his brother.
Lucius, who had been waiting for him, taught him the rest. They worked the winter of 1931 in the cane country, and the craft that Ralph made his own was the trap. A vampire, Lucius said, would come to a lit window or a lone traveller as reliably as a catfish to bait, and what the work required was not a better pistol but a better place to stand. Ralph studied the roads. He learned where a wanderer stops and where a hunting thing waits, he learned to lay a line of silver wire at ankle height across a gap in a fence, and he learned, as a factor learns about a market, to be patient, and to be in the right place before the rest arrived. By the third year the cousins up and down the river called him The Iron Drover, for the way he would drive a hunted thing down a lane toward a place that he had prepared, as a drover brings cattle to a pen.
The Depression years were hard on cotton and harder on the men who financed it, but Ralph kept his house solvent on a simple rule of his father's, which was that a promise made in a ledger was a promise kept. He kept the Ledger's money moving through the exchange, as Milton had done, and trapped at night, and was never once late to the office. In the war years, when the city filled with soldiers and the river front and the camps at the edge of town were crowded with young men who did not know what lay beyond the lamps, he laid his lines along the levee road and in the empty lots behind the lodging houses, and it was said by those who worked with him that no soldier on leave from Camp Plauche was lost on the roads that he watched. He took a wound in 1938, a long rip across the ribs from something in a bayou camp that he had not killed quite soon enough, and it never healed. It closed and opened for eleven years, and he dressed it himself each morning, with lint and carbolic, and said that it was a small price for a good trap.
His mother died in 1944. He sold the firm's old office the same year and took a smaller one, and by the time the war ended he was thinner and quieter, and a good deal more careful about his stairs. In the winter of 1949 the wound opened for the last time. He went to bed in the house on Esplanade, with Nettie in the next room and Wilma on the way from the exchange, and he asked for the ledgers to be brought up. They were brought. He looked through them for an hour, found a sum that did not agree and corrected it, and said, in the flat voice of the family, that the books were in order. He died that night, at forty-four, and his brother Lucius, who came in from the road at dawn, found the pistol on the chair beside the bed, cleaned and loaded, as it was every night of his working life.
Ralph Cormier Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Iron Drover, the cotton factor who drove the dark into a pen of his own making and kept the books straight while he did it. In the Slayerverse he stands for the hunters who work with patience instead of rage, who treat a lonely road as a ledger of risks to be balanced, and who prove that a snare laid carefully by a methodical man can do what no amount of bravery can.
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