Joseph Proctor Thorne

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

Joseph Proctor Thorne was born in 1888 at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the son of two hunters, and became in his turn a man of the family who did not hunt. He lived sixty-five years as a telegraph operator in New Orleans. His father was the cattle drover and vampire slayer Alexander Thorne, The Bitter Warden, and his mother the laundress and slayer Harriet Bartlett, The Grey Quill, and his younger brother was Alexander Proctor Thorne. In 1912 he married the seamstress Martha Pinkney, and they had two sons, Norman Thorne, who became a slayer, and Edward Thorne, who did not. Joseph died in 1953 of a stroke, aged sixty-five. He belonged to the House of Thorne and to the Proctor Ledger through his grandmother Minnie Proctor Thorne's line, and the family remembers him as the operator who kept a Thorne at the key of the New Orleans wire through two wars and a flood, and as the man who made sure that the wire was never left unattended. Baton Rouge in 1888 was a small state capital on a bluff above the Mississippi, with a statehouse that looked like a castle, a cattle market on the edge of town and a great many drovers. It was where the herds from the Attakapas prairies and the piney woods were brought for shipping, and where a man who could hold a thousand head on a road and not lose a cow was worth what he asked. Alexander Thorne, a big, fair, slow-moving Kentuckian of twenty-one, who had come south from his father's farm in Bourbon County with a pack of hounds and a pair of spurs, was one of them. He had met Harriet Bartlett, a laundress from the Delta, at a boarding house on Laurel Street, in the spring of 1887, and married her within the year. She was a tall, dark, sardonic woman of twenty-seven, with forearms like a stevedore's, who took in the washing of half the drovers and had, on the side, a peculiar talent for finding what they had lost. She was delivered of her first son in a room above the laundry, in the first week of July, in a heat that stopped the clocks. He was a thin, pale, watchful baby, with his father's fair hair and his mother's frown, and he was named for a Proctor uncle on his grandmother's side and, in a manner of speaking, for the White Ledger that the Proctor connection had brought into the house. The surname Thorne was his father's. The family, who were of the Kentucky Thornes, the hound-keepers and reivers, expected him to take to the hounds. He did not. He liked the dogs well enough, and they liked him, but when his father led him out to the kennel at four and put a puppy in his hands, he looked at the dog, looked at his father and asked, in a small and perfectly clear voice, what the puppy was thinking. It was not a question that a drover was able to answer. He put the child down and went to tell his wife. It was a household of hunters, and he grew up in it. His father was away for weeks at a time, on the trail from the prairie with a herd, and came home smelling of dust and cattle, with a story and a pistol, and his mother, who took in laundry by day and went out by night, did the things for which a laundress was uniquely fitted. She could find out, from a shirt, a good deal about its wearer. She knew, from the collar, where a man had been sleeping, from the stains what he had eaten and from the smell of the river on his cuff what he had seen. She began, when her son was six, to teach him. He learned to sort a bundle of washing by eye. He learned, more usefully, to keep silent, to watch the wearer and to remember what he had seen. But he did not learn to shoot. In the year that he turned eleven, his mother, who had been watching for a sign, put a pistol in his hand in the yard and stood back. He held it like a teacup. She did not say anything, and took it gently from him, and he knew that she had known. His father died in 1900, at thirty-three, when he was twelve. The family papers, which are exact about the hunting, are plain about this. They say that Alexander Thorne died in the spring of that year, at thirty-three, and record no more, which in a Thorne house is a kind of statement. The boy was told only that his father had gone to the drove and had not come home, and he carried that for the rest of his life. His mother closed the laundry, took the boy and his eight-year-old brother, and went to New Orleans, to a sister, in a house in the Irish Channel with a gallery and a mangle. She began again. She was a hunter in her own right, The Grey Quill, a name for a woman who wrote her warnings in a clear hand on the lining of a collar, and she hunted for forty more years, on the river front and in the wash houses of the Channel, where a laundress could go anywhere. It was the telegraph that took her elder son. He had gone at fourteen to work as a messenger boy for the Western Union in the Gravier Street office, in a cap and a pair of boots too big for him, carrying telegrams through the Quarter for ten cents a trip. It was a hard, quick, cheerful life. He learned the streets, the names and a good many of the secrets of the city, and he learned to read the sounder. The instrument in the back office, on a mahogany base, ticked all day in a manner that seemed to him more lively than any conversation. A senior operator, a gentle, deaf old man named Gilmore, who had been sending for forty years, noticed that the boy was listening and put him at a practice key. He took to it at once. In two years he was an operator, and at seventeen the youngest in the office. He knew the retired operator Benjamin Faulkner by fist, which is to say by the peculiar touch of his sending, which any operator on the line could recognise at a mile. The old man, who had retired in 1915, was still spoken of on the wire, and it was said of him that he had sent a good many things that were not prices. Joseph took the hint, and in the course of a winter made himself useful to the cousins of the Red Ledger as the old operator had done. He was not told what the messages meant. He kept the wire open, at night, in the small hours, for the hunters who needed to warn the cousins up the river or down the bayou, and he never once left the key. He met his wife in the spring of 1911. Martha Pinkney, a seamstress from the Marigny, was nineteen, small, dark, freckled and very particular, who worked in a dress shop on Canal Street and who came to the telegraph office one wet Friday to send a message to her mother in Thibodaux. She wrote it out in a beautiful hand. He counted the words and told her the charge. She said that it was a great deal for a single sentence, and he said that he would gladly send it for nothing if she would tell him what it said. It said, she told him, that she was getting on well. They were married in 1912, at St Mary's, with his mother in the front pew in a grey dress that she had made herself and had refused to let anyone else press. Their sons came in the first years. Norman Thorne was born in 1915 and lived until 2005, a stern, dark, silent boy who took to his grandmother Harriet and was called in 1949, at thirty-four, to the work of a slayer. Edward Thorne was born in 1918, in the same month as a bad influenza epidemic, and lived until 1994, a cheerful, round-faced, easy child who had no hunting in him at all and was, his father said, the better for it. The brothers were devoted. Joseph brought both up in a small house in the Marigny, with a sounder on the kitchen shelf, and taught them Morse before they could read, as Benjamin Faulkner had done for his own children. It was a custom that ran in the operators of the city, and in the family, he said, there was precedent. His own brother, Alexander Proctor Thorne, who had left for San Antonio and a post there, married, in 1916, Adriana Navarro, and wrote to him every Christmas by wire, at the special rate. The Great War, the soldiers who filled the city and the long years after made the Western Union office, which had been a small room, into a great one. By 1920 Joseph was a chief operator, and by 1930 a supervisor, with twenty-six men under him and a salary that just kept up with the price of shoes. In the Depression years the traffic fell, rose and fell again, and he kept his men on the payroll by a system of rotas that he designed himself. In 1927, when the Mississippi flooded and the wire out of the city was down for three days, he took a crew of four to the Metairie road and mended the line in the rain, from a canoe, and is said to have sent the first message that went out that week, which was a request for coffee. Martha died in the winter of 1943, at fifty-two, of a sudden collapse at her pressing table, and he was a widower for ten years. He went on working through the war years, when the city filled again with soldiers, until his retirement in 1951. His son Norman, who was called and married to Josephine Delacroix in 1937, lived nearby with his wife, and his son Edward, a railway clerk with the Illinois Central freight office, in an apartment on Bayou Road. Both came to supper on Sundays. Joseph was a silent, courteous, slightly stooped old man by then, with a white moustache and a little cough, and a way of tapping the table with one finger, in a pattern that his sons recognised as the old code, when he wanted the salt. He taught it to his grandchildren, who took it for a game. He died in the autumn of 1953, at sixty-five, of a stroke, in his chair by the window, with the radio on. The newspaper on his lap was folded open at the cotton prices. The finger of his right hand, when they found him, was resting on the arm of the chair, and it was said by his sons, who were both of them in the room, that it tapped, once, twice, and then, very quietly, stopped. Joseph Proctor Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as the telegraph operator who kept the New Orleans wire open for the Ledger through two wars and a flood, the son of a drover and a laundress who chose a key where his parents had chosen a pistol. In the Slayerverse he stands for the signalmen and clerks of the House of Thorne, the ones who never took the field and whose steady hands held the line that joined the hunters to each other in the dark.