Edward Thorne

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

Edward Thorne was born in 1918 at Birmingham, Alabama, and lived seventy-six years as a railway clerk in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, a Thorne of the Proctor line who was not called to hunt and who was, his father said, the better for it. He was the younger son of the telegraph operator Joseph Proctor Thorne and the seamstress Martha Pinkney, and the brother of the vampire slayer Norman Thorne. In 1942 he married the laundress Helen Sewall, and they raised two children, Joseph Thorne, who became a slayer, and Gladys Proctor Thorne, who did not. Edward belonged to the House of Thorne, the border reivers and hound-keepers whose name had come down through Kentucky, and to the White Ledger through his Proctor grandmother. He died in 1994 of a fall, aged seventy-six. He kept freight books for the Illinois Central for forty-one years, and the family remembers him as the cheerful clerk who never once misdirected a car, a letter or an argument. He was born in Birmingham by a railwayman's accident. In the autumn of 1918 his father, who was a chief operator at the Western Union office in New Orleans, was sent on loan for three months to the office at Birmingham, where the war traffic in iron, coal and steel had swamped the wire, and Martha, who was heavy with her second child and had no intention of being left behind, went with him. The boy arrived in October, in a rented room above a hardware store on Morris Avenue, in the same week that the influenza closed the schools, the churches and the theatres, and the doctor who delivered him wore a gauze mask and said that he had never seen a baby so unconcerned. He was round, pink and loud. His brother Norman, three years old, regarded him with a stony eye, and said, as the family tells it, that he would do. They were back in New Orleans by Christmas. He grew up in the Marigny, in a small house with a sounder on the kitchen shelf, and from the beginning he was a different kind of child from Norman. Norman was stern, dark and silent, and went about with his grandmother Harriet Bartlett, who was a slayer and who taught him to read a collar. Edward was easy, plump and sociable, and went about with everybody. He knew the baker, the iceman and the priest, and could talk to a stranger on a streetcar for six stops and learn his name, trade and opinion of the mayor. His mother, a particular woman who had dressed the girls of Canal Street for twenty years, said that he had been born with a smile and had seen no reason to put it down. His father, who had been braced for a second hunter, took one look at him and was visibly relieved. He was told what the family did when he was twelve, and he took it as he took most things, with good humour and a great many questions. He did not ask whether it was true. He asked whether his brother would be all right, and when his father said that he was not able to promise it, Edward went away and thought about it for an afternoon, and came back and asked what he could do. It was the right question. His father, who understood it perfectly, gave him the answer that the Thornes had given to the same question for three generations. He could keep the house in order, keep the peace and keep the books. A hunter, said the old operator, is a man who goes out, and he needs someone who is there when he comes home. He went to work at seventeen, in the freight offices of the Illinois Central at the Poydras Street terminal, as a junior clerk, copying waybills. It was the same sort of room that had once held Aristide Delacroix, a great dim hall with a hundred desks and a clock that ran slow, and Edward, who was a better talker than a copyist, was moved after a year to the tracing desk, where lost cars were followed up and down the line. He turned out to be extraordinarily good at it. He could find a boxcar of cotton between Memphis and New Orleans by ringing six people, none of whom he had met, and in half an hour he would know the name of the stationmaster's wife. The Illinois Central, which valued such talent, gave him a raise. His father, who had one eye on the Ledger, gave him a quiet word, and from that year on, in the margins of the freight books, in a small private mark, Edward noted the cars that carried what they should not. He met Helen Sewall in the spring of 1941, at Memphis, where he had gone to the central yards to trace a missing consignment. It was, he said, an entirely professional visit. The consignment, which proved to be four crates of table linen for a hotel, had been delivered to the wrong dock, and the hotel's laundress had come down to the yard herself to demand it. She was a tall, brisk, fair young woman of twenty-three, who handled the linen of the Peabody Hotel, and she told the clerk, in front of his superintendent, that a railway that could lose a hundred tablecloths could lose a President. He said that he was entirely of her opinion and would walk her to the dock. He did. They were married in the spring of 1942, in Memphis, at her mother's church, with his father in a borrowed suit and his brother Norman, who had come up from New Orleans in a very good humour, behaving, for a whole day, exactly like a man at a wedding. They lived in an apartment on Bayou Road, in New Orleans, near his father, in the years of the war, when the city filled with soldiers and the Illinois Central ran every train it owned. He was classed as essential to the railway, and never went into the army. His son Joseph Thorne was born in 1943, a quiet, dark, level-eyed baby who looked a good deal like his uncle Norman, and who became in time a vampire slayer of the Ledger. Gladys Proctor Thorne followed in 1947, a laughing, fair child like her father, who was never called and who never wished it. The Sunday supper at the Bayou Road apartment, with Joseph the elder at the head of the table tapping the code on the cloth, and Norman and Josephine across, and the little ones underneath, was the high point of the family's week for a decade. His father died in 1953, in his chair, and Edward and Norman were in the room. The following year Edward took a transfer to Memphis, to the Illinois Central's great freight house, where he was made a chief clerk in 1958, and where he stayed for the rest of his career. He did it for Helen, whose mother was failing, and for himself, because he liked the old river city, with its cotton exchange, its railroad yards and its long yellow evenings. In the Korean War years the freight house worked round the clock, and in the Vietnam years it sent more than its share of boys to the induction centre, and Edward, who knew half of them by name, wrote to a good many of them. He was a great letter writer. He kept a drawer of his replies, and there were said to be, at the end, six hundred. Helen's work was done in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, and at the great hotel, and later in the kitchen, with the wash. She took in the Ledger's linen, which came by post from cousins in three states, and found in its hems, folds and stains the sort of news that a laundress understood. Edward, who had no craft and no alias, kept the other half of the arrangement. He saw that the freight went where it was meant to go. When Joseph, who was a grave and patient young man, set out on the road in the sixties, his father put into his pocket a freight pass that was good between Memphis and the Gulf, and said, with a certain dryness, that he had arranged for a clerk at every junction. It was perfectly true. He retired in 1983, at sixty-five, and spent the next eleven years in the Memphis house with Helen, doing the crossword, writing his letters and attending, with every sign of enjoyment, the funerals of his colleagues. He was, at the end, a round, white-haired, cheerful old man, a little deaf, who said that he had never missed a train. He died in the autumn of 1994, aged seventy-six, of a fall, on the back steps, going out to put the bins at the kerb, and was found by Helen, who said that he had been smiling, and that the bins, she was glad to say, were already at the kerb. Edward Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the railway clerk who knew where everything was, the cheerful younger brother who kept the home fires and the freight books. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ones who stayed behind, the Thorne kin who were not called and who kept the house, the trains and the letters going so that the hunters had somewhere to come back to.