Thelma Faulkner

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

Thelma Faulkner was born in 1935 at Wichita, and lived fifty-eight years as a bookkeeper in the oil towns and prairie railheads of the Southern Plains, and she never married. She was the youngest child of the bootlegger's driver and vampire slayer Lucius Faulkner, The Delta Cutter, and the seamstress Ada Allen, and the younger sister of Milton Faulkner, Clara Allen Faulkner and Marguerite Faulkner, all three of whom became slayers of the Red Ledger. She did not. She belonged to the House of Faulkner and descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, and she served the Ledger in the one capacity that nobody else in the family would take, as the person who made the figures come out. She died in 1993 of kidney failure, aged fifty-eight. If there is a single fact about her that her relations repeat, it is that in forty years of keeping other people's accounts she never once carried a balance she could not explain. The Wichita of her birth is the Kansas town and not a district of New Orleans, and she was born there because her father had gone to work in the oil fields. In the spring of 1935 the bootlegging trade, which had kept the Faulkners fed in the nineteen-twenties, was long dead, and Lucius took what the Depression offered. What it offered that year was a hauling contract for an oil-field supply company that ran a string of trucks out of Wichita to the wells in the Kansas and Oklahoma pools, with a bunk at the yard and wages that were paid. He left in March, driving a borrowed truck with a stove on the back, and Ada, who was heavy with her fourth child and had no wish to be left alone above a ship chandler with three children, followed with the family and the sewing machine on the train. Thelma was born that summer in a rented room behind a boarding house, on a Tuesday in a heat wave, with a Kansas midwife who charged a dollar and a Faulkner cousin from the packing houses holding the lamp. The family was back in New Orleans before the leaves turned. Ada said that Wichita had been a place where the wind did not stop and the flies did, and Thelma, who had no memory of it, was asked all her life whether she had ever been back. She grew up on Tchoupitoulas Street, in the two rooms above the chandler's, where her mother's Singer stood in the window and her father's boots stood by the door. She was the smallest of four, a round-faced, dark, solemn child with her mother's eyes and her father's gift for being exactly where she was wanted, and she was the only one of the children who liked arithmetic. Milton was always out. Clara and Marguerite, who were close to her in age, did their sums with their thumbs and each other's help, and Thelma, who did hers in her head, sat at the end of the kitchen table with a pencil and a school copybook and did the household accounts for fun. By eight she knew what the rent was, what the grocer was owed and how much of her father's income came from a source that was not discussed. She said later that she had not been told what the family did. She had seen the figures, and the figures had said it. The great grief of her childhood was her mother's death in the spring of 1943. Ada, who had been tired for ten years, went to bed one evening in April and could not rise, and Thelma, who was seven, was put on the bed beside her, with her head on her mother's arm, to keep her company. She woke at dawn with the arm cold. She did not cry. She got up, put on her shoes, found the doctor's address on a card on the dresser, and went out in the grey light and knocked on his door, and the doctor, who came with his bag in his pyjama trousers, said that he had never been fetched by anyone so exact. After the funeral her father, who was a lean, quick, kind man with a scar on his chin, found that he was no longer able to make his rounds at night with a clear conscience. Milton, who was sixteen, took what he could of the work, and Clara and Marguerite, who were ten and nine, took the house. Thelma kept the book. It was the old family account book, in her mother's hand, with the grocer's debts, the milk money and, at the back, in a small neat column, the cost of the cartridges. The war years were hungry and busy. Lucius drove for a defence contractor, and was hunting in the evenings on the river front, and the house above the chandler's filled with sailors' coats that were to be mended and with a good many cousins who came to the table. Thelma learned to make a sack of flour go further than it was meant to. She learned that a woman who can keep a ledger can run a household. She passed through the commercial course at a school on Baronne Street in 1951 with a certificate in bookkeeping and the highest marks in the city, and in the autumn of 1953, at eighteen, she took a post with an oil-field supply company in Wichita, the same company that had hired her father. The cousin from the packing houses, who was now an old man with a hearing aid, remembered the room where she had been born and offered her a bed. The Korean War, which had just ended, had left the company short of clerks. She said that she would go and see what the wind was like. She stayed on the Plains for forty years, and they taught her what a ledger is for. The oil business, in Kansas and Oklahoma and then in the long dry reach of West Texas, was a trade of cash, trucks, leases and men who disappeared, and the bookkeeper of a supply yard at a prairie railhead knew exactly who was buying pipe and who was not, and which crews were drinking their wages. She kept the books for the Wichita yard, then for a drilling contractor in Ponca City, and finally, from 1962, for a pipe and casing dealer in Midland. She was good, quick and honest, and she was much sought after, and she refused all offers of marriage. The Ledger came to her by correspondence. Her sisters wrote from New Orleans, and her brother wrote from Mississippi and Arkansas, and from time to time a cousin on a hunt out across the Plains would turn up at her door with a message in his hat, and she would give him a bed and a hot dinner and a place to wash, and say nothing about it to her employers. She also kept, in a locked drawer in her kitchen, a private ledger of the Red Ledger's Southern Plains cousins, which showed who had been through, who had paid for what and where the cartridges had come from. It was never found, and it was never wrong. Her father died in 1957, and she went back for the funeral and saw her sister Marguerite marry a lineman the following year. She kept in step with her family from a distance. Clara's death in 1962, a year after her marriage to Marius Delacroix, was the second great loss of her life, and she came down on the train, sat with the baby Cynthia and did Marius's accounts for a fortnight, so that when he looked up from his grief there was nothing to do but go on. In the Vietnam years she watched the young men of the railheads go off in trains, and sent money orders to a cousin who was sick. The oil bust of the eighties emptied the offices of Midland, and she lost her place at fifty, with a good reference and a bad kidney, and took in the books of half the small businesses of the town at home, at the kitchen table, in the evenings, as she had done as a child. The kidneys went in the early nineties. She was on a machine for two years, three days a week, at a clinic by the highway, and she kept the books of the clinic in return for a better chair. She died in the autumn of 1993, at fifty-eight, in the Midland hospital, with Marguerite, who had come from New Orleans, holding her hand, and with a pencil, as her sister said, still in her pocket. The accounts she left, in her small neat figures, were found to be complete to the day of her death, and she had written, on the last page of her last ledger, that there was nothing owing. Thelma Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the one who made the figures come out, the youngest daughter of the Delta Cutter and the keeper of the Red Ledger's accounts on the Southern Plains. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet bookkeepers of the old bloodlines, the ones who never fired a shot and never missed a column, and who showed that the work of the hunt is carried by a great many people who are never called, and who add up.