Robert Faulkner Delacroix

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

The cotton hook, the tally board and a good deal of patience made up the working kit of Robert Faulkner Delacroix, who was born in 1889 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and spent forty years on the wharves of the river front as a dockworker. He was the elder son of the bookkeeper Elias Faulkner Delacroix and of the bookkeeper Amelie Delacroix, and the brother of Alexander Faulkner Delacroix. He never married and had no children, which the family put down to the fact that he was too busy keeping other people's cargo in order. He died in 1968 of cancer, aged seventy-nine. He was not a vampire slayer, and no one in the family ever imagined that he might be. He belonged to the House of Delacroix by name and to the Faulkner bloodline of the Red Ledger through his grandmother Georgia Faulkner, a line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and what he did for the Ledger he did with his shoulders: for the better part of half a century he moved its freight from ship to rail to wagon and never once asked what was in the box. He was born in the rooms behind the dry-goods shop on Royal Street, in the Vieux Carre, in the spring of 1889, two years after his parents' wedding. The shop belonged to his grandmother Monique Delacroix, who was by then sixty and a retired Broker of the family, and who sat in a chair on the gallery with a ledger of favours on her knee and was said to have looked at the new baby for a full minute before pronouncing that he had his father's size and his mother's silence, which was the highest praise she gave anybody. He was a heavy, fair, deliberate child who did not walk until he was sixteen months old and then did not stop. His mother taught him his sums on the shop shelves, counting tins of lamp oil, and his father taught him the harder lesson, that a number is not finished until somebody has checked it twice. Robert absorbed both and put them to a purpose that neither of them had foreseen. He was never fond of columns. He liked the things the columns were about. The river took him as a boy. The shop was four streets from the levee, and by ten he was running errands to the wharves for the cooperage where his father kept the books, carrying tally sheets to the checkers and coming back with an orange or a sailor's opinion. He learned the river front the way other boys learn a street. He knew which wharf took the sugar and which the bananas, which stevedore was honest and which had a thumb on the scale, and how a ship rides when she is loaded and how when she is not. By fifteen he had left school, with his mother's blessing and his father's sigh, and gone to the Poydras Street wharf as a checker's boy. At seventeen he was carrying cotton. New Orleans in those years was the great cotton port of the Gulf, and its docks were run on a strange and rather admirable arrangement. White and black longshoremen worked side by side in separate unions that struck together, the screwmen who stowed the bales, the teamsters, the freight handlers, and in 1907 they all came out in the general dock strike, which shut the port for weeks and ended, as these things did, in a compromise that nobody liked. Robert, who was eighteen, walked the picket line with his father's cooperage men and was thrown off a wharf by a company guard into eight feet of river. He climbed out by the piling. He said afterward that it was his first lesson in the real balance of the trade, which is that the man at the bottom of the heap carries the cost of every error above him, and the lesson stayed with him. The Ledger found a use for him almost at once. A dockworker sees what is landed and when, and the Red Ledger's Louisiana chapter, which his father kept the accounts of, needed such a man on the wharves for the plainest of reasons. Silver came in from Mexico in kegs, stakes were turned in a shop in Algiers and shipped to hunters upriver in crates marked as ploughshares, and now and then something arrived that was not freight at all and had to be got off the dock before the customs men saw it. Robert, who had a lifted bale's strength and a stevedore's gift for looking at nothing, saw to it. He never carried a pistol. He carried, as he said, the other end. When a cousin of the Ledger from the Marigny came down to the Poydras Street wharf at three in the morning with a long box and a short explanation, it was Robert who put it on the cart, and Robert who sat on the box all the way to the Rampart Street depot with his cap pulled down and his eyes on the horse. His father died in December 1914, of pneumonia, at fifty-one, and Robert, who was twenty-five, took on the care of his mother and of his brother, a student of twenty-one with a gift for drawing hulls. He was already earning more than the shop. He gave his mother the greater part of it every Friday, in an envelope, and she put it in the cash book under a heading that she did not explain. When the Great War came, he went into the army as a quartermaster's clerk, a post for which the recruiting officer, who had read his tally sheets, held that he was uniquely fitted, and served at a depot in Georgia and then at the embarkation port at Newport News. It was dull work, but he did it well. He counted boots. He counted blankets. He saw to it that a trainload of mules arrived with the same number of mules that had left. He came home in the summer of 1919 with a medal that he never wore and a conviction, which he expressed to his mother in the kitchen on the first evening, that a depot was only a wharf with a fence round it. He went back to the river. Storyville had been closed by order of the navy in the autumn of 1917, and the brass bands had gone up the line to Chicago, but the music had not left the city, and on warm nights as he walked home along Rampart Street with his hook in his belt he heard it from every open window, from small bands in back rooms playing for nothing, which he much preferred. He kept a room on Dauphine Street, three blocks from the shop, and played the clarinet there, badly, on Sunday afternoons, to the despair of the neighbours. His mother died in the winter of 1925, of pneumonia, in the back room on Royal Street with the cash book open, and he buried her beside his father in the Faulkner tomb, in the Treme, and took the key to the shop and the ledger of favours to the aunts. He had no use for the one and no head for the other. The flood of 1927 was the nearest he came to a hero's part, and he did not care for it. The Mississippi rose all spring and the city, which lay below the level of the river, waited for the levees to hold. They held at New Orleans, and they were helped by a decision of which he disapproved, to dynamite the levee at Caernarvon, downriver, and let the water run out over the cane and the trappers' marsh of St. Bernard. The docks were full of men from the flooded parishes that spring, hungry and silent and in no mood to be told that it was for the good of the city. Robert, who spent three weeks on the sandbag lines at the Poydras Street wharf, handed out his own pay in food. He said afterwards that a river is the only landlord that cannot be argued with, and that the only sensible answer to it is a good rope. In the war years that followed the city filled again with soldiers, sailors and shipbuilders, and the river front, which had been quiet, was suddenly a place where a man could not cross the street. Higgins boats were built in the shipyards on the Industrial Canal, and Liberty ships went down the river with their holds full of everything an army could want. Robert, who was past fifty, worked the night shift, loading stores for the Pacific, and was said by the foreman to be the only man in the gang who never broke a case. He retired in 1954, with a pension, a bad shoulder and a gold watch that the union had paid for. He lived out his days in two rooms on Dauphine Street, and was to be seen every morning at the corner, with a newspaper, watching the traffic and, it was said, still counting. The cancer was found in the winter of 1967 and he took it as he had taken the weight of a bale, with a grunt and a shift of the shoulders. His brother Alexander, who had spent his own working life in the shipyards at Algiers, sat with him through the last months. Robert died in the spring of 1968, at seventy-nine, in a bed that looked out over the river, with a radio playing and a cap on the chair. The union sent a wreath in the shape of a cotton hook. Robert Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the dockworker of the Poydras Street wharf, the grandson of a Broker who took the heavy end of every errand. In the Slayerverse he stands for the carriers of the Red Ledger, the men with strong backs and closed mouths who moved the hunters' freight by night from the ships to the road, and who proved that a creature of the dark is no match for a crate that arrives on time.