On the Delaware, in the years when the river was the only reliable road in Pennsylvania, a pilot's word was worth more than a magistrate's, and Amos Lister's was among the best. He was born in 1715 at Philadelphia and died in 1788 of a fever, aged seventy-three, having spent something like fifty years reading brown water for a living. He was of the House of Proctor by descent, the son of the schoolmaster and slayer Norman Proctor Lister, but he was never called himself, and the White Ledger records him as a non-slayer with a great deal of respect and a faint note of regret. Later generations of the family would say that he was the one who kept the family's hunters afloat, in the plainest literal sense.
Philadelphia in his childhood was the largest town in British America, or close to it, a grid of brick houses between two rivers with a forest of masts along the wharves, a State House still under construction and a population that grew every year with German, Irish and Scots-Irish arrivals. It was a Quaker town in its manners, if not entirely in its numbers, orderly, commercial and suspicious of ostentation. Ships came in with sugar, rum, wine and convicts, and left with flour, flax-seed, bar iron and lumber. Amos's father Norman kept a school there, teaching arithmetic, writing and surveying to the sons of shopkeepers and shipwrights, and his mother Susan Bowen, a seamstress, took in fine work from the merchants' wives and taught her children to sew a straight seam before they could read.
Susan died in 1724, when Amos was nine and his sister Mary Lister was seven. The household that remained was a masculine one in its rhythm, ruled by the schoolmaster's bell and the school year, though the children were tended by a neighbour and by their father's habit of setting problems at the supper table. Norman was also the slayer known as The Wary Wren, and he raised his daughter in that knowledge. Amos he watched more carefully and, as time passed, more anxiously, because the boy showed no sign of the calling. He was a quick, restless child with a talent for mechanical things and a habit of drifting down to the wharves after school to watch the pilots bring vessels in against the tide. His father, to his credit, saw that a son who could not be a hunter might still be of use to hunters, and let him go.
He was apprenticed at fourteen to a river pilot who worked the stretch between Philadelphia and the capes, learning the channel the hard way, from a small boat with a lead line in his hand. The Delaware is a treacherous river. Its bars shift with each spring flood, its fogs come down without notice, and the ice in a hard winter can close it for weeks. The pilot's craft was purely one of memory, a mental chart of soundings, marks and currents that no printed map could equal, and Amos had it in abundance. He was tall, weathered by his early twenties, with a heavy jaw, a steady eye and a way of standing at the bow of a boat with his weight perfectly balanced that made passengers feel safe. He earned his own licence young and was soon bringing merchantmen up from the bay to the city wharves for a fee that made him, by the standards of the Lister family, prosperous.
In 1738 he married Susanna Tipton, a milliner of Chester, and moved to a rented house near the river in that town, which suited a pilot who spent his working days between the capes and the city. Their only child, Amos Proctor Lister, was born in 1739. The marriage was warm and businesslike in about equal parts. Susanna was to prove the better observer of the family's neighbours, and Amos the better observer of the river, and between them they knew a great deal. He was not slow to tell her what he was and what his father and sister were, and her willingness to hear him mattered to him for the rest of his life.
His usefulness to the hunters was considerable. A vampire, in the White Ledger's understanding of the matter, must be brought to a place, and the river was a highway by which a great many things moved unnoticed. Amos could tell when a ship's arrival did not match its manifest, when a crew was short or a cargo unaccounted for, and when a vessel was sailing without lights on a night when it should have had them. His sister Mary, who was a dairywoman and a vampire slayer, would sit in his cabin at the landing and hear what he had seen. Her husband William Kincaid, a wheelwright and hunter, borrowed Amos's boat when a chase followed water. Between them they took several creatures on the river in the 1740s, and Amos's name appears in the ledger margins with the letter P for pilot. He always refused the title of hunter and disliked being asked to shoot.
Mary's death in 1750, of a fever caught in a plague house, struck him hard. He had been very close to her, and he took the loss with a silence that his wife found worrying. His father Norman died two years earlier, in 1748, and by 1750 the older generation of the family was gone. Then came the frontier years. The wars with France pulled the province into a fight it had long avoided, and the river carried soldiers, supplies and refugees. Amos piloted transports upriver and, according to a family letter, carried a load of powder to Reading under fire from an unseen party in the woods on the bank. Susanna died in 1758, and Amos grieved and continued to work. He did not marry again.
The Revolution found him in his sixties, still piloting. The British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777 closed the river, and the American defences below the city, the chevaux-de-frise sunk in the channel, were placed in part on the advice of pilots who knew where the bars ran. Amos was one of them, and he spent that autumn showing officers where a hulk would ground and where it would not. It was a modest service and an honest one. He declined a pension. His son Amos Proctor Lister, by then in his thirties and a slayer of standing, kept the White Ledger through the war, and the two men had the odd experience of finding their private business overlapping with a public one.
He came down with a fever in the summer of 1788 and did not recover from it. He died at seventy-three, in the house at Chester, and was buried in the Quaker ground with a plain stone. The White Ledger records that he never fired a shot for it and never asked to have his name entered, and that he was on every page anyway. In the Slayerverse chronicles, Amos Lister is remembered as the pilot who kept the family afloat, and a river chart in his own hand survives among the Proctor papers with its soundings, its marks and, in the margin beside a bend near Marcus Hook, a single small cross.
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