Wallace Butler

Spouse of Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Wallace Butler was born in 1942 at Thibodaux, Louisiana, and lived seventy years as a machinist in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of modern New Orleans. He was not a hunter and belonged to no house; the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated. In 1961 he married the nurse Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, the younger daughter of the druggist Xavier Delacroix, and they had one son, Neil Butler Faulkner, born in 1963, who became a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. He entered the Faulkner bloodline, the Lancastrian line that keeps the Red Ledger, by marriage, and his son took his mother's family name. He died in 2012 of old age, aged seventy, two years after his wife. For forty-three years he cut metal to a thousandth of an inch in a shop on the river, and for forty-nine years he was the husband of a woman who came home at dawn with other people's blood on her cuffs and never said whose. The family remembers him as the man who made the parts, quietly, so that other people's work would hold. Thibodaux in 1942 was a sugar town on Bayou Lafourche, with a courthouse square, a cathedral-like church, an old railroad depot and, in the autumn, a haze of cane smoke that hung over the whole parish. His father was a mechanic at a sugar mill, one of the men who kept the great rollers and the centrifugals running through the grinding season, and his mother kept a small grocery in the front room of the house. He was a stocky, fair, cheerful child with large hands, who was happiest in the mill shed with a wrench and who could, at eight, take a bicycle to pieces and put it together with a part left over that turned out, on inspection, not to be needed. His father taught him the first principle of the trade, which was that a machine tells you what is wrong with it if you will listen, and the second, which was that a man who works with his hands is a man who has time to think. He was the first in his family to finish high school, and in the autumn of 1959 he went to New Orleans on the Texas and Pacific bus, with a cardboard suitcase and a letter to an uncle. New Orleans in 1959 was a river city at the peak of its working life. The port was the second busiest in America, the shipyards at Algiers and Avondale were hiring, and along the river road ran a mile of foundries, machine shops and wharves where a young man who knew a lathe could find work by noon. He found it in a shop on Tchoupitoulas Street that made valves and fittings for the sugar mills and the ships, a long dim hall of belts, shafts and cutting oil, under a foreman named Gaudet, a short, silent man who looked at the new hand's palms and said that they would do. He learned the milling machine, the shaper and, in two years, the big Monarch lathe, and Gaudet, who had not said a kind word in twenty years, told him that he had a feel for steel. It was the only compliment he ever gave. Wallace framed it, in his mind, and kept it for the rest of his life. He met Josephine Delacroix Faulkner at a church supper in Algiers in the winter of 1960, where his uncle, a cousin of the nurse Vera Butler's, had taken him for a plate of red beans. Josephine was twenty-three, a tall, brisk, dark-haired young woman in a nurse's cape, who had trained at the Charity Hospital school as Vera had before her, and who was in the middle of an argument with a deacon about the placing of the fans. She was five years his elder and very much his superior in education, and she knew it, and she thought it a joke. She asked what he did. He said that he made valves. She said that she had a patient whose heart had one, and that she would be glad if he would explain to her how a valve could be made to open and shut for a hundred years. He did, with a fork and a piece of bread, and she listened with her chin on her hand. They were married in 1961, in the spring, in the church at Algiers, with her father Xavier, the druggist, who had walked her to the altar, shaking Wallace's large hand for a full minute and saying nothing at all. It was in the first year of the marriage that he learned what the family was. Josephine had not been called, and neither had her sister Lorraine. Their mother, Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, had been a slayer, and had been killed on a night hunt in 1949 beneath a barn that came down on her in the dark, when Josephine was twelve, and their father had hunted, too, as a druggist with a crew. Xavier told him, one evening, over the counter of the drugstore, with the door locked, in the grave, listening manner that he had for important matters. Wallace heard him out. He asked a single question. He asked whether anyone needed anything made. It was the right question. Xavier, who had spent thirty years among cousins who wanted to be told, said that the Ledger had an old habit of buying its silver from jewellers, and that the jewellers were sometimes talkative. He cast the bullets. The Red Ledger's hunters in New Orleans, in those years, had a trouble that nobody liked to mention, which was that the silver rounds that came from the old moulds were irregular. Some ran heavy, some light, and a few, in the damp, split on the way down the barrel. Wallace, who had a lathe, a mould-maker's eye and a great deal of patience, made them true. He turned the moulds from tool steel, polished the cavities, and made the silver, at his own cost and in his own garage in Gentilly, into rounds of a uniformity that the cousins found almost uncanny. He made them by the hundred. He never fired one. He took the view, which he shared with no one, that the one thing a man could properly do for a fight he could not wage was to see that the people who waged it did not have a bad round. The years of the sixties were thick with weather. In September of 1965 Hurricane Betsy came up the river and drowned the lower Ninth Ward, and the city's hospital, where Josephine worked a double shift for five days, filled with the wet and the hurt. Wallace spent the week in a borrowed boat with a cousin, taking people off roofs in the dark. He said afterward that it was the only time in his life that he had been frightened, and that it had been entirely out of reason. Their son Neil Butler Faulkner had been born two years earlier, in 1963, a round, quiet, observant baby with his mother's eyes and his father's hands, who watched the shop as other children watch a television. In the Vietnam years Wallace, who was married and a skilled man in a war industry, was not called up, and he spent a number of his evenings in the clubs on Bourbon Street and Frenchmen Street, where a young machinist with a taste for trumpet could hear the old players for the price of a beer. He liked jazz more than he liked anything but his family. Neil was called as a young man, and became, in the family book, a slayer in his own right. His father, who had made the rounds that his son would carry, was not surprised. He asked the boy two questions, the first being whether he understood what he was doing, and the second whether he would let his father keep the moulds. The answers were yes and yes, and the moulds stayed in the garage, and Neil, in his years of work, never fired a round that his father had not made. Wallace taught him one thing more, which was to take his hat off to the machine, and Neil, who was a great deal more careful than his father, did. On the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 he and Josephine were in the kitchen in Gentilly, watching the television, when the towers fell. He said nothing. He got up, went out to the garage and turned the lathe on, and ran it, as he later said, for the pleasure of hearing it work. Josephine, who had by then retired from the hospital, died in 2010, and he did not much like the house without her. He sold the shop, kept the lathe, and spent the last two years of his life in the garage, with the radio on, making small things for the neighbours, a hinge, a pin or a spindle. He died in the spring of 2012, aged seventy, of old age, in a chair, with a half-finished valve in his lap. It was a very good valve. It turned, said his son, who tested it, without a sound. Wallace Butler is remembered in the Faulkner family as the machinist who made true rounds out of a garage in Gentilly, the cheerful man who loved a lathe and a trumpet and never fired a shot. In the Slayerverse he stands for the makers and trades-people of the Red Ledger, the ones whose craft stood behind the hunters, and who proved that a perfect round, like a perfect valve, is a thing that is done well in silence.