Norman Thorne

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Thorne), known as The True Crook. Craft: Ledger Recall.

Norman Thorne was born in 1915 at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lived ninety years as a carpenter in New Orleans and, from 1949, as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. He was the elder son of the telegraph operator Joseph Proctor Thorne and the seamstress Martha Pinkney, and the brother of Edward Thorne, and in 1937 he married the typist and slayer Josephine Delacroix. They had no children. The family book knows him as The True Crook, a name that sets a shepherd's honest hook against a rogue's, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by questions, records and patient comparison and would rather be told a thing than find it out the hard way. His craft was Ledger Recall, the trained memory that holds the whole of a Ledger, its names, dates, sightings and cautions, in the head, so that a hunter can answer in the dark a question that would take a clerk an hour in the light. His gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He died in 2005 of old age, aged ninety. He was a Thorne by name, of the border hound-keepers who came to Kentucky and Louisiana, and a Proctor by the line of his great-grandmother Minnie, and he was the last of the Thornes of his generation to put down a hammer. His birthplace was an accident of the calendar and a small family scheme. Joseph and Martha lived in the Marigny, in a house with a sounder on the kitchen shelf, but in the last month of her pregnancy Martha, who was twenty-four and nervous, was sent upriver to Baton Rouge, to a cousin of the drover Alexander Thorne, a widow named Mrs Lacour who kept the same boarding house on Laurel Street where Norman's grandparents had met in 1887. It was a hot, stormy spring and the railway was washed out for two days, so that his father, coming up by a slow relief train, arrived on the wrong side of the birth. The child was a long, silent baby with dark eyes who did not cry. He was taken home to New Orleans at six weeks and spent the rest of his life correcting people who said that he was a Baton Rouge man. He was, he said, a Marigny man who had been delivered upriver for his health. He was a stern, dark, silent boy who took after his grandmother Harriet. She was the laundress Harriet Bartlett, The Grey Quill, who lived to eighty-four and who looked at a child as she looked at a bundle, to see what was in it. She taught him the small attentions of a hunter without ever calling them that. Every Sunday afternoon, in the kitchen, she would put a tray of twenty objects on the table, a thimble, a key, a pocket watch, a button, a spoon, and let him look at it for a minute, and then cover it and ask him what was there. By the age of eight he could name them all. By ten, in any order, with the dates on the coins. She told him that a person who could remember a thing was worth three who could write it down, because a ledger could be burned and a head could not, and he took the lesson very seriously, as he took everything. His father taught him Morse before he could read, and his mother taught him to thread a needle, and he turned to wood. At sixteen, in 1931, he was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker on Esplanade, a Frenchman with one good eye and a brusque manner, who put him to planing boards for a year before he allowed him a chisel. It was the right school. A carpenter must measure twice and remember both numbers, and Norman, who never forgot a figure, was soon the shop's reference. The Depression years were short of work, and when the cabinetmaker's trade fell off he took up house carpentry, working with a crew on the shotgun cottages of the Seventh Ward and the Bywater, repairing galleries and raising floors that the damp had taken. He was good. He had a dry, exact, unemotional way with a plank that his clients mistook for coldness, and a habit, when he had finished, of walking round the house to see what he had done as if it had been done by a stranger. He met his wife in 1936 at a church supper. Josephine Delacroix was eighteen, a small, quick, gentle-voiced girl, newly come from Mobile, a landing on the Louisiana side of the river, where her father Aristide was a railway clerk, and she had taken a post as a typist at a law office on Camp Street. She sat across the table from him, and in the course of the meal asked him eleven questions about his work, politely, one after another, and he answered each, and at the end she said that he was the only man she had ever met who gave the whole answer and then stopped. They were married in 1937, at St Mary's, with his father on one side of the aisle and her father, The Fallow Ledger, on the other, and nobody on either side said what each side knew. They took a small house in the Marigny, a few streets from his parents, and Norman built the kitchen himself. The war years put him in the shipyards. He had been turned down for service because of a damaged ear, and he went, like thousands of New Orleans carpenters, to the boatyards of Higgins Industries on the Industrial Canal, where the landing craft were built of plywood and oak, and he worked a night shift for four years, on a line that turned out a boat a day. The city filled with soldiers. His grandmother died in 1945, in a car accident, at eighty-four, in her chair almost to the last, and his mother in 1943, and he came home from the funerals with a calm that frightened his wife. He had known all his life that the Ledger was in the house, and he had refused it, with the stubbornness of a man who had been told that he might choose. He was called in 1949, at thirty-four, on a lonely road. He had taken a carpentry job on a farmhouse in Terrebonne Parish, and had missed the last bus back, and was standing at a crossroads at night, in the lee of a cane field, with his tool bag at his feet, when a coach came down the road with its lamps on. It was the evening motor coach to Houma, a long green single-decker, and it drew up at the crossing with a sigh. The door opened. The driver sat at the wheel in his uniform, with his cap straight and his hands on the wheel at ten and two, and he looked at Norman, and said nothing, and there was nobody else on the bus. Every seat was empty, down to the back, and every light was on. Norman stood and looked at it. He remembered, with great clarity, a page of the Ledger that his grandmother had made him learn when he was nine, which began with the words, a conveyance with a driver and no passengers, and which he had thought at the time a curiosity. The page ran on for a quarter of an hour in his head. He did not get on. When the door closed, the coach did not move for a full minute, and then it went on down the road at an even speed with the lamps lit, and the sound of the engine did not fade as it should have. He walked home, twelve miles, by dawn. He told Josephine in the kitchen, and she listened, and said that she had been wondering when he would. She had by then been a long time in the Delacroix circle, though she herself was not called until 1951, and she took him to the old cousins on Royal Street, who sat him down and asked him to recite what he had. He recited for four hours. They wrote down, he said, only the places where he corrected them. He became The True Crook, the one who could hold the whole of the White Ledger in his head, and he was sent for by the cousins from Natchez to Galveston when a thing came up that did not fit the record, to say what the record said. He asked questions. Josephine, who followed him in the work two years later, worked the crowds and the doors, and he worked the answers. They hunted as a pair for thirty years. He was fifty when Hurricane Betsy came in 1965, and it was his sort of weather. The roofs of the Lower Ninth Ward and the Bywater came off in the night, and he and his crew spent three months putting them back, and in the course of it, working in the flooded streets, he found in a damp attic a creature that was using the storm as a shelter, and dealt with it, in a way that he described only as a matter of tidying up. In the Vietnam years he trained the younger cousins in the Ledger, a page a week, at the kitchen table, with a pot of coffee. Josephine died in 1981, of kidney failure, and he lived on for twenty-four years in the house in the Marigny, with the kitchen he had built, reciting the Ledger aloud to the empty room in the evenings, so as not to lose it. He died in the spring of 2005, at ninety, in his own bed, of old age, and a niece who sat with him said that in his last hour he was reciting, quietly, in order, and that he got all the way to the end of the page. Norman Thorne is remembered in the Thorne family as The True Crook, the carpenter who carried the White Ledger in his head and answered the dark from memory. In the Slayerverse he stands for the keepers of the record, the detectives of the old houses, who proved that a trained memory and an honest question can hold a line against the dead as surely as a stake.