Thomas Cooke

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

A wheel is a small argument between wood and iron, and Thomas Cooke spent his working life settling it. He was born in 1750 in Staunton, Virginia, at the head of the Shenandoah Valley, and he became a wheelwright in a country where the whole economy rolled on wagon hubs. In 1777 he married Rachel Thorne Proctor, a daughter of the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and so entered a family whose history he only partly understood and whose secrets he learned to carry with the same steadiness with which he trued a rim. Staunton in his boyhood was a raw, growing county seat on the edge of settlement. It sat in a green trough between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny ridges, on limestone soil that made the best wheat and grazing land in the colony, and the Great Wagon Road ran through it, carrying Scots-Irish and German families south from Pennsylvania in a steady, creaking stream. The town had a courthouse, an Anglican parish church, a scatter of log and stone houses, and several taverns that did brisk trade with drovers and packers. Everything that moved there moved on wheels or hooves. Conestoga wagons, carts, gigs and heavy farm sledges all needed axles and wheels, and they broke constantly on the rough limestone roads. A wheelwright who could make a wheel that lasted was worth more than a preacher. Thomas learned the work young. The trade was a subtle one, more so than most people guessed. A cart wheel was built of three kinds of wood, each chosen for its grain: elm for the hub, because it resists splitting; oak for the spokes, which had to be riven along the grain and shaved to a taper; and ash or hickory for the felloes, the curved segments of the rim. The spokes were driven into mortises in the hub at a slight dish, so that the wheel would stand under the load of a wagon on a sloping road. Then came the tire, an iron band made by the blacksmith and heated red, dropped over the felloes and quenched with water, so that it shrank tight and pulled the whole wheel into one rigid piece. Thomas worked with the smith next door and grew to know the smell of scorched oak and steam as he knew the smell of his own house. He was a lean, sandy man with a slow smile, permanently dusted with shavings, and he was known in the valley for measuring twice and complaining once. His path to the Proctors ran along the wagon road itself. The family had come down from Pennsylvania in the previous generation, following the same road as everyone else, and by the 1770s a branch of the Yorkist line had settled on a limestone farm outside Staunton, raising wheat, hemp and a few horses. Rachel Thorne Proctor was born in 1755, the daughter of that farm, and she had grown up with the White Ledger read aloud on winter evenings. She was a practical, quick-tongued young woman who ran her mother's dairy and could handle a team as well as her brothers. Thomas came to the farm on a repair call, to mend a wagon whose axle had cracked on the ford, and he was fed dinner, then supper, then given a stool by the fire. The courtship lasted through most of a year. They were married in 1777, when he was twenty-seven and she was twenty-two, at the parish church in Staunton, with the Proctor farm supplying the feast. It was the middle of the Revolution, and the valley felt it. Virginia's militia drew heavily on Augusta County, and the men of the region went east and south in waves to join the campaigns in the Carolinas and at Yorktown. Thomas was not a soldier, being needed at home to keep the army's wagons and the county's carts moving, and it was in this capacity that he did his part: repairing baggage wheels, cutting new felloes, shoeing waggon boxes with iron bands. In June of 1781 the Virginia legislature, fleeing the British raiders under Tarleton, moved west across the mountains and sat for several days in Staunton itself. The town filled with delegates, horses and rumours, and Thomas's shop, for a few frantic weeks, was mending the carriages of statesmen. He remarked afterwards that a governor's coach broke an axle exactly like anyone else's. The Proctor side of his life came to him gradually. It did not surprise him, in the end, to learn what the ledger was. In a country of blood feuds and old superstitions, in a county where he had heard the Scots-Irish settlers tell of things that walked in the hollows, the notion of hunters who kept written tallies seemed almost orderly. What he learned was that the Proctors of the valley were expected to keep watch, to lend their barns and wagons to travelling hunters, and to record what passed through. Thomas built a false floor in a wagon bed for carrying rifles and silver, and he learned to hold his tongue at the tavern when travellers asked about the strange marks on the barn door. He also learned of the old contest with the Faulkners, whom his in-laws spoke of with affection tinged with irritation, and of the Guest who had escaped at Towton three centuries earlier. He listened, he nodded, and he made no comment on anything that he could not repair. Two sons came of the marriage. Jonathan Cooke Proctor was born in 1779. In keeping with the family custom that lets the surname travel through the maternal line, he was given the Proctor name with his father's as a middle one, and he grew up to be a farmer and a keeper of accounts, without the calling; he died in 1832. His brother John Cooke was born in 1781 and kept his father's plain surname. The calling found him in his time and made him a vampire slayer of the Yorkist line, though his ledger entries, and his whole story, belong to his own profile. He died in 1834. Thomas taught both boys the wheelwright's trade before they took their own paths, and he insisted that they learn to true a wheel by eye and by ear, tapping the spokes and listening for the note. Rachel died in 1801, aged forty-six, and the loss took something permanent from him. The farm went on, and the shop, and the boys were grown or nearly so, but he became a quieter and thinner man. In his last years he worked mostly at the lathe, turning hubs and handles, and let his apprentices do the heavy tire work. A wasting illness took his flesh and his strength through 1807, and he died in 1808, aged fifty-eight, in the house he had built next to the shop, having outlived his wife by seven years. Thomas Cooke does not appear in the White Ledger as a hunter. He appears, in a small careful hand, as a man who lent wheels to the Yorkists for thirty years and never sent a bill. In the wider Slayerverse he is the type of the family's unarmed allies, the craftsmen and neighbours whose wagons, shelter and quiet made the hunting possible.