Lewis Eaton

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

Lewis Eaton was born in 1866 in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, and lived sixty-seven years as a dockworker on the wharves and railway landings of the lower Mississippi. He was born to no hunting house and he was not a vampire slayer, but in 1892 he married one, the seamstress and slayer Nettie Thorne, of the Proctor line and the White Ledger, and they raised two sons, Benjamin Eaton Proctor and Lewis Proctor, neither of whom was called. He died in 1933 of a long illness, aged sixty-seven. He never carried a pistol, a craft or an alias, and he was shy of the whole business. But for forty years he handled freight that other men were afraid to touch, carried crates for the Ledger under cover of the wharf, and stood between his wife and the river with a cargo hook, and the family remembers him as the big, slow, reliable man who did the lifting. Algiers in 1866 was a railway and shipyard town on the west bank, facing the city across a mile of brown water, and was known for its drydock, its ferry and its long levee of sheds and warehouses. It was a working place, poor, noisy and cheerful, with its own churches, its own politicians and a fine contempt for the city on the other shore. The Eatons were river people, boatmen and deck hands and pilots of small craft, and the family papers do not connect them to the Charles Eaton who married into the Faulkners a generation earlier, although the two families used, in their kitchens, the same short, flat phrases for bad water. Lewis's father worked the drydock as a caulker. His mother took in washing and sold fish on Saturdays, and the boy, who was the fourth of six, grew up on the batture, among the cypress logs, barrel staves and discarded ship's rope, which he learned to splice at eight. He was a big child. By twelve he was larger than his father, with a pair of hands like shovels, a wide, calm, sunburned face and a voice so deep that it came as a surprise to people who had not yet seen him. He was also, which is less common in large boys, extremely gentle. He brought home stray dogs, and he was incapable of finishing a fight. He went to school for four winters, in a one-room schoolhouse by the drydock, and learned to read and cipher, and at fourteen he went to work on the wharf, as a trucker, hauling bales of cotton and sacks of sugar down the gangplanks on a two-wheeled hand cart. It was hard, hot, dangerous work, and he took to it at once. He was paid by the day and usually cheated by the week, and he said that the only real pleasure of it was that nobody on a wharf ever asked a man to explain himself. By twenty he was a full longshoreman, a stower and a hook-man on the Algiers and the Poydras Street landings, and known to every foreman from the cotton press to the banana wharf. He could swing a hundred-and-fifty-pound sack onto a pile in a single movement and stack a hundred bales of hay in a day without a drop of sweat. He was slow. He was so slow, in fact, that strangers mistook him for stupid, and this was of great use to him in later years. A man who is thought to be stupid is not watched. He stood on the wharf, in the heat of the afternoon, and everybody who passed him spoke freely. He met his wife on a ferry. It was in the spring of 1891. A young woman in a grey dress, small, dark and sharp, with a carpetbag and a sewing basket and a very straight back, came down from Kentucky to New Orleans on a matter that she did not explain, and crossed from the foot of Canal Street to Algiers on the evening boat, to lodge with a cousin who kept a house near the railway shops. She was Nettie Thorne, the daughter of the farmer and slayer Hob Proctor Thorne, of Bourbon County, and she had been sent down by the White Ledger with a letter and a pistol to look into a matter of the docks. She stood at the rail in the dusk and looked at the water. A large man in a cap, who had been standing beside her for five minutes and had not said a word, shifted, and politely put his body between her and a pile of loose chain that was about to slide across the deck. She said that she had seen it. He said that he knew. She looked at his hands, and at his face, and asked him whether he knew a good many of the men who worked the night shift on the Algiers wharf. He said that he knew all of them. It was, in every way that mattered, the beginning of the business. She did not tell him what she was for a month. She came to the wharf in the evenings in her grey dress, sat on a cotton bale with her sewing, and talked with him, and within three weeks she had, from his plain and open replies, a clearer map of the night gangs than any report that the Ledger had ever filed. Lewis did not know that he was answering questions. He thought that she was a pleasant woman who took an interest. When she told him the truth, in June, on a bench by the ferry landing, he listened to the whole of it, and then said, in his slow voice, that he had wondered about the night of the twelfth of March, on the third pier, and what the watchman had seen. She said that what the watchman had seen was what she had come to find. He said that he had supposed so. They were married on the Saturday after Easter, in 1892, in a small church in Algiers, with her brother Alexander Thorne, who had come down by train, standing up for her, and sixty longshoremen, who had not been invited, at the back. The Ledger's White cousins were pleased, and cautious. Nettie went on hunting, in the docks and the wharf districts on both banks, and Lewis, who would not hear of being left out of the matter altogether, took the nearest thing to a share in it that a man of his size and trade could find. He carried. He was a stevedore in an age when every crate that came off a ship was somebody's business, and a crate that was marked for a fruit importer on Decatur Street could be taken off a lighter, put on a dray and carried to a house on Bayou Road without a single question. He handled the silver shot, the lamp oil, the stakes of ash and the chains. He knew which dock-masters to tip. He moved a Thorne hound from the wharf to the railway in a crate marked pianoforte. He never asked what was in a box that his wife had marked with a small cross, and she never told him, and they agreed, in the course of forty years, that this was the healthiest arrangement in the parish. Their sons came in the first years of the marriage. Benjamin Eaton Proctor was born in 1894 and Lewis Proctor in 1896, and they took the Proctor name, at their mother's request, as a form of insurance, and kept the Eaton as a middle name and a surname on the first. Neither was called. They grew up in a rented house on Pelican Avenue in Algiers, in the shadow of the drydock, with a large, silent father who could lift the two of them at once, and a small, sharp mother who went out in the evenings with her sewing basket, and they learned early that there were things that a household did not discuss. Benjamin took his father's trade. Lewis, who was thinner and quicker, went into the railway shops, and was in time a machinist. The great dock strike of 1907 closed the wharves of New Orleans for a week, in a rare union of the white and black longshoremen, and Lewis, who had sat on a committee for ten years without ever opening his mouth, was asked to speak. He stood up at a meeting hall on the Poydras landing, took off his cap, and said that there were a good many men in that hall who had worked the night shift and had seen things that they would not describe, and that he wished the owners to be reminded that the docks were not a safe place at night, and that the men who worked them should be paid for it. He sat down. The hall was silent for a moment, and then applauded. It was the longest speech that anybody had heard from him, and he was paid, the following week, a third more. The Great War took both of his sons. Benjamin went to the army as a sergeant of engineers, and Lewis as a machinist in the railway shops at Algiers, and both came back. Storyville, the district across the river, was closed in 1917, and the wharves, which had long kept the place in business, were quiet for a month. The influenza arrived in October of the following year, and he went down to the Algiers landing every morning for three weeks with a sling and a cart, to carry the dead to the boat. He did not speak of it, and he never afterward ate fish. The illness began in 1929, in the lungs, from the dust of the cotton sheds and the years of lifting, and he lay in the house on Pelican Avenue for the last four years of his life, with the window open to the ferry whistle. He was visited by the wharf foremen, who sat in the kitchen in their caps, and by the hunters of the Ledger, who sat in the parlour. He died in the autumn of 1933, at sixty-seven, with his wife holding his hand, and the ferry, at the hour of the funeral, blew its whistle three times, which it was not supposed to do. Lewis Eaton is remembered in the Proctor family as the big, slow man of the Algiers landing, who carried the crates and kept the door. In the Slayerverse he stands for the labourers of the White Ledger, the stevedores and teamsters who were never named in the book, who moved its weapons and its hunters across a city by the simple habit of being trusted, and who proved that there is no cover so good as a large man going quietly about his work.