Victorine Delacroix

Slayer of House of Delacroix, parent of a spouse who married into the Faulkner line.

Victorine Delacroix was born in 1931 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived sixty-seven years as a bookkeeper and, from 1957, as a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix, the Norman-French line of the Vieux Carre and the bayou parishes. The family book knows her as The Plain Cairn, the heap of stones that a traveller leaves at a fork so that the next one will know which way to go, and it classes her as a Thief, a hunter who works by entering where she is not invited, taking what a creature keeps and leaving before the house knows it has been visited. Her craft was Bayou Piloting, the reading of marsh water, tide and channel by night so that a flat boat can go where a car and a search party cannot, and her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She raised one daughter, the slayer Monica Delacroix, born in 1960 and living, whose father the family papers do not name, and she lived to see her married to Daniel Faulkner in 1992. She died in 1998 of kidney failure, aged sixty-seven. The Delacroix remember her as the bookkeeper who audited the dead, and who did it so quietly that the parish took her for the dullest woman in the Marigny. She grew up on a street of shotgun houses behind the old Bayou St John, in a branch of the family that lived on small incomes and large kinship. Her parents are given in the family papers only as a pair of Delacroix cousins of the parish, and the child was brought up chiefly by an aunt who kept a grocery, a great-uncle who had piloted boats in the marsh for sixty years, and a succession of lodgers. The great-uncle, whom the cousins called Oncle Pilote and whom the papers never name in full, took her fishing when she was six. He put her in the bow of a flat boat at four o'clock in the morning, gave her a pole, and told her to say where the water was going. She said that it was going down the bayou. He said that she was wrong, and that it was going where the wind let it. She was seven before she understood the difference, and eight before she could say, with her eyes shut, which of three cuts through the cypress the boat was in, from the sound of the reeds on the hull. She was a dull child to look at. She wore a plain dress and a plain braid, kept her marks in a small copybook, and said very little. But she counted, with an unfailing and rather fierce accuracy. She counted the steps from the house to the church, the crates in the grocery, the pelicans on the lake and the cousins at table, and she knew, at a glance, if one was missing. Her aunt, who was a woman of shrewdness, put her to the grocery's books at eleven. By fifteen she was doing the accounts for a seafood packing house on the lakefront, in the afternoons, after school, for a wage that she handed over entire, and by eighteen, in 1949, she had a full post in the counting room of a firm of ship chandlers on Tchoupitoulas Street. She kept books for the same trade, in one form or another, for forty-three years. She was fast, tidy and honest, and had the one quality which a good bookkeeper cannot be taught, which is that she noticed when a sum was too clean. It was the Korean War, with its freight and its ships, that taught her what an account could hide. The chandler's books ran through the war without a flaw, and she began to see, on the margin of the great ledgers, a small and persistent irregularity, a debit for a candle, a lamp wick or a cask of salt that was written off, every month, to a vessel that did not exist. She traced it. It went to a house at the end of a bayou road, and to a pair of cousins who had been carrying the Ledger's supplies in the chandler's name for twenty years and had never expected anyone to look. They looked at her over the counter for a good while. Then one of them said, in a considering voice, that she had a good deal more of Oncle Pilote in her than anyone had supposed. She was twenty-one. She said that she had no objection to being useful. She was called in the autumn of 1957, when a neighbour returned from the dead and would not come indoors. His name was Amedee Landry, a retired ferryman of seventy, a mild, deaf, widowed man who had lived across the street for as long as she had been alive and had never in his life refused a cup of coffee. He was buried on a Tuesday. On the Friday evening he was on his own gallery in his Sunday coat, quite upright, with his hat in his hand, and when his sister's girl came out and asked him in, he stood on the step and did not come. He said that it was kind of her. He said it three times. Victorine, who was crossing the street with a loaf of bread and a pencil behind her ear, saw the girl put out her hand, and she heard herself say, in a flat clear voice that she did not recognise, that nobody was to ask him in. She stood in the road with her loaf. It was the first time in her life that she had said anything that was not a figure. Oncle Pilote, who arrived on the bus that night with a bag and a boat-hook, said that he had been wondering when. He did not say how long. She learned the work in the marsh. It was the right place for it, as the cousins said, because the old creatures of the delta had always followed the water, and there was a great deal of water to follow. In the parishes of Plaquemines and Lafourche and St Bernard the bayous run in a thousand cuts through the cypress and the grass, with here and there a camp on pilings, a cemetery on a shell ridge, a fishing shack that has been empty for a generation, and a vampire in such country is as hard to find as a coin in a drain. Bayou Piloting was the art of finding it. She learned the water by night, by the smell of it, the temperature, the sound of the frogs, and the way the light fell on a surface that had been disturbed, and she could take a pirogue through two miles of cypress in a moonless dark without touching a root. She worked it on the evenings and weekends of a bookkeeper's week, in a borrowed boat, with a thermos, a paper bag and a pistol. The Thief's part was her own. A creature of the old sort, she found, kept things: a trunk of earth from the grave, a coffin lid, a pocketbook with the name of the last man it had taken, a bundle of the dead's letters tied in ribbon. They were not valuables. They were the things that tied it to its first life and gave it its power over the living, and she went into the camps and the sheds and the shut-up houses when the owner was out, in the dark, with a lamp, a canvas sack and a stubby crowbar, and she took them. She took them without a sound. She took them in a ledger's order, noting the place, the date and the item, and she carried them back across the water in the boat. Without its earth and its pocketbook, she found, a vampire was a good deal less than it had been, and it was then that the cousins, who had been waiting at the landing with their pistols, were most useful. She took, by the family's count, twenty-eight. She was never once seen. Her daughter was born in the spring of 1960. The father is a subject the family papers leave alone, and she did, too, with a placid obstinacy that no one in the family attempted to shake. Monica was raised in the Marigny, over the aunt's grocery, among the books and the boats, and at four she could row. Victorine took her out in the marsh at nine and put her in the bow and asked her where the water was going. The child said that it was going where the wind let it. Her mother wrote the date in the ledger. She kept her books through the Vietnam years for a firm that lost its customers, and through the hurricane of 1965, when she took her flat boat out through the flooded streets of the Ninth Ward in September with the grocery's lantern and rowed for two days, bringing out neighbours and cousins, an old priest, three dogs and a sewing machine, and was the only person in the Marigny who knew without looking where the water was deep enough to float a boat and where it was not. Her kidneys began to fail in 1994. She went on keeping the chandler's books, then the grocery's, then her own, until the last winter, and in 1992 she had seen Monica married to Daniel Faulkner, a young man of the Red Ledger who did not hunt, at a small wedding in the church on the bayou, in a dark blue dress, and she cried, the cousins said, for the first and only time. She died in the autumn of 1998, in the bedroom over the grocery, on a night of rain. In the drawer of her table, in a tin box, was a small pile of stones, each with a date, one for each of the twenty-eight, which she had set aside from her work. The daughter kept them. Victorine Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Plain Cairn, the bookkeeper of the Marigny who took her boat through the marsh in the dark and left a pile of stones for the next to follow. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who worked by entering and taking, who proved that a patient thief with a ledger and a flat boat is as terrible to the dead as any soldier, and who asked no thanks for it.