Vera Butler

Spy slayer from a local family, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Long Falcon. Craft: Quarry Reading.

Vera Butler was born in 1914 in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-six years as a nurse and, from 1942, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The family book knows her as The Long Falcon. It classes her as a Spy, a hunter who goes quietly into other people's houses and lives, watches without being seen and carries away what she has learned rather than what she has killed, and her craft was Quarry Reading, the art of knowing a hunted creature's habits, hours and hiding places from the small marks it leaves on a household. Her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. In 1937 she married the railway clerk Howard Faulkner Delacroix, who was not a hunter, and they had no children. She died in 1980 of kidney failure, aged sixty-six, five years after her husband. She belonged to no house and was entered in the Ledger as unaffiliated, and she was, her husband said, the only woman he had ever met who could take his pulse and his measure in the same breath. The calling came to her in a cellar in the autumn of 1942, and she told it afterwards the way she told everything, in order and without ornament. She was twenty-eight and working as a district nurse out of a clinic in Carrollton, and she had been sent to a house on a side street to see to a household of six, a grandmother, a widowed son, his wife and three children, one of whom had a fever. The front door was unlocked. The stove was cold. The beds were made. There was a pot of coffee on the table that had grown a skin, and a child's slate with a half-finished sum, and no one anywhere, in the rooms or the yard or the privy. She went down to the cellar for no better reason than that a nurse looks in every room, and found the family's winter stores on the shelves, the sacks of rice and the crates of onions and the jars of fig preserves, quite untouched, with the dust undisturbed even on the lids. The household had gone and had taken nothing, not a coat, not a coin and not a loaf, and the cellar smelled, faintly, of a stranger's cold. She stood on the bottom step for a quarter of an hour, with her bag in her hand, until she knew precisely where everybody had been and in what order they had gone, and then she went up and put on her hat. She did not understand the whole of what she had seen. But she understood the habit of mind, because it was her trade. A nurse learns to read a house. She sees, from the state of a sickroom, how long a patient has been ill, who has been caring for him and who has not, and what is likely to happen in the next twelve hours, and she does it from small things, the water in a glass, the folding of a sheet. Vera had been doing it for seven years, and she realised, on that step, that it was a craft and not an accident, and that there was a family in the city who would want to know. She went to her husband's father's cousins on Burgundy Street and said it plainly. She was heard. She was born on Jackson Avenue, the daughter of a gardener who kept the grounds of a big house with a greenhouse and of a woman who took in washing, and she grew up among camellias and clothes-lines. She was a thin, tall, dark-eyed child with a long neck and a look of watching, and her father said that she held her head like a bird that has seen a hawk. She was good at school and was sent, on a scholarship that an old lady of the house had arranged, to the Charity Hospital school of nursing, where she trained from 1932 to 1935 in the great grey wards on Tulane Avenue, in a stiff cap, under sisters who did not smile. The Depression years had filled the wards, and she learned more in three years than most nurses learn in ten, the fevers, the injuries, the wounds from the docks and the long, slow dying of the poor. She met Howard Faulkner Delacroix in her second year, over a crushed hand. He was a boy of seventeen, a clerk in the baggage office at the railway terminal, and he had caught his fingers in a freight door, and was brought in white and silent, saying that it was nothing. She dressed it. She told him, as she did it, in a low steady voice, that it was a good deal of something, that he was a fool and that if he moved the hand before she had finished she would never forgive him. He did not move it. He came back each week, for a month, to have the dressing changed, long after it needed it, and when the hand was well he waited by the ward door with his hat in it and asked whether he might take her to the pictures. They were married in 1937, in the church off Esplanade, when she was twenty-three, and Howard's father, a railway clerk, gave a speech, and his mother Alice, a seamstress, made the dress. Alice died in 1945, after a long illness, and Vera nursed her through it, through the last year, in a back room in a house that smelled of starch and camphor, with the patience of a woman who knew the end and kept it from the patient. It was in that house, in the long evenings, that she and her husband's sister Lorraine, who came to sit and talk, grew close, two women who spoke little and understood each other. In 1946, the year after Alice's death, Lorraine came to Vera's kitchen at dawn, grey in the face, with the mud of a churchyard on her skirt, and told her that something had answered the bell. Vera put the kettle on. She was the first outside the household to hear it, and it was Vera who told her whom to see. In 1949 Lorraine died on a night hunt, beneath a collapsed barn, in a parish out past the lake, and it was Vera who was called to the scene at dawn, to the dreadful business of the dust and the beams, and who did the part that nobody else could have done. She did not speak of it again. The war years had made her a Spy in earnest. A nurse in the great hospitals in the early forties went anywhere. She was sent to boarding houses full of soldiers and to the river front lodging houses, to see to the sick, and she read each one as she went in. She kept her observations on the temperature charts that hung at the foot of the beds, in a code of her own, a pencil mark here, an underlined hour there, that no doctor in the city ever once remarked, and that the cousins at the clinic read like a newspaper. By the end of the war she had marked, by her own count, forty-one houses, and the Ledger's hunters, who went to them by night, found nine that were what she said. She was The Long Falcon because she saw from a long way off, and stooped only once. She went on nursing through the Korean War and the years after, on night duty, on the ward at Charity and later in a small private clinic, and came to be known as the nurse who was always, mysteriously, awake. Howard went on at the railway. They had no children, a fact which they discussed once, in 1941, in the kitchen, and settled, and did not raise again. He died in 1975 in a car accident on the Airline Highway. She went on alone for five years, in the house they had bought in Gentilly, and she took on, after retirement, a good many cases, among the old and the poor of the neighbourhood, who paid her in pecans and cakes. Her kidneys failed in the winter of 1980. She sat up in the hospital bed, as she had sat up in a thousand others, and took her own pulse, and said to the doctor, in a perfectly steady voice, that he might as well tell her. Vera Butler is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Long Falcon, the nurse who read a household as other women read a letter and who marked forty-one doors with a pencil and a temperature chart. In the Slayerverse she stands for the watchers of the old houses, the hunters who went in unarmed with a bag and a clean apron and who proved that the sharpest weapon in the long war is a pair of eyes that have been trained to notice.