Warren Delacroix

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

Warren Delacroix was a streetcar conductor in New Orleans for twenty-four years, and in a city that ran on its cars he was one of the most familiar faces on the line: a lean, tall, fair man in a blue uniform, with a nickel punch, a leather change-bag and a joke for every regular. He was born in 1871 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the younger child of the blacksmith Hippolyte Faulkner Delacroix and the midwife Elizabeth Cooke, and the brother of Sarah Delacroix. He belonged to the House of Delacroix and to the Faulkner bloodline of the Red Ledger, and he was not a vampire slayer. He died in 1918 of pneumonia, at the height of the influenza winter, aged forty-seven. In the family memory he is the brother who could make anybody laugh on a wet night, and the conductor who, for a quarter of a century, looked at the face of every stranger who stepped aboard and noticed the ones that did not look back. He was born at the forge on Burgundy Street in a hot July, three years after his sister, and was the smallest, noisiest baby that the quarter had seen in some time. His mother, who by then had delivered several thousand children, did not deliver her own, and so he was caught by a neighbour, a stout woman of the Treme who said that he came into the world with his mouth open and never shut it. His father, who was at the anvil, put down the hammer, washed his hands in the trough, and said in French that the child was the image of his grandfather, which was the sort of remark that Hippolyte made about every child. The baby was put to sleep, by the forge's custom, in a nail keg lined with a horse blanket. He cried at the sound of a hammer for a week and then never minded it again. He grew up in a house that was a good deal noisier than most. The forge rang from six in the morning, the dray horses stood two deep in the street and his mother, who had patients at all hours, was in and out of the door with her bag. He was the child who ran errands. He was sent to the Cotton Exchange with a bracket for the clerks, to the wharves with a pair of tongs, to the French Market with a pail for his mother's herbs, and he knew by the age of ten every street between the river and Rampart. He was also, in an unthinking way, the family's best company. He mimicked. He could do the Alsatian, the Irish cop, the Creole grocer and the man who sold hot pies at the wharf, each to perfection, and he had the gift, which is rarer, of knowing when to stop. His father said that the boy would be a priest or an actor, and would in either case be late. In the summer of 1878, when he was seven, the yellow fever came. It was the great epidemic, in which thousands died, and the Delacroix household turned its rooms over the forge into a ward for the sick, under the direction of Elizabeth. The boy was sent up to an aunt's house on the Metairie ridge with his sister, and did not go willingly. He said later that it was the only time in his life that he had been sent away from trouble, and that he had not liked it. He remembered it as a long hot silence, with the sound of the dead-carts on the far road, and an aunt who kept a pot of camphor on the stove. It did not make him solemn. It made him, instead, a little more deliberate in his kindness, and inclined to bring something to anybody who was ill. He was a bright, idle scholar and was sent, at fourteen, to work in an office. It was a cotton factor's on Carondelet Street, and the job was to copy invoices, run messages and add the long columns of figures that a cotton firm generated every week. He did it well and with deep boredom. In six years he rose to a stool and a pen-holder, and his employer said that he was an excellent clerk in every particular except that he was always looking out of the window. He was looking at the street. By the early nineties the cars of the St Charles line, which had been drawn by mules for thirty years, were changing to electricity, and the new cars, green and cream, with a bell and a long pole at the back, went humming past the window at eleven minutes past the hour. At twenty-two he gave his notice, took off his collar and put on the blue uniform of the New Orleans Traction Company. It was the right trade. A streetcar conductor in that city saw the whole of it, in a day, at twelve miles an hour. He took fares from cotton brokers and from longshoremen, from bankers' wives and from the women of Basin Street, from black and white alike in the old mixed cars, before the law decreed that they should be separated, and after. He learned the regulars. He learned the ones who paid with exact change and the ones who paid with a story, the old woman who always rode to the end of the line and back, the judge who read the same newspaper for a year. He was said to have a memory for faces that the police might have envied. He had a rule that he never forgot a person who had been kind to him, and never once forgot one who had not. It was this memory that the Ledger used. His mother had been the eyes of the cradle and his father the maker of hinges, and it came to them, about 1896, that the conductor on the night car was a good deal more useful than either. He did not hunt, and was not asked to. He was asked only to notice. The last car of the night went out along Canal and St Charles at midnight, and the conductor saw, in the half-light, who got on at which stop, who paid and who did not, who sat in the seat by the door and who would not sit by the window. He noticed the man who never spoke and who got off, every night, at the gate of the old cemetery. He noticed the fare whose coins came out of the pocket cold on the hottest night of August. He said nothing, and a week later a man in a long coat would be waiting at that stop. He kept a small notebook, with a pencil, in the change-bag, and gave it on Sundays to his mother, who took it to the Treme. He never married, and the family does not say why. His sister Sarah, who kept a shop on Royal Street, said that it was not for lack of offers, and that he had turned down three of the best, each time with a joke, and never been sorry. He lived at home, in the rooms behind the forge, and later in a small house two streets away, and took his Sundays at the shop, and paid for the roof. He had, in the years of Storyville and its brass bands, the reputation of a man who could quiet a drunk with a remark, and who could, when needed, put him off the car without a hand laid on him. He was in his forties when the Great War came, and he worked through it, in the crowded cars of the wartime city, with women on the platforms for the first time, and a fog of shipbuilders, soldiers and sailors who did not know the route. The influenza reached New Orleans in October 1918. The cars were kept running, since the war effort could not spare them, and the conductors, who stood all day in the draught of a crowded platform, took the disease from the passengers like dust from a road. He was taken ill on a Thursday. He went home, and was taken to his sister's back bedroom, because she would not have him moved, and died there on the following Tuesday, of pneumonia, at forty-seven, with his mother, who was seventy-two and had not been sent for, in the chair beside the bed. His last words, it is said, were to ask whether the next car had come. The line ran a black ribbon on the front of every car on the day of his funeral, and the motormen rang their bells as the hearse went by. Warren Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the conductor of the St Charles line, the brother who joked through every trouble and noticed who got on at midnight. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ordinary watchers of the Red Ledger, the people of the trams, shops and wharves who never drew a weapon, who kept their eyes open on the night car, and whose small notebooks were the first warning that any hunter had.