Albert Nichols Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Wild Sieve. Craft: Procedural Trapping.

Albert Nichols Proctor was born in 1805 in Franklin, Tennessee, and lived forty-three years as a blacksmith and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Wild Sieve, a name that recalls the way he sifted a crowd for the one person in it who did not belong, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by method. His craft was Procedural Trapping, the building of a case, step by step, in which each move closes one exit. He was the younger son of the teamster and slayer Levi Proctor and the herbalist Naomi Nichols, and the younger brother of Edwin Nichols Proctor. He married the shopkeeper Nettie Eaton in 1828, raised two children with her, and died in 1848 of a blow taken in a churchyard, two years after he had buried his brother. His father, Levi Proctor, born in 1774 and known as The Gentle Spindle, was a teamster of the Tennessee frontier, a soft-spoken, unhurried man with a great talent for horses and a greater one for patience. His mother, Naomi Nichols, born in 1777 and dead in 1840, was a herbalist from the Watauga settlements, practical, cheerful and entirely unafraid. The family had lived in the Watauga hills when Edwin was born in 1802, but the freight trade of the upper country was thin, and in about 1804 Levi, who had heard that the Nashville road wanted good teamsters, moved his household west across the mountains to the Harpeth River settlements. Albert was born there the following year, in the small Tennessee town of Franklin, in a log house by the creek, three years after his elder brother and a few miles from the house in which the printer Jacob Proctor was growing up. Franklin in 1805 was a village, barely half a dozen years old, laid out on a bluff above the Harpeth by settlers who had come from Virginia and the Carolinas and who were still clearing the canebrake at the edges of the square. The road that Levi drove ran north to Nashville and south toward the Natchez Trace, and its traffic, the pack trains, the wagons, the droves of hogs and the occasional party of emigrants bound for Mississippi, kept a teamster in steady work. The boys grew up among wheel ruts and hoof prints. They were put to the horses at six. They learned to harness, to shoe, to grease an axle, to repair a wagon tongue with a hatchet and a length of hickory, and to judge the temper of a mule by the set of its ears. Albert's gift was for iron. He was a strong, quiet, deliberate boy, with large hands and a habit of watching a job before he touched it, and from the day that his father took him to the smithy in the village, to have a wheel tyre set, he would not be kept away. The smith, an old Carolinian named Hobart, let him blow the bellows. Within a month he was holding the tongs. Within a year he was shaping horseshoes, and at fifteen he was bound as an apprentice and living above the forge. He learned to read the colour of the metal, from dull red through cherry to the yellow-white of a weld, and to know by the sound of the hammer when a piece was right. A blacksmith, he said, is a man who does one thing at a time, in order, and does not move on until the last step is done. It was that habit of order that made him a detective. A smith's work is procedure. The iron must be heated, then drawn, then upset, then shaped, then quenched, and to alter the order is to ruin the piece. Albert applied the same discipline to everything he did, and in the course of a few years he acquired a reputation in the district for being unable to tell a story out of sequence. Asked what had happened at a neighbour's barn-raising, he would give the events in order, with the times. Asked what a man had said, he would give the words. His father, who heard him give an account of a stranger's visit to the forge, stopped him in the middle and said that it was a pity he had not a better use for such a memory. He was called in 1826, at twenty-one, during a funeral. A farmer of the Harpeth settlement, a man of some standing, had died in the night, and the burial was held the next afternoon at the country churchyard, in the usual way, with the neighbours gathered in their black and the preacher reading over the open grave. The coffin was lowered. The preacher said the prayer. One of the bearers, who had helped to lift the lid a moment before, turned white and said nothing. Albert, who was standing at the rail in his Sunday coat, saw the man's face and stepped forward to look. The coffin was empty. The mourners, who had all seen the body laid in it on the previous evening, could not account for it. Nobody had touched the coffin. Nobody had opened the house. Albert, who had been taught to ask what came first, asked who had last been alone with the body. He went to his father that night with a list. It was a list of everyone who had been in the house, by the hour, and of what each had said, and at the bottom of it was a name, a cousin of the dead man who had arrived from Virginia the day before the death and had not been seen since the burial. Levi Proctor read it through, slowly, by the fire. He said that it was a good list. Then he said that he would have to tell the boy something about the family, and that it would take until morning. He trained under his father for the next two years. Procedural Trapping, as Albert developed it, was the craft of the closed door. A vampire, he observed, is most dangerous when it has a choice of exits. He therefore did not chase. He spent days, sometimes weeks, working out which ways out of a place a quarry could take, and closing them one at a time, by a word to the landlord, a padlock on a cellar, a word to the ferryman or a chain across a lane, until the thing had only one way left, and he was standing in it. It was slow, methodical work and it lacked glamour. It was also very successful. In twenty-two years he took some forty vampires, and of these he fired at fewer than a dozen. His brother Edwin, who was called two years after him, worked a different way. Edwin gathered information and passed it on, and Albert used it. The two were an effective partnership, and the cousins called them the Watauga pair, though Albert had been born in Franklin and had never lived at Watauga. They met once a month in a tavern at the river crossing between their two districts, over a joint of mutton, and compared notes, and when a case was hot they wrote three times a week. Their father, who died in an ambush in 1828, never saw the full effect of the method, but the two sons carried it on. In 1828 Albert married Nettie Eaton, a young Nashville shopkeeper of twenty-one whom he had met through a cousin, a quick, dry, round-faced girl who kept a dry-goods shop on the public square and who had a way of counting change faster than the customer could watch. They set up house in Franklin, in a frame house next to his smithy, and she opened a shop in the front room. Their son Edwin Eaton Proctor was born in 1830 and lived until 1908, and their daughter Naomi Eaton Proctor was born in 1833 and lived until 1912. Neither was a hunter. Both grew up to be useful and unremarkable members of the family, the kind whose letters were kept. He was a big, slow, cheerful man, with a black beard and a forge-scarred forearm, who talked little and laughed easily. He was said to be the only man in Williamson County who had never lost his temper. His smithy was the meeting place of the neighbourhood, and the talk that went on around the anvil, about horses, weather, crops, wagons and other people's business, gave him a full picture of the district's life. His gear was a revolver, which he made a holster for out of a shoe-leather offcut, and silver-cast shot, which he made himself, in the same crucible in which he melted lead for the neighbours' bullets. In the autumn of 1846, when his brother Edwin was killed on the river road, it was Albert who went to bring him home. He buried him in the hills at Watauga, beside their parents, and stood for a long time at the grave. He wrote to the cousins, afterwards, that he had not known how much of the work he had done through Edwin, until Edwin was not there to do it. He carried on alone for two years. He died in the spring of 1848, at forty-three, from a blow taken in a churchyard. He had been called to a burial at a country church in the next county, where there had been trouble with grave robbers, and in the dusk, as he was examining a fresh grave, he was struck from behind with a spade. The man who did it was taken alive, and was found to be in the pay of a vampire whom Albert had been closing upon for a year. He lived for three days. His wife Nettie nursed him. He was buried in the Franklin cemetery, with his forge hammer laid on the grave. Albert Nichols Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Wild Sieve, the blacksmith of Franklin, the hunter who closed the doors. In the Slayerverse he stands for the detectives of the White Ledger who believed that patience, order and a good lock would do what courage alone could not.