Joseph Thorne

Gangster slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Thorne), known as The Wild Falcon. Craft: Cross-Examination.

Joseph Thorne was born in 1943 at Memphis, Tennessee, and lived sixty-one years as a high school coach and, from 1961, as a vampire slayer of the House of Thorne. The family book knows him as The Wild Falcon and classes him as a Gangster, a hunter who works through crews, favours, protection and the wide acquaintance of a man who is useful to a great many people, and who fights with his friends before he fights with his pistol. His craft was Cross-Examination, the patient questioning of a stranger until his account of himself comes apart, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He was called in 1961, in a mill, when a shift of workers came out pale and would not speak. He was the elder child of the railway clerk Edward Thorne and the laundress Helen Sewall, and the brother of Gladys Proctor Thorne. In 1967 he married the schoolteacher Wilma Reyes, and they raised two daughters, Wilma Thorne and Teresa Thorne, both slayers. He died in 2004 of cancer, aged sixty-one. He belonged to the Proctor bloodline that keeps the White Ledger, and the family remembers that he took the roster of a football team and turned it into the best-informed network in the Deep South. He was born in Memphis because his mother insisted on it. Edward and Helen were living on Bayou Road in New Orleans in the year of the war, in a small apartment near his father, and when her time came in the spring of 1943 Helen, who would not hear of her first child arriving among strangers, took the Illinois Central to her own mother's house on the north side of the river city and was delivered there, in the front bedroom, with the pecan tree scraping the window and the hand laundry going full tilt in the back. Edward came up on the next train with a freight pass and a bag of oranges. The baby was dark, level-eyed and extremely quiet, and looked, everyone agreed, like his uncle Norman Thorne, who was in New Orleans and learned of it by telegram. He was back on Bayou Road by midsummer, and in 1954 the family moved to Memphis for good, and the boy who had been born there became, at eleven, a Memphian by habit. He grew up in a house with a clean bed for any passing cousin and a lamp in the window. His mother ran the table-linen room at the Peabody Hotel and read the Ledger's wash by its hems, and his father, who traced lost freight cars for the Illinois Central and wrote six hundred letters, had told him at twelve, as his own father had once told him, that a hunter is a man who goes out and that he needs someone at home when he comes back. The boy took it in without comment. He was a grave, patient, watchful child with a gift that no one in the family could quite place, which was that other boys followed him. He did not lead them. He asked them what they thought, and listened, and they tended to end by thinking what he did. In the long Memphis summers he ran a sandlot team of twelve on the cotton-compress lots, with a different position for every boy and a different job for every boy's father, and by fifteen he knew, among the families of the north side, who drove a truck, who ran a pool hall, who sat on the county board and who could be relied on to keep his mouth shut. He was called in 1961, at eighteen, in a mill. He had a summer job on the night shift at a cotton and cottonseed works on the river, a hot, roaring place of gins and presses, and in the third week of July the second shift came off at midnight and walked past him through the yard, forty men and women in single file, pale as candle wax, not one of them speaking. They did not look at him, or at one another. A mill hand, in the ordinary way, comes off shift loud, sweating and hungry, and these walked as people walk at a funeral. He stood at the gate and counted them, as he had counted ball players all his life, and the count was off by one. There was a man at the end of the line who threw no shadow under the yard lamp. Joseph said nothing, went home and sat in the kitchen until his mother came in from the early shift, and told her. Helen set down her handbag, took off her hat and said that she had been wondering how long it would take. The next year she sent him a pillowcase with a single word pencilled in the corner, and he said later that it had saved him a month of watching. His teacher was a retired county solicitor of the White Ledger, a dry, tall, stooping old man named Pruitt who lived on Poplar Avenue and had spent forty years in the courts of three states. He did not teach shooting, which Joseph picked up from cousins in the country. He taught questions. A creature, said Pruitt, is a liar by long habit, and a liar does not have to be fought if he can be made to contradict himself. Joseph learned to take a stranger through the plain facts of a life, where he was born, where he went to school, what he had for dinner on a given date, what the weather was on the day of the great flood, and to let the answers accumulate, politely, until a date did not fit or a name was wrong or a man who claimed to have lived at a house for forty years could not say which stair creaked. It was Cross-Examination. He practised it on his team. He could tell from the way a sixteen-year-old explained a missed practice whether the boy was lying, and by what degree, and in the last years of his life he was sometimes called in by the county sheriffs of three states to sit across from a man in an interview room and ask him to tell it again from the beginning. The rest of the work came from the crew. The Ledger classes a Gangster as a hunter who builds a following out of favours, and Joseph's crew had grown out of the sandlot team. By the time he was twenty-five there were former players in half the county courthouses, depots and filling stations of the Mid-South, a deputy in Marion, a switchman in Corinth, a nurse's aide in Jackson who could tell him which patient had come in at night with a bite, and a very large retired tackle who ran a tow truck and appeared at the scene of a hunt, without being asked, with a chain. He never explained them. He asked the boys for small things and gave them larger ones, a reference, a loan, a word with a coach, and he never forgot a birthday. The cousins gave him the alias The Wild Falcon, because his school's mascot was a falcon, and because on a hunt he was not wild in the least, and they thought it funny. He went through the university on a scholarship and into coaching, and was for thirty years a high school football and track coach in the Deep South, in Memphis, in Birmingham and, last, in Bessemer, where the mills and the rail yards still ran three shifts. It was a good job for a hunter. It put him in front of a hundred boys a year, and in front of their families, and it gave him a reason to be at a rail depot at six in the morning with a whistle. In the Vietnam years he was not drafted, being a teacher, and he spent more nights on the road than at home, with his pistol in the bag and his clipboard on the seat. In 1967 he married the schoolteacher Wilma Reyes, whom he had met in Birmingham in the autumn of 1963 at a library drive, and who read the entire Ledger in a week and told him it was a disgrace. She became his best source. He said, to the end of his life, that he had been cross-examined only once in his life by a better hand than his own, and that he had then proposed. His mother died in 2002, and he sat with her through the last month, saying nothing, which she said was exactly what she wanted. His father had gone eight years before. In 2004, in the early summer, he was himself taken down by cancer, a swift one, and he spent his last two months in the house with his wife, his daughters and a steady procession of former players who arrived in pick-up trucks with casseroles. He was entirely calm. He had given Wilma Thorne the pistol the year before and Teresa Thorne the case of silver rounds, and told them that they were to ask a question twice before they fired. His sister Gladys Proctor Thorne, who kept the books for half the cousinhood, sat with him on his last evening and read him the scores. Joseph Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as The Wild Falcon, the coach who knew every name in the county and asked the one question that a liar could not answer. In the Slayerverse he stands for the hunters who worked through people, the Gangsters of the White Ledger who built their power on favours, kindness and a good memory, and who proved that a whistle, a ledger of friends and a courteous cross-examination can hold a town against the dark as firmly as a rifle.