Sarah Faulkner was born in 1863 in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-four years as a typist among the French Quarter offices, the wharves and the cotton exchange, and for the last thirty-five of them as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The True Mantle, a name taken from the old custom by which a hunter's cloak is passed down, for she took up her father's. She was a Hunter, which in the Faulkner sense means a slayer who fixes on one quarry and does not leave the trail until the business is finished, and her craft was Dusk Patrol, the walking of a chosen beat at the turn of the light, when a thing that has slept all day first wakes. Her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She was the eldest child of the river pilot and slayer Augustus Faulkner, The Levee Warden, and of the herbalist Sarah Foster, and the sister of Hippolyte Foster Faulkner, Clara Faulkner and Andrew Faulkner. In 1889 she married the bookkeeper John Trahan, and they had two children, Ida Trahan Faulkner and Augustus Trahan Faulkner, of whom the younger became a slayer. She died in 1927 of a fall, aged sixty-four. She descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486.
The Algiers birth was owed to the army. The family's room on Dumaine Street in the Quarter was billeted that summer with Federal soldiers, who were civil and untidy, and Sarah Foster, who was in her last month and in no mood for either, crossed the river by ferry in June 1863 to the house of a cousin of her husband's at Algiers, one of the shipyard Aldens, whose kitchen looked out over the drydocks. The baby was born on the eleventh, at midnight, to the sound of hammering from the yard. Augustus, who was a pilot on a Union-licensed boat and had not been home for a fortnight, came across the ferry at dawn with a bunch of herbs from the market, which his wife said was the only flowers that she would have accepted from him. They named the child Sarah, for her mother, in a family that already contained two Sarahs, and her aunt, the tailor Sarah Delacroix Faulkner, announced that the house was now adequately supplied. The infant was carried back over the river at a week old, wrapped in a pilot's coat, and was said to have looked at the water all the way.
She grew up on Dumaine Street, in the house with the herb jars, among lamps and steamboat whistles. Her father was away a great deal, on the long runs to Natchez and Memphis, and when he came home, tall and lean, smelling of coal smoke and river mud, he took her on to the gallery and taught her to read the river from the window, and then to read the street. By eight she had been given a place in his gun-case, which she was allowed to clean. Her mother, who did not hunt, taught her the plants, and what they could do for a burn or a bite. She was a long, dark, thoughtful child with her father's pale eyes and a great, calm, patient tenacity, and she was told what the family was at ten, in the kitchen, by both of them together, and said at once that she would like to see the gun-case again. The Levee Warden, who had been a slayer for twenty years, was not surprised. He said that he would give her until she was grown to be sure.
Her mother died in 1886, of kidney failure, and her father three years later, in 1889, the year she married. She was twenty-six. She had trained as a typist at a business school on Canal Street, at the age when the Remington typewriter was turning a great many young women of the city into clerks, and she was by then employed in the office of a cotton factor on Carondelet Street, among the files and the brass spittoons, where she was known as the best and quietest hand in the room. She met John Trahan in the course of her work. He was the bookkeeper in the next office, a thin, sandy, exact young man from Thibodaux with ink on his cuffs and a dry sense of humour, and he took her to lunch for a year before he said that he had been trying to ask her to marry him since the spring. She said that she had noticed. They were married in 1889, in the church on Dauphine, and moved into a narrow house in the Faubourg Marigny, where he kept the books for a firm of shippers and she kept his shirts.
She told him in the kitchen, on the third night, in the level voice that she used for typing a letter, and he listened with a pencil in his hand. He said, after a minute, that it was a little like auditing a firm that turned out to have a second set of books. He said that he would ask no questions that she did not wish to answer, and that he would count whatever needed counting. It was a fair bargain, and they kept it for thirty-two years.
Their children were born in the first years. Ida Trahan Faulkner was born in 1890 and lived until 1970, and Augustus Trahan Faulkner was born in 1891 and lived until 1933, and was called, in time, to the work, like his grandfather, whose name he carried. Sarah herself had not yet been called. She had the knowledge, the skill with the pistol, and her father's old gun-case, and she went out occasionally with the cousins to stand a watch, but she held that a hunter was made by one thing, and that it had not yet come. She said that she would know.
It came in the autumn of 1892, in a barn. She had gone across the river to Algiers to visit the Alden cousins, and was walking home along the levee road at dusk, past a dairy farm whose barn stood open, when she saw a small crowd of people at the door, and a number of farm dogs lying flat in the dust at forty paces, growling and shaking and refusing to go nearer. A stranger had died in the barn that afternoon. He had come in off the road, said the dairyman, asked for water and a place to lie down, and died in the straw within the hour, and was lying there still under a horse blanket, and the dogs, which would go anywhere, would not go near him. It was dusk. The last light was going down behind the drydocks, and she stood and looked at the barn and understood that she was looking at something that had not finished.
She took the dairyman's lantern and went in alone. She did not have her pistol. She had an umbrella and a great many years of watching her father. She stood at the side of the body for an hour, in the gloom, with the lantern turned low, and did the thing that she was later to make into a craft. She waited for the turn of the light. The body stirred when the last of the dusk went out of the window. It sat up. She took the dairyman's hay fork, which stood against the post, and did what was needed, at the very moment it was needed, and not before. She walked out into the yard and told the dairyman that the man was dead, and asked him to fetch the priest.
Dusk Patrol was the craft that she made of it. A vampire wakes at the turn of the light, she said, and is weakest and hungriest in the first hour, and it was in that hour that she walked. She chose a beat, the levee from the ferry landing to the Algiers shipyards, and then the wharves on the city side, and then the warehouses of the lower Quarter, and she went out every evening at sunset, in her office dress and a good plain coat, with the pistol and silver-tipped stakes in a bag, and walked it. She wrote a line in her notebook every night. She was never late for supper. She was credited with twenty-six vampires in thirty-five years, most of them at the hour she chose, and the cousins said that she had the most regular habits of any hunter in the book.
She saw a great deal of the city in those years. The Storyville district grew up behind Basin Street in 1897 and sent its music out across the rooftops at dusk, which she said she could hear better than she liked, and the yellow fever returned for the last time in 1905. The influenza of 1918, which filled the wards of the city, found her fifty-five, and her son, who carried her lantern but was not yet called, walked behind her on the Esplanade beat. Her husband John died in 1921, at fifty-five, in the office, at his desk, and she took a few weeks off and then went on.
She died in the autumn of 1927, of a fall, at sixty-four, on the stairs of the ferry landing at Algiers, at dusk, when a board gave way beneath her. She had said that she would retire at seventy. The cousins, who came for the funeral, noted that the notebook in her bag had been written up that morning, and that the last line said simply, at the turn of the light, all quiet.
Sarah Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The True Mantle, the typist of Algiers who took up her father's cloak and walked his beat at dusk. In the Slayerverse she stands for the patrols of the Red Ledger, the hunters of the ordinary evening who made the turn of the light a thing of routine, and who were never once late for supper.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
