Susan Delacroix Faulkner

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

A dental hygienist sees what no one else is shown, which is the inside of a person's mouth under a bright lamp, and Susan Delacroix Faulkner has looked into some eleven thousand of them. She was born in 1988 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and is living today in that city, where she is a dental hygienist at a practice in Mid-City, and she belongs to the House of Faulkner and the Red Ledger, the Lancastrian line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. She is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of her own beyond a mirror, a scaler and a head lamp. She is the younger daughter of the high school coach and slayer Neil Butler Faulkner, The Quiet Heron, who is living, and of the seamstress and slayer Rosalie Delacroix, The Narrow Quill, who died in 2016, and the sister of Marguerite Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1987. She has not married and has no children. The family remembers her as the member of the Ledger who knows what is wrong by the teeth, and who has never once, in twenty years, said anything about it in the chair. She was born in the small house in Gentilly, near the lakefront, in the autumn of 1988, in the front room beside the sewing machine, on a day when her mother Rosalie, who had expected to go to the hospital, discovered that the baby was not going to wait. Her father Neil, who was twenty-five and had just come off a night at the barge yard, took the telephone from the hall and rang the nurse next door, and her grandmother Josephine, who was a nurse herself and who lived four streets off, arrived on foot in a quarter of an hour, in her slippers, with a first-aid bag. It was all over before the ambulance came. The baby was a round, plain, composed child who looked, her grandmother said, as though she had been told what was to happen and had agreed to it. Her sister Marguerite, who was a year old and in a cot in the corner, was reported to have stood up and watched. She was the quiet one in a quiet house. Her sister said the odd things at the supper table, and Susan, who was alone among the family in saying nothing at all until she had something to add, listened, and the aunts remarked that she had her father's way of looking at a room before going into it. She was not the sort of child that a pattern could be made for. She took to her mother's work-basket before she could read, and by six she could thread a needle in the dark and by nine she could turn a hem. Rosalie, who had been trained by a Sicilian widow on Dryades Street to take a measure as one takes a pulse, taught her the rest, in the evenings, with a tape round her own neck. A measure, her mother said, was the truth about a person, and a good seamstress wrote it down and kept it. She kept her mother's needle case on a shelf beside her bed, and keeps it there still. She was told the family's business at fifteen, in the spring of 2004, at the kitchen table, by both her parents, who took it in turns, her father with a clipboard on his knee that he did not look at and her mother with a pair of scissors. They told her that the family hunted, that the dead of the old houses did not always lie quiet, and that she was free to follow or to stay out. She asked what the scissors were for. Her mother said that they were for the hem of a dress that she was making and had nothing to do with the matter, and put them down. Susan said that she thought she would stay out, and that she would like to know how to be of use. Her father, who was a man who had taken a long time to say a short thing all his life, said that it was a decision that took three seconds for a hunter and thirty years for the rest of the family to live up to. She did not see the sense of it till much later. She was seventeen in the last week of August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina came, and she was sent on the Sunday with her sister and her grandmother Marguerite to a cousin's house in Lafayette. The house in Gentilly took five feet of water. Her parents, with a borrowed boat, got thirty neighbours and a cat out of it, and her mother lost the sewing machine and kept the thimble. In Lafayette, Susan spent a September doing what she could, which was to dress wounds. She had no training in it. A man who had been pulled from a roof came into the church hall where the family was sleeping with a gash on his hand, and Susan, who had a first-aid manual that her grandmother Josephine had given her, washed it, closed it and bound it, and looked up and saw that the whole of the hall had stopped to watch. The man said afterwards that she had the steadiest hands that he had ever known. She decided that autumn that she would work with her hands, and with other people's pain. She took the dental hygiene course at a university in the city, and she graduated in 2010, in a white coat that her mother had altered by candlelight, a size too narrow and a good deal too proud. She has worked since at a family practice in Mid-City, with the same dentist, a spare, humorous man called Dr Boudreaux, who says that she is the only member of staff who has ever got a nervous child to open its mouth by telling it a story about a pirate. She is thorough, quick and kind, and she has a voice for the chair, level and low, with a slight laugh in it. Her patients, who know her as the quiet one, tell her things, because a person with a mouth full of instruments cannot reply, and it is much easier to confide in a woman who is looking at your teeth than in one who is looking at your face. That is her service, and she has been told by her father that it is a better one than most. A dentist's chair is a thing that a person sits in twice a year, and a hygienist, by the nature of the trade, sees the same people over decades, and sees what changes. She has seen a patient whose mouth, in six visits across three years, had not altered in the least, though he had told her that he was fifty. She has seen a young woman who would never lie back under the lamp, and who would not allow a mirror in her mouth. She has seen, on one night in 2014, a bite. She wrote it up in the notes, in the neutral language of the practice, and she told her father, over supper, in the same voice. He went with a cousin to the door of the address the next morning. She did not ask what was found. She has never been to the door. The Ledger's Louisiana chapter says that she has given it nine good names in twenty years, and the family says that she has never once been wrong. Her mother's death in 2016, in an ambush on a gravel road in the river parishes, at fifty, came on a Thursday, when Susan was twenty-eight and halfway through a root canal. She finished the root canal. She then went to her father's house and sat with him on the porch and did not say anything for three hours. In the pandemic years the practice closed for nine weeks, and she made masks, on the old treadle machine that her mother had bought after the flood, for the whole of the street, and posted them out in envelopes. She was thirty-one, and she cut every one by eye. Her father, who is living and who walks the levee at dusk, still wears his. She lives in a flat in Mid-City, with a sewing machine in the window and a view of the streetcar line, and she cooks on Sundays with her sister, who is the better cook. She is a calm, compact, grey-eyed woman of thirty-seven, and she can tell by looking at a stranger's smile whether he has been to a dentist in ten years. She would add that she can also tell, by looking at the same smile, what he has been doing in the dark. She says she has never needed to. Susan Delacroix Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the hygienist of Mid-City, the younger daughter of the Quiet Heron who looked into the mouths of the city and told her father what she had seen. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers and tradespeople of the Red Ledger, who were never called to the hunt, who kept their hands steady and their counsel closed, and who showed that to notice a thing, and to tell the right person, is the beginning of every successful night.