Wilma Reyes

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

Wilma Reyes was born in 1939 at Birmingham, Alabama, and lived eighty-three years as a schoolteacher in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South. She was not a hunter and belonged to no house; the Ledger lists her as unaffiliated. In 1967 she married the high school coach Joseph Thorne, a vampire slayer of the White Ledger known to the family book as The Wild Falcon, and they raised two daughters, Wilma Thorne, born in 1969, and Teresa Thorne, born in 1970, both of whom became slayers in their turn. Through her husband she entered the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and the House of Thorne, the border reivers and hound-keepers of the old books. She died in 2022 of a car accident, aged 83. For fifty-one years she stood in front of classrooms, and for thirty-seven years she was married into a household where the supper table doubled as a briefing room. The family remembers her as the one who made sure that every child in it could read a document properly, a skill she held to be more use against the dead than any amount of marksmanship. Birmingham in 1939 was the iron city of the South, a place of blast furnaces, coke ovens and ore trains, laid out under Red Mountain with its great iron statue of Vulcan looking down on the smoke. Her father was the son of a Cuban cigar-roller from Tampa who had come north for the steel wages, and he worked as a rigger at a Tennessee Coal and Iron plant at Ensley, where the furnaces ran so hot that the night shift cast shadows on the clouds. Her mother was a Birmingham girl who took in sewing and ran the household on a budget that she kept in her head. They lived in a frame house in a mill neighbourhood where the washing hung out grey by noon whatever the weather, and Wilma, who was an only child, remembered that her first lesson in arithmetic was the number of tram fares between home and the plant gate. She was a small, straight-backed, serious girl with her father's black eyes, and she corrected her teachers from the age of six, politely, with the page number. She wanted to teach from the day she learned to read, and was never tempted by anything else. She went to the state teachers' college on a scholarship that her father's union had arranged, took the elementary course and in 1960 was hired at a school on the south side of the city, where she had forty-four children in a room built for thirty and a stove that burned the legs off the desks. She loved it. She was, her pupils said, a strict teacher who never raised her voice, and who had a way of looking over her spectacles at a child who had not done his sums that made the child wish that he had been born in some other century. She taught reading by the sound of the letters and by constant questions. What did the author say? What did he mean? How do you know? The last question, put to eight-year-olds ten times a day, was her particular contribution to Alabama education, and a good many of her former pupils, now grandfathers, still ask it of their newspapers. Birmingham in 1963 was a hard place to teach and a harder place to be young. In the spring the schools emptied of children who had gone to march, and in September a church was bombed on a Sunday morning, and the city, which had been braced for it, was not braced enough. Wilma, who was twenty-four, kept her classroom open through all of it. She did not preach and she did not take sides in front of the children, but she taught them, in that autumn, to write letters, to the papers, to the mayor and to one another, and she told them that a letter was a thing that could be kept. She told a friend afterward that it was the only year in which she had come near to leaving the city, and that she had stayed because the children were there. It was also the year that she met Joseph Thorne. He was a young assistant coach at a high school across town, twenty years old and already looking thirty, a long, dark, level-eyed man who had come down from Memphis, and he arrived at her school one afternoon in October with a football team's worth of boys in tow to help carry books for a library drive. She noticed two things at once. He was extremely good with the boys, who went quiet when he spoke without his appearing to do anything to make them. And when she asked him a question, he did not answer it. He asked her a better one. She said afterward that she had been cross-questioned by experts, her father's union steward and the Birmingham school board among them, and had never been so thoroughly out-argued by a man so courteous. They were married in 1967, in the spring, at her mother's church, with Joseph's parents Edward and Helen up from Memphis, and with a good many of his team in borrowed ties. Edward Thorne, a cheerful man, told her that she was marrying into a family with a great many cousins and a very old book, and Helen, who was a laundress, told her not to believe a word of it until she had seen the sheets. She saw the sheets. Joseph told her the substance of it in the first summer of their marriage, on the back porch of a rented house in Bessemer, with a glass of tea on the rail, and she heard him out as she heard a pupil recite, with her head on one side, and then asked for the evidence. He gave her the Ledger, the actual book, and she read the whole of it in a week. She said, at the end, that it was the worst-kept set of records she had ever seen, written in thirty hands, indexed by nobody and corrected by whoever happened to be passing, and that she would be glad to see to it. It was the beginning of her real work. She became, in a quiet way, the White Ledger's schoolmistress, who taught the younger cousins to read a record, to cite a source, to tell a rumour from a sighting and a sighting from a fact. The Wild Falcon, who was a Gangster in the Ledger's sense, a hunter who works through crews, favours and a wide acquaintance, and whose craft was Cross-Examination, the patient questioning of a stranger until his account of himself comes apart, said freely that he had learned the better half of it from her. The Vietnam years ran through the whole of the first decade of their marriage, and they were thin, anxious years in a house that never quite knew whether the next knock would be a draft board or a cousin with a wound. Joseph, who was a teacher and a coach and kept his schedule, was not called, and spent a good many nights away on the Ledger's business, in mill towns and railroad junctions from Meridian to Chattanooga, while she graded papers under the lamp, kept the telephone, and wrote the letters that came back from the road. Her daughters grew up on that routine. Wilma Thorne, born in 1969, had her father's gravity, and Teresa Thorne, born in 1970, her mother's dry tongue, and each of them, in her own time, took up the work. Wilma Reyes did not discourage them and did not push. She said only that anyone who meant to hunt should first learn to read, write and add, and she saw to it that they did, at the kitchen table, in the evenings, with a ruler. She taught for thirty-eight years in the Birmingham schools and for thirteen more, in retirement, as a volunteer reading tutor, which she called her second pension. She was widowed in 2004, when Joseph died of cancer, and she did what she always did, which was to put the house in order. She wrote to every cousin. She sorted his papers into folders that she labelled in a clear round hand and handed the whole to Teresa. In 2019 she lost her elder daughter, and bore that, too, in the same level fashion, going to school the next morning to hear the children read, because, she said, it was Tuesday. She was a small, bright, upright old woman in a green cardigan, who had never learned to be idle. She died in 2022, in the autumn, in a car accident on a wet road, on her way home from the library where she tutored, aged eighty-three. The other driver was not at fault and the family has never said otherwise. She was found with her handbag on the passenger seat and, in it, a primer, a pencil and a list of the five children she was to see that week, every name correctly spelled. Her granddaughters, who are numerous, chose to keep the list. Wilma Reyes is remembered in the Proctor family as the schoolteacher who taught the hunters to read, the small, strict woman who held that no fact was settled until someone had asked how it was known. In the Slayerverse she stands for the teachers and record-keepers of the White Ledger, the ones who never carried a pistol, and who made certain that the hunters, and the children of hunters, could tell what was written from what was only said.