Roy Robichaux

Hunter slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Hard Ford. Craft: Long-Watch Tracking.

Roy Robichaux was born in 1934 at Natchez, Louisiana, the Cane River village and not the famous town on the Mississippi, and lived thirty-four years as a lineman for the power company and, from 1952, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows him as The Hard Ford and classes him as a Hunter, the plainest of the hunting styles, a person who finds the thing and goes straight at it without a disguise or a cover story. His craft was Long-Watch Tracking, the patient art of sitting a night out in one place until a creature's habits give it away, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. In 1958 he married the schoolteacher and slayer Marguerite Faulkner, who hunted after class, and they raised two children, Ada Robichaux, born in 1960, who became a slayer in her turn, and Daniel Faulkner, born in 1963, who did not. He died in 1968 of an old wound that never closed, aged thirty-four. He belonged to no great house and was entered in the Ledger as unaffiliated, but he stood in the Faulkner bloodline, and he was a good deal more use to it than most men with a longer name. The Natchez that Roy was born in is a place of live oaks, a ferry and a church on the Cane River, forty miles below Natchitoches, and people from the other Natchez are obliged to be told so more than once. His father worked for a cotton gin and his mother took in boarders, and neither of them appears in the family papers by name, a silence that the Ledger keeps for people who asked to be left out of it. What the papers do say is that the boy was long, lean and quiet, with big hands and a habit of sitting very still. He could stay on the gallery of an evening for three hours without being noticed, and by ten he knew from the sound of the frogs which night the heron would be on the bank. His mother said that he had been born listening. The gin was a poor place to work and the parish had little else, and in 1950, at sixteen, he took the train south to New Orleans on the word of a cousin, with one shirt and a letter. The cousin got him on as a groundman with a line gang of the power company, and a groundman's work is a hard school. He dug the holes, carried the cross-arms, held the ladders and learned, from older men who did not trouble to be kind, how to climb a pole in spikes with a belt, a hammer and eighty pounds of gear. By eighteen he was an apprentice lineman, which in the winter of 1952 was a useful trade to have, because the Korean War had taken half the young men of the crews and the company was glad of anyone who could stay on a pole in the wind. He was on a pole when he was called. The calling came on a night in November 1952, on a call to restore a dead feeder in a Treme street. The church there had a bell tower, and its bell-ringer, an old man who had rung the evening bell for thirty years, had gone up at dusk and had failed to come down. The bell was still ringing, but it was ringing wrong, in a slow, even pattern, like a thing being tested. Roy, who was up the pole beside the church with a hot stick, could see straight into the louvres. He watched for a quarter of an hour. Nothing came out. Then something at the top of the tower leaned out of the dark, looked at him across forty feet of air, and drew back, and the bell stopped. He did not run, which is the thing the family remembers. He climbed down in his own time, walked to the foreman and said that he would like to stay late, and then sat on the kerb across the street until sunrise with his back to the pole, looking at the tower. He saw the same thing lean out twice more. At first light the sexton came with a ladder and found the bell-ringer in the belfry, quite dead, very clean, and sitting in his chair with his hands in his lap. A cousin of the Ledger, who had been called by the priest, found the lineman on the kerb and asked what he had been doing there. Roy said that he was waiting to see what it did when it was tired. The cousin, who was a cautious man, took him home to breakfast and told his wife that the Ledger had a new Hunter. The craft he made of it was his own. Long-Watch Tracking began as a lineman's habit, because a man who spends his working life on a pole learns to look down at a street from forty feet and to read what moves there, who walks and who lurks and who stands too long under a lamp. He would take a night shift on a pole above a district where a creature had been taking its supper, with a thermos, a belt and a pistol, and sit there from dusk to dawn, so still that the pigeons settled beside him. A hunted thing which feels itself watched hides. A hunted thing which has not been seen settles into a routine, and the routine is what he was after, the street it crossed, the hour it crossed it, the door that it went in by, and the way it stopped to look at a particular window. The cousins called him The Hard Ford, because he found where the dead crossed and stood at the crossing until they came. He met Marguerite Faulkner at a funeral. Her father, Lucius Faulkner, the bootlegger's driver and slayer who had hunted between deliveries, had died in 1957, and the whole Red Ledger came to the church, and Roy, who had never met the family, went because the cousin who had taken him in had asked him to carry the coffin. She was twenty-three, a schoolteacher at a parish school, a neat, brisk, brown-eyed woman with a ruler in her bag, and she looked at the young lineman who was bearing her father and said, after the service, that he had shouldered the left side a good deal better than the man in front. He said that it was a matter of height. They were married in 1958, in the church in the Faubourg, with her sister Clara Allen Faulkner as a bridesmaid and her brother Milton Faulkner giving her away. They took a small house on a street near the Industrial Canal, and she taught every weekday and hunted on every second night, and he worked the poles by day and the long watches by night, and they met, as she liked to say, in the kitchen at breakfast. Ada was born in 1960 and Daniel in 1963. The household ran on a timetable that the neighbours found alarming. Marguerite taught fourth grade, marked the books by lamp, and Roy, who was the one at home in the morning, took the children to the school and the dog to the vet and kept the shotgun, as he said, where the dog could not reach it. When Clara died in 1962, the year after her marriage to Marius Delacroix, Marguerite was the one who took the baby Cynthia, Marius's motherless daughter, home with her for the first Sunday dinners, and Roy went with her and sat on the step. The two households made a habit of Sunday dinner after that, and the children grew up with Cynthia as a cousin, which she was. The wound came in 1962, on a night in the floodplain behind the Industrial Canal, where something had been taking cattle and a night watchman. He was on a watch in a half-built shed when it came in under the rafters, and he got the shot away, and it got him across the ribs and down the left side, from the shoulder to the hip, with a hand that he said afterwards felt like a hay-hook. It was not closed by the stitches. It closed, and opened, and closed again, every year, and the doctors, who had seen a great many wounds and not many like it, shook their heads over it. He did not stop. In September 1965, when Hurricane Betsy came up out of the Gulf and put the Lower Ninth Ward under water, he climbed poles for three days to put the lights back in Gentilly, with the wound weeping through his shirt, and was then seen at the foot of a pole in a flooded street at four in the morning with a flashlight and a pistol, watching a thing in the water that had come in with the flood. It was never taken. He said that it was a wet night and he would give it another. The Vietnam years were the last of his. He went on working, and hunting, and watching a generation of boys go up to the induction centre on Camp Street, and he taught his daughter, who at eight was already a tracker, the first rule of the long watch, which is that a creature which is watched for long enough will always, at last, look back. He died in the winter of 1968, at thirty-four, of the wound that had never closed. Marguerite sat with him for the last of it, and was in her classroom the following Monday, because she said that nine-year-olds could not be left alone with a long division. Roy Robichaux is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Hard Ford, the lineman who sat out the nights on a pole and let the dead come to him. In the Slayerverse he stands for the patient hunters of the Red Ledger, the men and women who understood that a creature gives itself away to whoever has the nerve to wait, and who never once supposed that waiting was the easier part.