Xavier Delacroix

Gangster slayer of House of Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Wary Seal. Craft: Second Line Cover.

Xavier Delacroix was born in 1911 in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty-three years as a druggist and a vampire slayer of the House of Delacroix. He was the only son of the milliner and slayer Clemence Delacroix, The Sure Tally, who was also his mentor, and his father the family papers do not name. In 1932 he married the laundress and slayer Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, and they raised two daughters, Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1934, and Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, born in 1937, neither of whom was called to the work. The family book knows him as The Wary Seal and classes him as a Gangster, a hunter who works through crews, favours, protection and the wide acquaintance of a man who is useful to everybody, and whose craft was Second Line Cover, the use of the brass-band parades of the city as a screen for movement, hiding in a street full of music what a lonely street would have noticed. His gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He died in 1994 of a stroke, aged eighty-three. He is counted in the Red Ledger of the Faulkner bloodline through his unnamed father, and in the Delacroix book through his mother, and he was a good deal more at home in the second than in the first. He slept the first months of his life in a hatbox. This was not a figure of speech. Clemence kept her shop in a narrow room behind the Algiers ferry landing and had no cot to spare, so the baby was put to sleep in a round box lined with ribbon, on a shelf behind the counter, and the customers, who found it charming, dropped their voices when they bought. He was a tall, grave, long-legged child with a way of looking at a person for a long moment before deciding whether to speak, and he had, from his mother, the habit of listening. He was sent across the river on the ferry to school, in a clean collar, with a packet of bread and cheese and the instruction to keep his eyes open, and by nine he knew the ferry hands by name, the deckhands, the pilot, the old man who sold coffee, and what each of them was likely to want. Algiers in the twenties was a town of railroad shops, dry docks and small cottages that flooded in the spring, and it taught him that a place which is overlooked is a place which is useful. At fifteen he took a post as a delivery boy for an Algiers druggist, a thin, dry, kindly man named Roussel, who taught him to pound a powder, roll a pill and read a doctor's hand. Roussel was a quiet member of the Ledger's circle, in the way that a druggist is, since a hunter needs liniment, laudanum, lint and iodine more often than he needs a gun, and a druggist who asks no questions is worth a regiment. Xavier saw, in that back shop, a very odd traffic. Men with their sleeves rolled down came in at closing time for a bottle of nothing in particular and left with a bandage. A woman with a hat pulled low asked for something for her husband's arm. He understood, in a month, what the shop was for, and he said nothing, and when Roussel noticed that he said nothing, he was given a key. The calling came in the spring of 1927, when he was sixteen. The great Mississippi flood was in the news, and the river was out across half the state, and the city lived in dread of a cut levee downriver. In the second week of April a cousin of his mother's, who had gone to see to a house on the edge of the parish, came to the shop and said that it was empty, and unburied. The door stood open. The table was laid. The household of five, a man, his wife and three grown children, were gone, and in the back room, in a row on the floor, lay the dead of the house, who had been dead a week, under a quilt, with a candle at each head and nobody left to bury them. Xavier was sent to help with the carrying. He stood in the doorway, with a lantern, and counted them, and counted them again, and the cousin said, in a low voice, that the count was wrong. There should have been six. Something in the house had taken the sixth and left the rest in order, with candles, like a guest who has had his supper and leaves the table tidy. His mother put her hand on his shoulder. He said, in a voice that was almost level, that he would like to learn how it was done. Clemence taught him. She was a Charmer, and her way of work, the candle and the smile, was not his, but she taught him the principles, to work at night, in the open, and to be home by morning, and she sent him to a cousin who kept a tobacconist's in the Quarter for the shooting. What became his own was something stranger. In the Vieux Carre and the Treme, in the twenties, a man of the right sort could get anything done if he knew the right people, and Xavier, who knew the ferry hands, the pilots, the bandsmen, the bartenders and the gentlemen of the numbers game, knew everyone. He became what the family book calls a Gangster, though he never broke a law that mattered to a decent man. He ran a crew of eight, the Algiers boys, who watched the levee road and the dry docks and reported to him over the counter of a drugstore. The pharmacist's licence, which he took in 1932, was the capstone: it put a bottle of anything into his hands and a reason to be at any door at any hour. The second line was his own invention, or so the cousins said. In New Orleans, when a man is buried with a band, the brass plays him to the grave with a slow hymn and plays him home, once the box is in the ground, with a hot tune, while the second line, the neighbours and strangers who follow behind, dances in the street with umbrellas and handkerchiefs. It is a great noise, and nobody looks at a face. He found that a hunter could walk in the middle of it, with a pistol in a coat pocket, and a hunted thing could not walk in the middle of it without being seen, and by the late thirties he was arranging the cover for half the House. He would find out which band was playing which funeral, and slip a bandleader a few dollars, and see that the route went by the house that mattered. Then he walked in the crowd, with his hat down, and watched, and a creature that had thought itself invisible found that it was in the second line of a funeral, and surrounded. In 1932, at twenty-one, he married Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, then seventeen, of the Red Ledger, a match that his mother had arranged in a few quiet sentences with the girl's father, a railway clerk of Burgundy Street. Clemence did not live to see her first grandchild. She died in January 1934, and the daughter born that year, Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, was named for her mother, and the second, Josephine Delacroix Faulkner, in 1937, for the great-aunt whose house they rented. He brought them up behind his drugstore on a street in Algiers, where the family lived over the counter. The Depression years, in which half the neighbourhood went on credit, taught him to lend. In the war years, when the city filled with soldiers and every dance hall on Rampart Street had a hunting creature at a table, he and his cousin Aurore Delacroix, who was a Broker, worked the Quarter in tandem, he behind the bandstand and she in the crowd. His wife was called in 1946, in a churchyard at night, and died on a night hunt in 1949, beneath a barn that came down on her in the dark. He went to the barn at dawn, and stayed for two days. After that he did not marry again. He kept the drugstore, brought the girls up, put them through school, walked them to the altar and left the hunt, in the end, to younger people, though he kept a stool by the counter where a cousin could sit and tell him what the night had been like. In the Vietnam years he gave medicine to the families of boys who had gone to the war, and said nothing about the price. He had his stroke at eighty-three, behind the counter, quite quietly, with a customer waiting and a bottle in his hand. They found it unbroken. Xavier Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Wary Seal, the druggist of Algiers who hid the hunt in a funeral band and never once raised his voice. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet organisers of the old houses, the men who built a crew out of kindness and a counter, and who proved that a hunter does not always need to be the one in the front rank.