Clifford Thorne

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

There is a certain surprise on a drilling floor when a roughneck turns out to have been born in San Francisco, and Clifford Thorne has spent fifty years enjoying it. He was born in 1950 in San Francisco, California, and is living today in San Francisco, where he has retired from a working life as an oil-field roughneck in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West. He is a man of the House of Thorne and of the Proctor bloodline that keeps the White Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he has never been called to hunt. He is the younger child of the telegraph operator James Proctor Thorne and the schoolteacher Edna Bishop, and the brother of the archivist Doris Thorne, who is also living. He has no alias, archetype or craft, and has never claimed any. What he has is a pair of hands like shovels, a drilling hand's memory of a thousand back roads, and a reputation in the family for being the cousin who could be telephoned from anywhere. He was born in the autumn, in a hospital in the Mission, three years after his sister and four years after his father had come home from sending messages from the deck of a Navy transport. The family lived by then in a small stucco house in the suburbs south of the city, near the airport, in a new street where every house had a carport and every carport an overweight Chevrolet. The aircraft going over made the windows hum. It was a house of codes and quiet. His father tapped the alphabet on the arm of his chair when he wanted the salt, and his mother, who taught fourth grade for thirty-five years, graded papers at the kitchen table in the evenings with a red pencil, and expected the children to be doing something equally useful at the other end. Doris read. Clifford, who was a large, fair, easy child, took things apart. He took apart the family's lawnmower at eight and the neighbour's at nine, and was able to put back the first. He was not a scholar and did not pretend to be. His mother, who loved him and was entirely without sentiment about his marks, said that he had a mind that worked on things that were heavy and could be moved. He liked the airport. He liked the freight yards in Oakland and the fuel tanks at Richmond, and above all he liked the oil, though he could not at first have said why, except that there was something about a refinery lit up at night across the water that made him feel that somebody was getting something done. He was told what the family was at sixteen, in the spring of 1966, by his father, on a walk along the shore south of the airport, in a cold wind with the fog coming in. James said it flatly, as one reads a telegram. His sister had asked, three years earlier, who kept the file. Clifford asked whether there was anything that needed carrying. His father, who had been braced for a different question, laughed for a quarter of an hour, and said that in his experience there generally was. He left school in 1968 and went south on a bus to the oil fields of Kern County, where a cousin of his mother's had a friend with a drilling contractor. A roughneck, in the language of the rigs, is a hand on the drilling floor, the man who handles the pipe, spins the chain, breaks out the joints and keeps the whole noisy business turning, on a tour of eight or twelve hours, in all weathers. It is a trade that a young man learns through his knees and his back. Clifford was a floorhand by the autumn and a motorman by the following spring, in the dust of the Midway-Sunset field near Taft, in a row of bunkhouses and trailers, among men from Oklahoma and Texas who called him San Francisco and were, within a month, entirely devoted to him. He was too cheerful to quarrel with. He was also, as the driller remarked, hard to tire. The Vietnam years, so far as they touched him, did so by lottery. When the draft numbers were drawn in the summer of 1970 for the men born in 1950, his was high enough to be a kind of joke, and he sat in the bunkhouse with a bottle of beer and a sense of guilt that did not go away for a long time. He sent money home to his mother, and wrote to three boys from his old street who had gone. When the Santa Barbara channel had its great spill of oil, the year before, he had been among the hands who went down from Kern County to help the clean-up on the beaches, in a borrowed truck, with a shovel, and he said that it was the one time in his life that he was ashamed of the trade. He went back to it. He said that he knew of no other line of work in which a man with his gifts could be as useful. He found the Ledger's use for him in the second year, and it was not a thing that he had sought. An oil field is a country of remote roads, lonely leases and sheds, and a roughneck who works the night tour sees the whole of it in the small hours. He saw leases where the hands would not stay after sunset, and a wellhead shed in the Temblor foothills that nobody could keep a lock on, and once a derrick on the desert edge in which three crew changes in a row had left a man missing from the bunkhouse in the morning and nobody able to say who had known him. He wrote it down, at first in a notebook, and then in the quick, blunt letters that he sent his father. James, who was an old hand at sending a message to somebody who needed it, put it on the wire to the Ledger's western chapter in his own code, and an old detective in Oakland, the same who had admired his sister's card files, wrote back that a good deal of what the book knew about the south of the valley it knew from a roughneck. It was, as the family put it, the only intelligence report in the Ledger that smelled of diesel. He worked in the field for thirty-six years. He went to the North Slope of Alaska in 1975, when the pipeline was being laid, and spent two winters on a rig where the air froze the inside of the nose, and he came back thinner, richer and with a lasting respect for the thermos. He worked the offshore platforms off Long Beach, the old fields at Coalinga and Santa Maria, and for a season the Texas Gulf. When the oil bust came in the middle of the eighties and the price of crude fell through the floor, he was laid off with eleven hundred other men in the same week, and spent the winter at his mother's house in the suburbs, putting up shelves, repairing the roof and teaching a nephew of the street to read a pressure gauge. He was back at work by the next spring, on a contract to a refinery at Martinez, and later in the turnarounds that took the Bay Area refineries apart and put them together again every few years. He was never married, and he said, when pressed, that he had been courting the road, and that it had been the better company. His father died in 2000, and his mother ten years later, and in those years he did what a son does, which was to come on Sundays. Edna, who did the crossword in ink, would hand him the paper and ask for a six-letter word for a thing that holds up a roof, and he would think about it, and say that it was a rafter. He and Doris, who had been given their father's sounder, kept the western pages of the Ledger between them, she as the indexer and he as the one who knew where the places were. On the morning of the attacks of September 2001 he was on a refinery shutdown across the bay, and the whole crew stood in the yard looking at a wall of cloud on a television in the foreman's truck, and then went back to the work, because a refinery in the middle of a shutdown cannot be left. He retired in 2012, with a bad shoulder, a good pension and a gold watch that he gave away. He is living today in a flat in the south of the city, with a window on the airport and a drawer of old maps, and on Sundays he drives his sister to church and waits in the truck. Clifford Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the roughneck of the western wire, the big cousin from the oil fields who saw the dark leases that nobody else would work after sunset and who always wrote it down. In the Slayerverse he stands for the labouring Thornes of the White Ledger, the ones who were never called, who walked the remote ground by night with a pipe wrench instead of a pistol, and who proved that a good report from a lonely place is worth more to a hunter than any weapon.