Asa Stone Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Bright Stave. Craft: Ledger Recall.

Asa Stone Proctor was born in 1800 at the settlement on Stones River in Tennessee that would become the town of Murfreesboro, and lived seventy years as a storekeeper and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Bright Stave, a name taken from the polished staff he carried on the road, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by records and recall. His craft was Ledger Recall, the trained memory for names, sums and dates that made him, in the judgment of his cousins, the best living index of the White Ledger. He trained under his father, Jacob Stone Proctor, he worked alongside his elder brother Jacob, he never married, and he died in 1870 of a sudden collapse, at seventy, behind his own counter. His parents were Jacob Stone Proctor, a hunter of the Tennessee settlements, and Ruth Cutler Proctor, the exact and formidable woman who kept the family's accounts. Asa was the younger of two sons. His brother Jacob, two years his senior, was the quick, verbal, argumentative one, a printer and a hunter of the courtroom method, and Asa, who admired him without envy, was the quiet, steady, numerical one. The two were raised together in a log house above the water, and when the family moved, as the Tennessee settlements spread, they moved together. Asa was born on Stones River, in the year that the Tennessee legislature was already talking of a county seat for the district, in a country of cedar glades, flat limestone outcrops, and cane so thick that a man could lose a horse in it. The river had been named for a hunter called Stone, and the family, who were Stones on the father's side, took it as an omen and never got over it. His mother taught him arithmetic, and it became the love of his life. She had a method, which she had learned from her own father, of teaching a child to hold a column of figures in the head and add it without the pen, and Asa, at seven, could give the total of a bill of sale as quickly as she could read it. At ten he was keeping the household book. At twelve he was balancing the account of a neighbouring farmer, who paid him in apples, and at fourteen, when most boys were learning to plough, he was sent to a storekeeper in Murfreesboro as a clerk and assistant. The store, a long, dim room smelling of molasses, tobacco, leather and cheese, was the centre of the district's life. It sold everything that the country needed and could not make, salt, iron, powder and lead, calico, coffee, tea, hardware, whiskey and medicines, and it bought everything that the country could spare, hides, feathers, ginseng, beeswax, corn, tobacco and cotton. A good storekeeper needed to carry in his head the price of every article, the state of every customer's account, the prospects of the year's crops and the credit of every man within thirty miles. Asa, who could remember a quotation from a fortnight ago and the exact amount that a customer had owed at the end of the previous harvest, was a natural. By eighteen he was managing the counter. By twenty he had bought a half interest. He was called in 1821, in the chapel loft, at twenty-one. A travelling family had taken shelter in the small Methodist chapel at the edge of town during a storm, and the preacher, who had found them there, sent for the storekeeper's clerk to ask if they might be given blankets. Asa, who went up to the loft with a lantern, found that the family had gone, all but one of them, a pale young woman, who sat by a window with a hymn book open. He asked her name, in the ordinary way, and she gave it, and he wrote it, as was his habit, in his pocket book. It was only in the morning, when he compared it with the parish register, that he found that it was unreadable. The letters, which he had copied exactly, made no name in any tongue. He took the book to his father. The elder Jacob, who had long since suspected that one of his sons would come to the work through his head, looked at the page for some time. Then he said that the girl had been trying very hard to give a name, and had found that she could not recall her own. That, he said, was a thing a vampire did, when it had lost itself too long. Asa, who had a good memory, never forgot the sentence. Ledger Recall, in his hands, was a simple and formidable thing. He had trained himself, over years of counter work, to hold a vast number of small facts in order, and he brought the method to the hunt. He learned the White Ledger by heart: every tally, every name, every date and every hunter's alias, back through the Proctor cousins of Virginia to the early books of the old country. He could recite, without a note, the tallies of a county for forty years. He could name the hunter who had taken a given vampire, the year, the weapon and the circumstances, and he could tell in a moment if a report that reached him was a fresh one or an old one in new clothes. The cousins called him the Index. A hunter planning a hunt in Kentucky or Alabama would write to Asa, and Asa, from his counter, would reply in a week with the whole history of the ground. His gear was a revolver, which he carried in a holster under his coat, and the staff from which his alias was taken. It was a long, straight, polished stave of hickory, shod at one end with iron and capped at the other with a silver ferrule, which he had bought from a pedlar in 1822 and carried for fifty years. It was bright because he rubbed it every night with beeswax, and it was the only thing in his life, the family said, that he ever fussed over. He used it for walking, for leaning on the counter, for pointing at a shelf and, when it was required, for something a good deal more serious. For almost fifty years the store at Murfreesboro was the White Ledger's switchboard in the middle South. Letters came to it, travellers called at it, and every hunter who passed through the district knew to ask at the counter for Mr Proctor. He took in messages, forwarded them, lodged travellers and kept, in a locked drawer, the private accounts of the district's hunters, with the dates and the amounts, because some had to be reimbursed from a common fund. He was the treasurer of the White Ledger in the West, which was an unofficial title but a real one, and in fifty years he never once made an error in the books. He never married. He said that he had been courting his work for too long to start courting anyone else, but the truth was that he was a shy man, who could calculate an interest rate to the fourth decimal and could not talk to a woman at a dance. He lived above the store with a housekeeper, a widow named Mrs Hollis, who looked after him for thirty years and in whose kitchen he was frequently to be found, talking to her about prices. His nephews, the children of his cousins, found him a delightful uncle. He gave them peppermint sticks and set them sums. His brother Jacob, who lived thirty miles away in Franklin, he visited twice a year, and the two sat up late, arguing, as they had done as boys, over whether a thing was better known or better proved. Jacob said that a fact was worth what you could make it confess. Asa said that a fact was worth what you could remember of it a year later. They never settled it, and each thought the other half right. The war came hard to Murfreesboro. The town changed hands several times, the great battle of Stones River was fought at the edge of it in the last days of 1862 and the first of 1863, and the store was stripped by one army after another. Asa, sixty-two, stood at his counter through the whole of it. He sold what he had. He gave credit to both sides, which he said was the only rational policy, and he kept his books, through shell fire and occupation, in a hiding place under the floor. When the armies had gone he dug them up, and found that they were dry. He died in 1870, at seventy, in his shop, of a sudden collapse, with a customer in front of him. The customer, a farmer, said afterwards that Mr Proctor had been in the middle of adding a column of figures aloud, had said forty-one, and had stopped. He was buried in the town cemetery, near the river. On his stone, the carver cut a staff, and beneath it, at his brother's suggestion, a line: Balanced. Asa Stone Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Bright Stave, the storekeeper of Murfreesboro, the man who could remember every tally. In the Slayerverse he stands for the keepers of the White Ledger's memory, the patient clerks and accountants without whom no hunter's work could have been recorded, found again or understood.