Helen Sewall

Spouse of Edward Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

The Peabody Hotel, in Memphis, sent down eleven hundred pieces of linen to the laundry every morning, and for nine years in the nineteen-thirties and forties a tall young woman named Helen Sewall knew where every one of them was. She was born in 1917 at Memphis, Tennessee, and lived eighty-five years as a laundress in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, a woman of the Proctor bloodline who was never a hunter and who served the White Ledger with soap, steam and a very good memory. In 1942 she married the railway clerk Edward Thorne, and they raised two children, Joseph Thorne, who became a vampire slayer, and Gladys Proctor Thorne, who did not. She belonged to no great house, and the family book gives her no alias or craft. She died in 2002 of cancer, aged eighty-five. The Thornes remember her as the laundress who could tell, from a pillowcase, where a man had slept and what had slept beside him. Memphis in 1917 was the biggest cotton market in the world, a river city of warehouses, compresses and brick factors' offices on Front Street, with the bluffs above the Mississippi, the music on Beale Street and, in the autumn of that year, a great many young men in new uniforms waiting at the depot for trains to the camps. The Sewalls lived on the north side, in a shotgun house with a pecan tree, and kept a hand laundry. The papers of the Ledger do not name her parents, and say only that her mother had come into the work through a Proctor great-aunt who had laid her linen out, in the year of the yellow fever, in the Tennessee manner, and had never forgotten what she had seen in the wash water. It was a small, plain, level household, with a great deal of starch in it. Helen was the oldest of three. She was a long, fair, quick-footed child, who learned her letters on the laundry tickets and her sums on the day's takings, and who could, at six, sort a basket of mixed wash by owner without looking at the marks. She was not a quiet girl. She had a sharp tongue, which she kept for the foolish, and a soft heart, which she kept for the sick, and she never in her life passed a lost dog or a hungry boy. In the great flood of 1927, when the river rose over the bottomland and the refugees filled the church halls of the city, she was ten, and she carried blankets from the laundry cart to the tent camp at the fairgrounds every day for three weeks, until her mother had to tie her to the table to make her eat. The Ledger entered her life by degrees. She was told by her mother, at thirteen, in the steam of the back room, that a family of her kin kept a book, that the book had once been a very important thing and that the work was still done. She was not called to it. She had not the stillness, and she said so. What she had was a nose. A laundress, in her mother's view, was the best-placed woman in any town, since every household sent its sheets to someone, and the sheets told the truth. A man who slept badly had a particular stain. A man who did not sleep at all, and who sent his linen out unused, with the creases still sharp, was another matter, and Helen, who learned these tells as other girls learned hymns, was able by sixteen to point to a certain gentleman's laundry, which came to the shop every Thursday by messenger from a house on Adams Avenue, and say that she did not care to touch it. She went to work at eighteen at the Peabody, in the basement laundry, where a hundred women worked in steam and noise under a matron, and where she rose in four years to the head of the table-linen room. It was hard, hot work, ten hours a day, for a wage that was barely enough, but the Peabody was the best of its kind in the South, and the laundry was a small republic with its own songs, its own feuds and its own news, and Helen, who had a gift for people, was happy there. She learned to take out a wine stain with salt and a lemon, and a blood stain with cold water and patience. She learned to tell, from the stains, which of the guests had been hurt, and which had hurt someone. The great ducks of the hotel fountain, which were marched down every morning in a procession, were no more interesting to her than the sheets. She met Edward Thorne in the spring of 1941, in the Illinois Central yard, where he had come to trace a lost shipment of table linen, and where she had come to claim it. He was a round, pink, cheerful young man of twenty-two, with a notebook and a manner, and she told him, in front of his superintendent, that a railway that could lose a hundred tablecloths could lose a President. He agreed with her. He said, with every appearance of sincerity, that he would see to it personally. He did, and delivered the tablecloths himself, in a hired truck, the next morning, and the hotel's matron, who had been told a good deal about him, said that the man was either a fool or in love, and in either case unlikely to be dangerous. They were married in the spring of 1942, in the church that her mother attended, and she wore a dress that she had washed and pressed herself, which was thought a great joke. She went with him to New Orleans, to an apartment on Bayou Road, near his father and his brother Norman, and found work at once in a laundry on Esplanade. The city was full of soldiers, and the laundries were swamped. Her son Joseph Thorne was born in 1943, in the middle of the war, a dark, level-eyed baby who looked like his uncle and who grew up into a slayer of the White Ledger. She took the baby to the laundry in a basket. Her daughter Gladys Proctor Thorne was born in 1947, a laughing, fair child who took after her father, and who in her adult life helped run a church kitchen, a flower fund and, by a long and accidental road, the entire cousinhood of the Thornes. The family returned to Memphis in 1954, when her mother failed and Edward transferred to the freight house, and Helen went back to the Peabody, which hired her without a word, as though she had been gone a week. She stayed until 1979. She ran the table linen room for the last twenty of those years and trained, in that time, some three hundred girls, most of whom were, by her own estimate, of use. She took in the Ledger's wash, besides, which arrived at the house in boxes from cousins in four states. She read them, as she read all things, by the hem and the stain. In her time she warned off two hunters, saved a third and once, in 1962, sent her son a pillowcase with a single word pencilled in the corner, which he later said had been worth a month of surveillance. Her years were not all easy. She nursed her mother through a long decline, lost a sister in the Korean War years to the sickness that came back from the camps and buried her mother in 1958 with the stern, steady face of a woman who has done it before. She did not complain. She was a believer in the efficacy of a hot iron and a straight back. In the Vietnam years, when Joseph was on the road for the Ledger and Gladys was in a teachers' college, she kept the house in Memphis as a kind of unofficial depot, with a clean bed, a hot supper and a lamp in the window for any member of the family who happened to be passing through, and a good many were. She was widowed in 1994, when Edward fell on the back steps, and she bore it with a dry, practical grief, doing the sheets, as she said, because there was nothing else to do. She lived on for eight years in the house on the north side. In the last, she was ill with cancer, and kept it from the neighbours, and the sheets from the sickroom, which she insisted on washing herself, were the whitest the family had ever seen. She died in the early spring of 2002, at eighty-five, with her daughter beside her and the window open. Her son Joseph, who came from the road to sit with her in the last month, sat on the end of the bed and said nothing, which she said was just what she wanted. Helen Sewall is remembered in the Proctor family as the laundress who read a household's secrets in its sheets, the tall woman of the Peabody basement who could take any stain out of any cloth. In the Slayerverse she stands for the washerwomen and linen-keepers of the White Ledger, the ones who never lifted a pistol and who kept the cloth clean and the cousins warned, because a sheet, as she liked to say, cannot tell a lie.