Benjamin Eaton Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Benjamin Eaton Proctor was born in 1894 in Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived eighty-two years as a carpenter, building and mending the frame houses, sheds, galleries and stairways of the lower river, and for forty of those years building into them a number of small spaces that did not appear on any plan. He was the elder son of the dockworker Lewis Eaton and of the seamstress and vampire slayer Nettie Thorne, The Narrow Seal, and the brother of Lewis Proctor. The family papers name no wife and no children. He died in 1976 of a long illness, aged eighty-two. He belonged to the House of Proctor and to the White Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he took his mother's Proctor name as insurance and kept his father's as a middle name. He was not called to the work. He was a man who built, and the hunters of the Ledger came to know that if you wanted a wall with a cavity in it, he was the one to ask. Algiers in 1894 was a railway and shipyard town with a drydock and a ferry, and Benjamin was born in the rented house on Pelican Avenue, in the shadow of the shipways, in a spring so wet that the batture at the end of the street was under a foot of water for a fortnight. His father, who was a longshoreman of enormous size and few words, carried the midwife up the steps on his back. The child was a heavy, quiet baby with his father's hands, and at three he was found in the yard with a hammer, banging nails into a cypress offcut with an expression of deep and settled calm. He was not stopped. His mother, who was a hunter and who had spent several evenings a week of that year following a man through the parish records, said that she had never in her life seen anyone so happy with a piece of wood. His father took him to the drydock at ten. The old shipwrights who worked the yard, a crew of Scotsmen, Greeks and freed families from the cane parishes, let him sit on a trestle and watch, and gave him, as a sort of fee for being no trouble, the offcuts. By twelve he could plane a board square, by thirteen he could cut a mortise and by fourteen, when he left the school by the drydock for good, he had made a table, a bench, two stools and a shelf for his mother's sewing basket. She still had them thirty years later. He was taken on at fifteen as an apprentice by a master carpenter of the Algiers side, a Breton named Le Gall who built houses for the railway foremen and who had a way of looking at a joint that made a boy want to take it apart and do it again. The apprenticeship was five years. At the end of it Le Gall, who did not give compliments, gave him a spirit level. It was in his apprenticeship that he first understood what his mother did. She had not told him, and he had not asked. He had noticed that she was out in the evenings, that she carried a sewing basket that was heavier than it looked, that there were certain gentlemen who called at the kitchen door and spoke to her in low voices and went away without a cup of coffee. In the spring of 1913 she asked him, in the same flat tone in which she asked about his wages, whether he could build a cupboard with a false back. He said that he could. She said that she needed it by Saturday, that it must hold twenty-four silver-tipped stakes and a revolver, that the back must come out with a single push and that no one, not even a joiner, must be able to tell. He built it in two days. It stood for forty years in a rooming house on Dauphine Street, and nobody ever found it. He said, later, that he had been rather proud of the hinge. The war came, and the engineers took him. He went in as a private in the summer of 1917, and was a sergeant by the following year, in a company of engineers that built bridges, barracks and a great many duckboards, at a camp in the mud of the French interior, behind the lines. He spent the autumn of 1918 building a bridge over a river that did not exist on the map, and was gassed slightly in October, and was in a field hospital when the influenza arrived. He recovered. He came home in the spring of 1919 on a troopship, with a sergeant's stripes and a bag of tools, and found that his brother Lewis, who had been in the railway shops at Algiers, had taken a place at a joiner's, and that the family business, such as it was, was waiting. He worked through the rest of the twenties in the building trade, which was good in New Orleans in those years. There was a great deal to repair. The old Quarter houses were falling down in places and had to be shored up, and the suburbs were growing in every direction. He built galleries in the Garden District and stairways in Gentilly, and in the evenings, for the Ledger, he built the other things. He made a bookcase that opened on a cellar and a bed-frame with a long compartment in the rail. He made a tall clock whose case could hold a shotgun, and a pew, for a church on Bayou Road, with a hollow seat. The district of Storyville, which had been closed in 1917, was by then being pulled down brick by brick, and he took the paneling, the staircases and the mahogany bars away from the demolition for a fraction of their value and used them for years. He built a good many of the houses that went up on the site, by a nice irony, for the Housing Authority. The Depression, which closed half the builders in the state, did not close him. A man who can build a staircase in a day and who does not talk could find work, and he found it, in the shoring of levees, the mending of floodwalls and the building of the small cabins that the state put up for the unemployed. He lived with his mother on Dauphine Street, in the rooms over her sewing table, until her death in 1944, and after that in a house of his own, with a workshop, a garden and a big grey dog. He said that he did not marry because he had never found a woman who liked sawdust as much as he did. His brother Lewis, from whom only the war had ever parted him, died in 1948, and it was Benjamin who built the coffin, which was oak, plain, and exactly the right length. In the years of the Korean War, when the building trade filled with young men who were afraid of nothing, he took on two of them as apprentices and taught them to square a corner. He was in his late fifties. He worked until he was seventy-one. He built, in the last years, a cabinet for the Ledger's New Orleans chapter with a double back, a false floor and a lock that opened to a particular sequence of knocks, and he said that it was the best thing he had ever built, and that he did not expect anyone to find it. He was ill from the winter of 1974, in the long, patient, dignified way of a man who does not want to be a nuisance, and he died in the autumn of 1976, in his own bed, with the dog under it. The pencil behind his ear, which the nurses removed, was found to be sharpened to a very fine edge. Benjamin Eaton Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the carpenter of Algiers, the son who built a wall with a secret in it and never told where. In the Slayerverse he stands for the builders and joiners of the White Ledger, who never raised a stake, who left room behind a panel for those who needed it, and who were trusted because they could keep a cavity as well as a counsel.