Alan Proctor was born in 1831 in San Antonio, Texas, and lived fifty-two years as a carpenter and, from the age of thirty-three, as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Swift Tally, a name that recalls the quick, exact count of what a witness had and had not seen, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by method. His craft was Witness Reading, the art of judging what a person truly saw, and his gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot. He was the eldest son of the teamster and slayer Absalom Proctor, called The Bexar Watch, and the schoolteacher Catherine Oppenheimer, and he trained under his father. He married the schoolteacher Fanny Kimbrough in 1849, raised two sons, Frederick Kimbrough Proctor and William Kimbrough Proctor, and died in 1883 after a long night on the marsh.
He was called late. The Proctors of the White Ledger usually knew by sixteen, and Alan, whose father was a slayer, whose brother Alexander would be one too and whose own household was full of the tally books, was thirty-three before he understood that the work was his. It was not that he had been unwilling. It was that he had not seen the need. His father had the Bexar Watch, his brother had the young man's enthusiasm, and Alan, who had a wife, a carpenter's shop by the river and a crowd of pupils' parents to please, took the view that the family had enough hunters. It was a market day that changed his mind.
It was in the autumn of 1864, in the plaza, on the busiest Saturday of the month. The square was full of ox-carts, goat-herds, German farm-women with baskets of butter and soldiers of the frontier regiments on furlough, and Alan, who had come in to buy nails, was standing by a stall of peppers. Among the faces that passed him was a man's. It was the face of someone he had helped to bury. He had built the coffin himself, two years earlier, for a teamster of his father's acquaintance, a thin, reddish man with a scar on his chin, and he had nailed the lid down and carried one corner. The man went by him in the crowd, three feet off, in a clean coat, walking unhurriedly toward the river, and did not look round. Alan stood among the peppers for perhaps ten seconds. Then he followed.
He lost him at the ford. He went home and told his father, at the table, in order, exactly what he had seen, the coat, the scar, the gait, the hour, and Absalom Proctor, who had been waiting for the son to come to him for years, said, without looking up, that he had the order right. It was a great virtue in a witness. He said that it was a greater one in a hunter. That winter he took Alan out to the ranches and taught him the trade, which was, as Alan found it, less a matter of shooting than of listening.
Witness Reading, as he made it his own, was the discipline of the question. A vampire leaves little that a court would call evidence. It leaves a missing child, a dog that will not go near a house, a neighbour who swears that he saw a man who was in his grave. Everything turns on whether the person who tells the story saw what they say. Alan learned to read his witnesses. He asked where the lamp had been. He asked what hand the man had used, what the dogs had done and what the speaker had been holding when it happened. He learned to tell the difference between a fright and a lie, a rumour and a recollection, and the tone of a man who has seen something from that of a man who would like to have. He kept a small book of the faces of the people he had questioned, and what they had got right, and it made him, in the Ledger's own phrase, the best assessor of testimony that the Texas branch ever had. The name was the Swift Tally. It meant that he could count the truth in a story in a single reading.
His gear was the plain gear of the Proctors, a revolver on his belt and silver-cast shot in a leather bag, and he carried it in a coat whose lining had been stitched by his wife. He was a large, slow-spoken, grey-eyed man, with a carpenter's hands and a teacher's patience, and strangers took him for a cattleman, a joiner or a preacher. He worked from his shop by the river. A carpenter who builds coffins, doors and cradles learns the secrets of a town, and he took from the trade the habit of saying little and watching a great deal. He had married at eighteen a girl who corrected his grammar, and it was she who, in the long kitchen debriefings after every hunt, asked the question that he had not thought to ask.
The war years were hard. Texas had seceded, the Proctors, who were Tennesseans and Unionists, kept their opinions to themselves, and Alan spent part of the war in a frontier company watching the Bexar road and the rest at his bench. After 1865 came Reconstruction and the cattle-trail years. The herds went north from South Texas in great slow rivers to the Kansas railheads, and with them went drovers, gamblers and a number of persons that the trail towns were better without. Alan was often on the road. He went down to the coast and up to the Hill Country, taking statements at saloon tables and on ranch galleries, and he was sometimes away for months. He was not a man for glory. His brother Alexander, who was, called him, affectionately, the clerk of the family. He said that somebody had to write it down.
His sons grew up in the house and watched him. Frederick, who was born in 1850 and lived until 1909, took to his father's second trade, and was called in his turn, and became a slayer, and Alan trained him with some care. William, who was born in 1853 and died in the same year as his brother, was not called, and went into the counting room and the ledgers, where his father, who had known at once, put no pressure on him. His mother Fanny said that the family needed both kinds. His father Absalom died in 1868, and his mother Catherine in 1869, and Alan, who had taken the old man's place in the tally, found that he missed, above all, the old man's silence. He took over the White Ledger's Texas pages with his wife, and they kept them in a good hand.
He died in the winter of 1883, at fifty-two, after a long night on the coastal marsh, where he had gone with a lantern and a revolver after a report that two witnesses had sworn to and a third, more carefully, had not. He found what the third had seen. He was out from dusk until the dawn mist lifted, and he came back to the cart at first light, and sat down on the tail of it, and did not get up. The marsh had taken what a man has. His wife entered the night in full, dated and witnessed, and went back to her pupils on the Monday.
Alan Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Swift Tally, the carpenter who counted the truth and asked the question that was not in the story. In the Slayerverse he stands for the detectives of the White Ledger who held that the first weapon against the night is an honest witness, and the second is a man who knows how to listen to one.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
