Sarah Delacroix

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

Sarah Delacroix was born in 1868 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-seven years, for the last thirty-odd of them as a shopkeeper in the old French Quarter, having begun as a schoolteacher. She was the elder child of the blacksmith Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix and the midwife Elizabeth Cooke, and the sister of Warren Delacroix, and she belonged to the House of Delacroix and to the Faulkner bloodline of the Red Ledger. She was not a vampire slayer and never wished to be one. She died in 1935 of kidney failure, aged sixty-seven, and the family remembers her as the woman behind a counter on a street near the wharves who sold lamp oil, candles, rope, thread, coffee and salt to a neighbourhood for three decades and who, without ever lifting a weapon, made her shop the place in the Quarter where a hunter in trouble could leave a parcel, collect a message and be sure that nobody would ask what it was. The shop was the end of a long road, and the beginning of it was a forge. She was born in a rented house behind the smithy on Burgundy Street, where her father had been journeyman to the Alsatian Bauer and would presently take the place over. She learned to walk on a floor of trodden cinders, to the sound of a hammer, and was said to have taken her first steps to the beat of it. Her mother, who had been at other women's births since the age of nine, did not attend her own, and the infant was delivered by a neighbour with a great deal of advice from the kitchen. Sarah was a solid, dark, deliberate child with her father's strong hands and her mother's steady eye, and she did not, like her little brother Warren, fall into the ash. She counted it. At five she was able to say how many horses had been shod since Monday. At seven she had taken over the tally of nails, for which Bauer, by then a very old man in a leather apron, paid her a penny a week and called her, in French, the little treasurer. The Christian Brothers would not have her, and the Ursuline nuns did. She went to their school in the Quarter from eight to fifteen, learned to write a fair hand, to reckon interest and to recite the catechism in two languages, and came out with a prize for arithmetic and a reputation for never forgetting a debt. She was clever, and her mother, who thought that clever girls were wasted in kitchens, had her take the examination for a teacher's certificate. She passed at seventeen. For nine years she taught the youngest class at a parish school on Dauphine Street, where she kept forty children in order with no more than a steady stare and a ruler that she never once used. She told her pupils that the thing to be afraid of was not the dark but a sum that did not come out, and that if a man told them he was owed a dollar they should always ask him for it in writing. It was in the classroom that she became aware of what her family was. She had known, as a child, that the forge was a busy place at night and that men in long coats came to the back door and were given supper. Her mother told her the rest in the winter of 1889, the week after her uncle Augustus was buried, on the back step, in the same tone in which she might have announced that the drain wanted clearing. The Delacroix had served the Red Ledger since the days of the cane farm on Bayou Lafourche, in the smith's way and the midwife's way, and there would be a place for a teacher. Sarah said that she had supposed it was something of the kind. She was not called. She had the sense, which she kept all her life, that there were people born to go into the dark and people born to keep the lamp, and that the world was short of neither. She taught her class, as before, and in the evenings she sat with her mother and made up small parcels. The shop came in 1894. A widow on Royal Street, who sold lamp oil and notions from a front room, wished to go and live with a married daughter at Baton Rouge, and Sarah, who had saved her teacher's salary for nine years in a stocking, bought the stock, the lease and the cat for four hundred dollars. She left the school at the end of the term and moved in over the counter. It was a narrow place, in which she sold what a neighbourhood wants: oil, wicks, matches, thread, buttons, nails, twine, salt, coffee, and a small selection of brown paper and sealing wax. She was scrupulous in weight and kind in credit. She kept an account book in which she recorded, in pencil, who owed her and how much, and she kept a second book, in ink, in which she recorded who did not pay and why. The second was very short. The third, which nobody knew about, was written in the Red Ledger's small plain hand and listed the people who had bought something odd. It was an easier post than it sounds. A shopkeeper sees who buys what, and in a port full of ships, sailors and wharf hands, she saw everything. She noted the man who bought nothing but salt, and the stranger who asked for six yards of black ribbon and paid in silver of a very old date, and the lady who did not come in out of the rain. She reported it, in the evenings, to her mother, who reported it to a cousin in the Treme, and the cousin to the men in long coats. The Red Ledger left parcels in her back room, which was an ordinary stock room with a hundredweight of salt in it. She never opened one. A hunter who wanted to be found left a word at the counter, and she passed it on without reading his face. She said later that a good shopkeeper was a person who had never once in her life said what she saw. The city changed round the shop. The Storyville years turned half the streets near Basin Street into a noisy, scandalous district, and the brass bands went past her window on Sundays, on the way to funerals and on the way back, playing in a different key. The business did well. She employed a boy, and then a second, and when her father sold the forge in 1907 she gave him the use of the chair at the back and a daily cup of coffee, and he sat in it, and watched the drays go by, until the stroke took him in 1910. She looked after her mother, who lived on in the little house on Burgundy Street and was delivering babies until she was past seventy, until the old woman's death in 1927. She buried both parents at the family tomb, with the iron gates that her father had made, and paid for the new paint. The harder blow was Warren. He had gone from school into a business office, and then from the office on to the platform of a streetcar, and he was the only person in the world who could make her laugh in the middle of a stocktaking. When the influenza came to New Orleans in the autumn of 1918, at the end of the Great War, the streetcars were kept running through the epidemic and the conductors took it from the passengers. He died in October, of pneumonia, at forty-seven, in her back bedroom, because she would not have him moved. She closed the shop for three days. It was the only time in forty years that the blind was drawn in the middle of the week. Those who knew her said that she was never after quite so quick to smile, and quicker, if anything, to be generous. She worked on through the Depression with a cheerful obstinacy, letting the neighbourhood run up credit that she had no hope of seeing again, and giving out ends of twine and candle-stubs to whoever asked. In the spring of 1935, at sixty-seven, her kidneys began to fail, and she lay upstairs for eleven weeks, directing the boy below by the sound of the till. She died in the summer, in the room over the counter, and was buried in the family tomb. The shop stayed open a week after her funeral, by the boy's own decision, and was then taken over by a cousin, who found, at the back of the stock room, a hundredweight of salt, a locked drawer, and a small ruled book in which the last entry, written in her upright teacher's hand, read, Owing to me: nothing. Owing to the house: everything. Sarah Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the schoolteacher who turned shopkeeper, the woman behind the counter on Royal Street who counted every stranger who came in. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of the small shops of the Red Ledger, the tradespeople who never carried a stake but knew what was being bought, and who made a counter a place where a hunter could safely leave a message and be sure that it would be kept.