Wesley Wood

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

Wesley Wood works to a tolerance of a ten-thousandth of an inch, and has never in his life been late with a part. He was born in 1973 at Jackson, Mississippi, and is living today in Jackson, where he is a machinist, a man of the Proctor bloodline that keeps the White Ledger, listed in the family book as unaffiliated, with no alias, archetype or craft, and not a vampire slayer. His parents are not named in the Ledger, which records only that the Proctor blood came to him through his mother's people in the Delta and that his father was a pipefitter who followed the foundries. In 1993 he married the secretary and slayer Wilma Thorne, The Wide Bell, and they raised two children, Darren Wood Proctor, born in 1995, and Amy Wood, born in 1998, both of whom were called. Wilma died in 2019, and he has been a widower since, and the cousins say that the knife she carried for twenty-six years was the best thing that anyone not of the hunt ever made for it. He was born on the north side of Jackson, in the cotton and railroad country of the Deep South, in the sticky end of a summer in which the Pearl River ran low and the cicadas shouted all night. The house was a rented frame bungalow near the Illinois Central yards, and his father, who laid pipe for a living and did not care to stay anywhere long enough to be disappointed in it, put the child on the kitchen table in a laundry basket and went back to a job in Meridian. The family moved when Wesley was seven, because a foundry outside Bessemer, Alabama, wanted pipefitters and paid for the move, and he grew up there, among the furnaces and the red dust, which is why Wilma Thorne, who was born in Jackson herself, always said that she had married a Mississippian who had been raised in the wrong state and had been brought up to find it funny. He was a broad, cheerful, round-faced boy with large hands and an enthusiasm for anything with a moving part. At eight he took a hand drill from his father's tool chest and, with no one watching, bored a perfectly round hole in a school desk, and when he was caught he explained that he had been trying to find out how much force it took. His father, who did not talk much, took him to the foundry on a Saturday and let him watch a patternmaker at work, and the boy stood for two hours without moving. By fourteen he was sweeping the floor of a small machine shop on the edge of Bessemer for a dollar an hour, and by sixteen he was running a manual lathe, and by nineteen he had a journeyman's card and a reputation, in a town of steelworkers, for the cleanest finish on a shaft. He liked the quiet arithmetic of the trade, the way a measurement is either right or wrong and a micrometer does not flatter anyone. He met Wilma Thorne in the early part of 1993, when his employer, a small shop that made parts for the foundries, needed a variance to put in a bigger lathe and sent the youngest man on the payroll to the county zoning office to ask for it. He was nineteen, twenty by the spring, and she was twenty-three, a tall, grave, heavy-lidded secretary who looked at him across the long wooden counter as at a document of uncertain provenance. She took him through the process at some length. He came back with the missing form the following week, and the week after that with another that he did not need, and by May he was bringing her barbecue at lunch. He proposed over a plate of it that summer. She said that she would think about it and wrote the date in her book, and he said afterwards that it was the only occasion in his life on which he had been timed. They were married in the autumn of 1993, in a church in Bessemer, with her father Joseph Thorne, the coach, in a dark tie and her mother Wilma Reyes, who taught school and who had been marking the wedding programme for errors, in the front pew. He was told what the Thornes were in the following year, in the kitchen of the rented house, by Wilma herself, with the Ledger's pocket book on the table and a pot of tea going cold. He did not interrupt. When she had finished he asked her, as he would have asked a customer, whether there was a drawing. She said that there was not. He said that in that case he supposed he had better make one. He was never a hunter, and the family does not pretend that he was. He was a man who understood that a hunter is only as good as her tools and the person who keeps them true, and he made himself the second. His great work for the Ledger was the knife. He made it in a long weekend in the winter of 1994 in the shop, after hours, with the lights low and a thermos of coffee, turning a blade-guard from a bar of tool steel and grinding a silver edge along the back of a plain carbon blade, the two metals joined so that the silver would not flake, which a worse maker would have found it did. He finished the handle with a wrapping of cord and tested it on a block of seasoned oak, and then took it to Wilma and told her the tolerance. She said that she could shave with it. He said that he would rather she did not. She carried it, in her handbag, among the pencils and the stamp pad, from that day to the winter she died, and when she sharpened it, which she did on Sunday evenings at the kitchen table, he would sit across from her and pretend not to watch. Darren Wood Proctor was born in 1995, and Amy Wood in 1998, and Wesley, who was given a good deal of latitude on the subject of names by a wife who held strong views about the Ledger's entries, agreed that the boy should go into the book as a Proctor, which pleased the cousins and mystified the Bessemer clerk who typed the birth certificate. He taught both children to use their hands. Darren, who was a thoughtful, slow-moving boy, learned to measure before he cut. Amy, who was quicker and louder, learned to read a drawing before she could read much else, and at ten could tell from the end of a bolt which way a thread was cut. Both of them were called in their turn, in the years after the attacks of September 2001, and he took the news as he took a bad casting, by asking what could be saved and getting on. He went on making their gear, in the shop, as a hobby that the cousins called a service. In the autumn of 2001, in the week that the towers fell, Wilma sat in front of the television with the children and with him, and said nothing, and he went out to the shop the following Saturday and ran the lathe for nine hours without stopping. He had no way of saying what he felt and so he made things. That was the year he put in for foreman. He held the post for eighteen years, a steady, fair, soft-spoken man with grease in the creases of his knuckles, who trained a dozen young machinists on the principle that a bad part is a bad habit and a good one is a good habit. Wilma's illness was short. She was fifty when she went into the hospital in Birmingham in January of 2019, with pneumonia, and he sat with her for a fortnight, in a plastic chair that had been designed by someone who disliked people, while Amy read her the docket from a notebook. She died on a Monday evening. He did not go back to the shop for a month, and when he did, he found that his hands had gone on without him, as a lathe will, and that a half-finished handle was on the bench with her initials cut into the end. He had no memory of making it. He finished it, put it in a drawer and did not tell anyone. He sold the house in Bessemer in the winter of 2020, in the first weeks of the pandemic, a thing that his children advised against and that he did anyway, and went back to Jackson, where he was born and where the Ledger's cousins in the Mississippi chapter, who had known him by reputation, found him a bench at a small shop near the old rail yards. In the pandemic years the shop made parts for hospital equipment, brackets, couplings and valve bodies, and ran two shifts, and he worked both of them. He is living there still, in a small rented house with a garden of tomatoes, and until the autumn of 2022, when she was killed in a car accident, he drove to Birmingham on a Sunday once a month to eat dinner with Wilma Reyes, who went on calling him her son-in-law and never noticed, or said she had not noticed, that he was no longer obliged to be one. He is fifty-three now, a broad, slow, sandy-haired man with a thick neck, a careful way of crossing the floor and a pair of reading glasses that he keeps on a cord. He has no alias, and has never wanted one. The cousins call him, behind his back and with affection, the Armourer, a title that he has declined on the ground that he only makes what he is asked. Wesley Wood is remembered in the Proctor family as the Jackson machinist who held a tolerance and a promise to the same ten-thousandth, the husband of The Wide Bell, who made her knife and kept her workbench as she left it. In the Slayerverse he stands for the makers of the White Ledger, the tradesmen who never carried a gun and were never called, and who showed that a hunter's edge is only as good as the man in the shop who put it there.