Effie Bradford was born in 1843 in Louisville, Kentucky, and lived fifty-five years as a farmer's wife in Bourbon County, on a tobacco and hay farm off the Maysville pike. She married the farmer and vampire slayer Hob Proctor Thorne in 1865, raised two children with him, Alexander Thorne and Nettie Thorne, both of whom became slayers, and died in 1898 of a long illness, at fifty-five, two years before her son. She was not a hunter and had no wish to be one, and she was not born into the Thorne or Proctor houses, although the Proctor Ledger counted her among its own from the day she married. Her work was the farm, and for thirty-three years the farm was, by unspoken agreement, the place in the Kentucky country where a hunter could come in from the dark, eat a decent supper, sleep in a clean bed and be gone before breakfast without anybody asking where he had been.
The best way to see her is through the year, which she ran on a fixed calendar, in a flat, exact hand, in the back of a farm diary that her granddaughter kept for a long time afterward. In January the house was shut up against the weather and the tobacco hung in the barn, and she mended. She had a mending basket the size of a washtub, in which were the torn sleeves of hunters, the split seams of saddlebags, a pair of children's boots and a great many pockets that had been cut from coats in a hurry. In February she planned. She sat at the kitchen table with the seed catalogue, the account book and a pencil, and decided how many acres of tobacco, how many of hay and how many of corn the farm could bear, and, in a separate column, how many beds the house could spare if six men arrived on the Saturday night coach. The answer to the second question was always more than anyone expected.
She came from a farm of her own. Her father, a small, brisk, plain-spoken man named Bradford, whose Christian name the papers do not give, worked a truck farm on the eastern edge of Louisville, in the low country by Beargrass Creek, growing cabbages, onions and potatoes for the town market, and she was the third of five children and the one who could be trusted with the horse. She was born in a frame house with a hen-yard, in a year of flooding. She drove the market wagon into Louisville at dawn from the age of twelve, sold the vegetables by the peck at a stall on Jefferson Street and brought the money home in a tin. It gave her a steady head for arithmetic and a cool eye for a bad bargain. She was a small, brown-haired, brisk girl, who talked as fast as she worked and who had a habit of humming a hymn tune while she counted change.
The war made her rich in a small way, and gave her her husband. Louisville, in 1861, became the great supply base of the Union army in the West, with warehouses, hospitals and camps on every side, and the truck farm on Beargrass Creek, with its cabbages and potatoes, could sell every head it grew. She took the wagon in every morning at four. She sold to sutlers and commissary sergeants and hospital matrons, and by the end of the war she had put by, in a stocking, more than her father had in the bank. It was in the last winter of the war, at a church social in the Methodist hall on Broadway, that she met a troop sergeant of Kentucky cavalry, a big, slow, fair-haired man, on a week's furlough, with a dimple in each cheek and a great deal of patience. He was standing by the wall, holding a cup of cocoa. She took it from him, refilled it and asked him his business.
He said that he was a farmer, and that he intended to be one again. She said that she had supposed so, from the way that he looked at the cocoa pot, as if it might be planted. He laughed. It was not a usual sound, she learned afterward, for a Thorne, and she was pleased with it. They saw each other for the rest of the week, walked out on the Sunday and were engaged before he went back to his regiment, and he wrote her one letter a fortnight, always in the same neat hand, about the weather, the horses and his father's opinion of the army. They were married in the spring of 1865, after his discharge, in her father's parlour.
She had been told, before the wedding. It was a point of honour with the Thornes that a wife should know, and Hob, who was a slow talker and thorough, had taken her out to the barn one evening in March, sat her down on a nail keg and told her the whole of it, in about a quarter of an hour, while she shelled peas. She listened. She said, at the end, that she supposed it was no odder than some of the things that happened to cattle, and she asked whether there would be many to supper. He said that it depended. She said that she would like to know, in future, by the Thursday.
The farm was a good one, and she made it a better. It lay in Bourbon County, a few miles from the Maysville pike, on forty acres of good limestone loam, with a tobacco barn, a hay barn, a half-built house and a spring. Hob had bought it with his discharge pay and her stocking. They set about it together, and she took to it at once. She planted the vegetable garden in the first week. She bought a cow, a dozen hens and a sow. She put up a clothes line, a smoke house and a cellar for roots. The house, which had two rooms and a loft, became, in the course of three years, a long, low, comfortable place with a porch, eleven beds and a kitchen big enough to seat a company of cavalry. She said that she would not have a house in which a person could not be given a meal.
The children came in the first years. Alexander Thorne was born in 1867 and Nettie Thorne in 1870, and they grew up, as their mother said, among tobacco leaves, hounds and hunters' boots. Alexander was a big, fair, slow-moving child who took to his father's hounds and to the mud, and Nettie was dark, small and sharp, with her mother's brisk tongue and a habit of going through other people's saddlebags for the joy of finding out. Both were called in time to be vampire slayers of the Thorne line, and she watched the calling come to each of them, at the kitchen table, with a spoon in her hand. She did not try to stop either. She said that she had not been asked. She said that she was, however, going to be consulted about their dinners.
She kept the farm going through every year of it. She did the accounts, which were better than her husband's. She hired the help, for the planting and for the cutting, and was a fair and exacting employer, who paid on Saturdays and stood no nonsense. She drove to Lexington every week of the last winter of her father-in-law Callum Thorne's life, in 1896, with a basket and a clean shirt, and sat with the old man and his last hound behind the shop, since he would not be moved. She fed, in thirty-three years, she reckoned, some four thousand hunters. She never took a cent. She said that the Ledger could send her a sack of flour at Christmas, which it did.
She was ill for a long time. The family does not say what it was, only that it began in the autumn of 1895 and lasted three years, and that she bore it with her usual composure. She did the farm accounts until the last month. She kept the diary. She put her daughter at the kitchen table and taught her the books, and she had the piano brought down from the loft so that she could hear it from her bed. She died in the spring of 1898, at fifty-five, in the front bedroom, with the window open on the tobacco field, and was buried on the farm, at the edge of the hay meadow, where the old hounds lie.
Her husband, who had said little all his life and less now, walked out to the barn the night she died and stood there for some time among the horses. Her son Alexander, who had come in from a hunt with his coat still wet, carried her coffin, and her daughter Nettie, who was twenty-seven, hunted for nine months afterward without once going home. Her diary, which ended in the middle of a sentence about the price of hay, was kept on the kitchen shelf.
Effie Bradford is remembered in the Proctor family as the farmer's wife of Bourbon County, the woman who had supper ready by the Thursday. In the Slayerverse she stands for the wives and mothers of the White Ledger, who did not hunt and were never on any tally, and without whose kitchens, clean beds and plain good sense the long war against the dark could never have been sustained.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
