Ralph Haddad

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

Ralph Haddad was born in 1945 at Savannah, Georgia, and lived sixty-six years as an electrician in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South. He was not a hunter and belonged to no house; the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated. In 1966 he married the bookkeeper Gladys Proctor Thorne, the younger child of the railway clerk Edward Thorne and the laundress Helen Sewall and the sister of the vampire slayer Joseph Thorne, and they had one daughter, Angela Haddad, born in 1969, who was not called. He entered the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and the House of Thorne through his wife, and he outlived her by barely a year. He died in 2011 of a sudden collapse, aged sixty-six. His life was spent pulling wire through other people's walls, and the family remembers him as the amiable son of a Lebanese grocer who made the White Ledger's cousins' houses safe from fire, short circuits and unannounced visitors, and who was never once heard to complain that the work was done at night. Savannah in 1945 was a squares-and-live-oaks port on the Savannah River, a city of cotton warehouses, naval stores, shipyards and Spanish moss, with a waterfront of old factors' offices and a wartime population swollen by the workers of the Liberty ship yards. His father was a Lebanese grocer who had come from a village in the mountains by way of Ellis Island and Atlanta, and who kept a small shop on a corner of the old downtown, a narrow room with a pressed-tin ceiling and a cat, where he sold olives, flour, coffee, a little tobacco and a great deal of credit. His mother was a quick, small, dark woman who kept the books and a loaded broom behind the counter. Ralph was the youngest of four, a small, quick, merry boy with his father's black brows, who learned to count change before he could read, to carry two crates on one shoulder and to say good morning to a hundred customers in the right order of precedence. He was the child who liked to know how a thing worked. At nine he took the shop's cash register apart on the counter, to the horror of the staff, and put it together before closing with the bell ringing, and his father, after a long silence, said in Arabic that the boy was a mechanic and that the shop had no use for him. The boy was sent to an uncle, who was an electrician for the power company, and who took him on Saturdays up poles and into attics and under floors, and taught him to respect the current. Ralph learned the colours of the wires, the weight of a load and the habits of fuses. He learned also, in the way of a boy who has grown up behind a counter, to listen. An electrician in the old houses of the Savannah squares heard what the families said at their tables, in the corridors and over the back fence, and Ralph, who was cheerful and kept his own counsel, heard a great deal. He joined the Navy at eighteen, in 1963, as an electrician's mate, and served four years, mostly on a repair tender at Charleston and Mayport, rewiring ships that had come home from the Caribbean with their circuits in knots. He was never sent to the war itself, a fact that, in the Vietnam years, he mentioned with a certain care. He did not wish to appear to claim a thing that he had not done. He met Gladys Proctor Thorne on leave in the spring of 1965, at a church supper in Memphis, where his shipmate's mother was a member and where he had been taken to be fed, and where he found himself in the kitchen with a tall, fair, laughing girl of eighteen, a first-year student at the teachers' college who kept the church's small accounts for pocket money, and who was doing the accounts of the supper in pencil on the back of a napkin and who told him, without looking up, that he had put the wrong end of the fuse in the box. He had not. He said so. She said that she knew, and that she had wanted to see what he would do. They were married in 1966, in the summer, at her parents' church in Memphis, with her father Edward Thorne, a round, white-collared railway clerk, giving her away in a cheerful frenzy of letters, and her mother Helen, who was a laundress and a woman of formidable judgement, inspecting the groom for stains. She passed him. She said afterward that a man who had been rewiring other people's ships was not likely to be careless, and that he had a good clean collar. Gladys's brother Joseph, a coach of twenty-three, who stood up for him at the altar, shook his hand on the church steps and said, in the plain, level voice that the family had learned to listen to, that if the groom ever wished to ask what the family did, he need only ask. Ralph was told within the year. He took it as he took a short circuit, by tracing it back to the source, and when he was done, he said that he supposed they would want the houses wired. It was not a trade that the Ledger had ever wanted for. The White Ledger's cousins in the Deep South lived in old, damp, many-fused frame houses, in mill towns and railroad cities, and they had always been afraid of fire. A fire in a hunter's house was a catastrophe, for a hunter's papers burned, and a creature that wished to be rid of a hunter's house had only to see that the wiring was bad. Ralph rewired them. Between 1967 and 1990 he rewired some thirty cousins' houses, from Savannah to Meridian, at cost, on his weekends, and he did it with a particular care. He put in conduit where his clients had cloth wire. He installed a second panel, in the cellar, behind a locked door, on a separate circuit that fed a single lamp in the front window, so that a house could go dark and the lamp stay lit. He ran the doorbells to a bell in the bedroom. Joseph, who was the Wild Falcon and a Gangster, a hunter who works through crews and favours, had a good many former football players in the trade, and Ralph, who was in the union, got a place on the list for every job the cousins needed. Gladys, who was a bookkeeper, kept the other half. She kept the books of his business, of the church and of three branches of the family's cousinhood, in neat columns, in pencil, on ledger paper that she bought by the ream. She was a laughing, fair, quick-witted woman who could tell by a figure in the third column whether a cousin was in trouble, and in a long career as the family's accountant she saved a number of them from foreclosure, from the tax man and, in one case, from a bill of sale on a boarding house that would have made a very good lair. Their daughter Angela Haddad was born in 1969, and grew up in the house in Memphis, in a kitchen with a ledger, a set of pliers and a Lebanese grandmother's recipe for stuffed grape leaves, in the care of two people who were seldom out of one another's sight. She was not called. She trained as a teacher, taught for six years, then became a diner waitress, and told her parents, at twenty, that she was glad. He worked for the electric utility in Memphis for twenty-two years, and for himself for the rest. He crawled through the attics of the city's old brick warehouses and the cellars of its cotton factors' offices, and in the April of 1968, when the city shut down after the shooting at the Lorraine Motel, he spent three days with the utility crew, keeping the lights on in the streets that no one else would go into, and said afterwards that it was a thing he would never talk about. On the morning of September 11, 2001 he was up a pole in Whitehaven, and was told by a neighbour from her porch, and came down, very slowly, and went home. He was a quiet, round, dark-haired man of fifty-six by then, with a lined, amiable face and a pair of pliers in his shirt pocket. He had begun to be called Pop. His wife died in the autumn of 2010, in a car accident on a wet road, and he followed her within a few months, in the house in Memphis, with Angela and her uncle Joseph's daughters beside her. He took it badly, in his own way, which was to go out and rewire a church. In the spring of 2011, in the course of that job, in a basement under the sanctuary, a cousin heard a tool fall and a quiet cry, and went down, and found him sitting on an upturned bucket, with a coil of wire in his lap, and his eyes open, and the lamp at his side lit. It was a sudden collapse, the doctors said, of a heart that had been under strain for a year. He was sixty-six. The wiring in the church, which was finished by his crew, has not failed since. Ralph Haddad is remembered in the Proctor family as the electrician who wired the cousins' houses against fire, the Lebanese grocer's son who married a Thorne and kept the lamp in the window lit. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trades-people of the White Ledger, the husbands and wives who made the hunters' homes safe, and who proved that a good fuse box can be as much a fortification as a wall.