Lloyd Stone

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

Lloyd Stone was born in 1915 in Phoenix, Arizona, and lived seventy-three years as a streetcar conductor and later a bus operator on the lines of that city. In 1941 he married the boarding-house keeper Norma Proctor Thorne, a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, known to the family book as The Long Lantern, and they had one daughter, Adriana Proctor, born in 1944, who became a nurse and was not called. Lloyd was not a hunter and belonged to no house; the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated. He married into the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and into the House of Thorne through his wife's father, and he outlived Norma by thirty-nine years. He died in 1988 of pneumonia, aged seventy-three. The Proctors remember him as the conductor who rang the last bell of his wife's life without knowing it was the last, and who then spent four decades making sure that the daughter she left behind was never short of a hand to hold. Phoenix in 1915 was a small, bright, dusty town of about fifteen thousand people, laid out in a grid on the floor of the Salt River valley, with canals, citrus groves and cotton fields at the edges, and a line of electric streetcars running down the middle of its main streets. Lloyd's father was a ginner at one of the cotton gins that fed the long-staple boom of the war years, and his mother kept chickens and rented a room. They lived on the south side, near the tracks, and the sound of his childhood was the clang of the cars and the ring of the conductor's bell. He was a fair, sunburned, easy-going boy with a habit of whistling, who could not pass a streetcar without watching how the conductor worked the fare box, and who at nine, as a family story has it, was found aboard a Grand Avenue car at the end of the line with a nickel in his fist, asking to be shown the controller. He left school in the Depression, at seventeen, and was taken on by the street railway in 1933 as a trackman, laying ties and cleaning switches in the summer heat, until a conductor fell ill and he was handed a cap and a change-maker. It was the best job he ever had. A conductor on a Phoenix car in the thirties had the run of the town. He stood on the rear platform, with a bell cord in one hand and a punch in the other, and called the stops, helped the ladies up, made change for the miners coming in from the hills and kept, on a long summer evening, a small, genial order among the passengers. He learned who rode where and at what hour. He learned the cattlemen, the clerks, the doctors, the girls from the cotton exchange and the old women who rode out to the end of the line for the air. In the Depression years, when the line ran half its cars and a nickel was a great deal of money, he let a good many children ride free, and the company, which noticed, said nothing. He met his wife on the Van Buren line in the autumn of 1940. Norma Proctor Thorne was nineteen, a tall, thin, composed young woman in a grey coat, who kept a boarding house for railway men and travelling salesmen on a side street near the depot and who rode the car each morning to the market, with a basket. She paid her fare in exact change, every day, and sat in the same seat, the second on the left, and on the fifth morning, when he was making his way down the aisle, she looked up and said that he had a very good voice for calling stops, and that she would be glad if he would call the one for Washington Street a little louder, since the old gentleman in the corner could not hear. He called it louder. The old gentleman, who was a retired judge, got off at the right stop for the first time in a month. She laughed. They were married in 1941, in a small church downtown, with her father Alexander Proctor Thorne, a telegraph operator for the Southern Pacific, giving her away, and her mother Adriana, a seamstress of the Navarro house, who had made the dress. The Thornes and the Navarros were a family of hunters, and Lloyd came into it by marriage, as a conductor comes into a town, by watching. He had known for a year that there was something about his wife that was not in the ordinary line, a way of going quiet at the sound of a particular bell, a trunk in the back room that she kept locked. She told him in the summer of 1945. She had been called that spring, on a lonely road outside Tempe, at night, in a borrowed car, when a coach came down the road from nowhere with a driver in the box and no one inside. She had stopped, and watched, and it had gone. She sat across the kitchen table from him and recited, in the even tones of a woman reading the minutes of a meeting, what the Ledger was and what it meant. He asked her whether she was afraid. She said that she was, rather, and that it was a good sign. He said that he would see to the boarding house. She became The Long Lantern, a Detective, in the White Ledger's sense of the word, a hunter who goes by questions and by documents, and her craft was Seal and Sanction, a thing she had learned by post from her father's mother, the Kentucky laundress Harriet Bartlett, The Grey Quill, the art of lifting a seal without breaking it and obtaining the formal leave that lets a hunter through a door. She rode the Van Buren cars to her work, and Lloyd, who knew who rode what, gave her what he knew. He told her which stops had been quiet for a week and which had had a stranger, which conductor had seen a passenger who did not pay and who did not leave. It was the conductor's intelligence, the commonplace knowledge of a man who sees the whole town go by in a day, and she said that it was worth more than a pistol. He kept the lantern in the window of the boarding house, a plain oil lamp that she had found in a junk shop, and trimmed it every evening, and was the only person in the household who was permitted to light it. Adriana Proctor was born in 1944, in the front bedroom, in a night of such heat that the midwife fainted, and the child, who was dark and round-faced and silent, was laid on her father's chest for an hour and slept. Norma was called the following year, and Adriana's earliest memories were of her mother at the table with a magnifying glass, of the smell of sealing wax and of a tall man in a blue cap whistling in the kitchen. Her grandmother Adriana Navarro lived across town, and her grandfather Alexander was in the habit of sending a telegram to the child on every birthday, in rhyme, at the special rate. In the spring of 1949, on a lonely road in the hills east of the city, Norma was ambushed, and she died. She was twenty-eight. She had gone out at dusk to look at a ranch house where a thing was said to be sheltering, and was set upon on the road home, and her cousin, the New Orleans carpenter Norman Thorne, who had been called to the work himself that same year, wrote that she had left a clear and exact account of the whole affair on the seat of her car, in her own hand, with the seal unbroken. Lloyd was brought the news on the step of his bus, at the depot. He took off his cap. He finished the run, because there were passengers aboard, and called every stop, and at the end of the line he got off, sat down on the kerb, and wept. A woman from the line, a stranger, came and sat beside him and said nothing. The streetcars had stopped running the year before, and he said afterwards that it seemed a poor thing that his wife should have outlasted them by so little. He raised his daughter in the house by the depot, with the help of her grandparents, and kept the boarding house, with a good many railway men, for another twelve years. The cars stopped in 1948, and he went to the buses, but the family went on calling him the conductor, and he did not mind. Alexander Proctor Thorne, who lived on until 1974, sat with Adriana on summer evenings, teaching her Morse. Adriana Navarro died in 1953, and it was Lloyd who saw her out. In the Korean War years, when the airfield east of the city was full of young pilots and the town overflowed, he fed them. Adriana grew up quiet and capable and became a nurse, and was never called, and her father, who had been prepared for the contrary, said only that he was glad. In the Vietnam years he retired from the buses, at sixty, with a gold watch and a pension, and took to sitting on the porch at dusk with the lantern lit. He died of pneumonia in the winter of 1988, in a hospital bed, with his daughter in her nurse's uniform at the foot of it, giving orders to the staff. His last words, the ward sister said, were of the stops, the ones that he had called for forty years, in order, softly, from the depot to the end of the line. Lloyd Stone is remembered in the Proctor family as the conductor who called the stops of a hunter's life and kept the lantern lit in the window, the husband who asked what he could do and then did it. In the Slayerverse he stands for the spouses of the White Ledger who never took the field, who knew the town better than the hunters did, and who proved that a steady voice on a rear platform can be as much a part of the long war as a stake.