Clifford Alden Proctor

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

Clifford Alden Proctor measured everything to a thousandth of an inch, and the only things in his life that he ever allowed to be approximate were his opinions of himself. He was born in 1956 in Memphis, Tennessee, and died in 2010 of cancer, aged fifty-four. He worked as a machinist, in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, chiefly in the shops of Bessemer and Birmingham, Alabama, and he belonged to the House of Proctor and the White Ledger without ever being called to hunt. He was the elder son of the high school coach William Alden and of the telephone operator and slayer Lorraine Hale, The Wild Kestrel, and the brother of William Alden Proctor, who is living. He descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he had no alias, archetype or craft of his own. What he had was a lathe, a set of micrometers and a steady pair of hands, and the family remembers him as the quiet cousin who machined the Ledger's small and exact things, and who never made a part that he would not have trusted with his mother's life. He was born in Memphis because that was where his aunt was. His mother, who was twenty-six and had an infinite capacity for work and no patience at all with being fussed over, was told by the doctor that her first child was due in the middle of the football season, when her husband, the assistant coach, would be unable to leave his team. She took the bus to Memphis in the late autumn of 1956, to lie in at the house of her sister Wilma, the seamstress, where the sewing room could be cleared, the midwife sent for and the pins put away. William's own mother, the Sunday-school woman from the end of the Poplar Avenue streetcar line, was a short walk away and arrived within the hour with a casserole. The baby came on a Tuesday, in a rainstorm, and was given the name of a great-uncle on his father's side, with Alden in the middle and Proctor at the end, in the old custom of the line. He was carried home to Alabama on a train in a basket of his aunt's making, with a coat that she had cut down from one of her own, and he slept all the way. He grew up in Bessemer and then in Birmingham, in a house with a telephone in the hall and a whistle on a nail, in the long white glare of the Alabama summer, and he was a patient, wary, slow-moving boy who liked to know how a thing worked before he would let it be used. At five he took the telephone apart, with a kitchen knife, and put it back together, and it rang. His mother, who had been trained by her own mother to treat a small success as a sign, watched him do it from the doorway and said nothing. At seven he took the back off the school bus's whistle. At nine he repaired the family's clock, which had not run since the war, and kept it running for fifty years. His brother William, who was a year younger, was the talker, the one who could charm a neighbour into lending a ladder. Clifford was the one who could use it. He was told what the family was at fifteen, in the garage, over a bicycle whose chain he was fitting, by his father, who had been told in his turn at a wedding breakfast and had never forgotten it. He listened, and went on tightening a bolt, and then asked if his mother had a spare pistol that wanted looking at. His father said that she had. He did not hunt. It was a question that was settled quietly in that garage, and it was settled in the family's usual way, by not being asked. His mother had been called in 1963, when he was seven, on a lonely road, by a coach with no passengers, and he had grown up in the house of a hunter who worked through records and favours, a house in which the kitchen table was always covered with cards. It was no hardship. He found that he preferred, to the question of what a creature was, the question of how a thing was made. He left school at eighteen, in the spring of 1974, with a good grade in mathematics and a better one in metal-work, and took an apprenticeship at a machine shop in Bessemer that made parts for the steel mills, a long, loud, oily building with a crane, a row of lathes and a foreman named Duffy who did not speak to apprentices for the first month. Clifford, who was not a talker, found this an advantage. He learned the lathe, the mill and the grinder. He learned that a part that is wrong by a hair is wrong, and that there is nothing to be said for it. He was a journeyman by 1978, and the best hand in the shop at a tolerance by 1980. His service to the Ledger began with his mother's pistol. It had been a good pistol, and it had been carried for sixteen years in a coat pocket and a glove box, through the cotton towns of the Black Belt, in the rain and the dust, and it had begun to jam. He took it to the shop one Saturday, when the place was empty, and stripped it on the bench, and found that the sear was worn. He cut a new one. It took him four hours. His mother, who had the pistol back that evening, tried it in the yard, squeezed the trigger once and said that it was the first time in sixteen years that it had gone off when she told it to. She did not thank him. She said that she would be bringing him the others. In the thirty years that followed he repaired, by the cousins' count, two hundred and eleven weapons for the hunters of the Deep South Ledger, and he did it for the price of the steel. It was the silver that made him indispensable. A hunter of the White Ledger carries a case of silver rounds, and the rounds are not easily had. They must be cast, swaged and seated true, and a bullet that is a few thousandths out will fly wide at twenty yards, and silver, which is soft and heavy and is ruined by heat, is a hard metal to work. The Ledger's old swages, which had been made by a gunsmith in Memphis before the war, had been wearing out for a generation. Clifford made the new ones. He worked in the evenings, on his own account, with a die-steel blank, a grinder and a pair of calipers, and by 1982 he had a set that turned out a bullet of a roundness that the old gunsmith had never seen. He made the dies. He made the moulds. He made a small press, of his own design, that stood on a kitchen table and could be carried in a suitcase, and the hunters called it the Alden, after his father, because he would never allow it to be called after himself. He was the machinist of the Ledger's safe houses too, in the same quiet way. A good bolt, a hinge that did not squeak and a lock that could not be forced from the outside by a creature that had been invited into the porch were all things that he made, in the shop, on the evenings, and delivered, in the boot of a car, to houses in five states. He cut the keys. He fitted the sliding bar to the door of his brother's flat. He machined, for his mother, in the year that she retired, a box of aluminium, the size of a shoe-box, with a lid and a catch, to hold the current cards, the ones of the day, while the older ones stayed in their shoebox on the shelf, and she said that it was the most beautiful thing that anyone had ever made for her and put it on the table beside the telephone. She was not a woman who said such things. He lived alone, in a small house in Bessemer, with a garage, a lathe and a clock on every wall, all of which ran to the second. In the Vietnam years, which ran on until he was nearly nineteen, he had watched his father write to forty graduates and go to three funerals, and it was perhaps from that that he took his plain view of life, which was that a man should leave things in better order than he found them. He was a deacon of his church, a quiet bass in the choir and a champion of the underpaid, and his brother said that he had never known him say a harsh word about a living creature, and a very few about a dead one. In the autumn of 2001, on the morning of the attacks, he was at the shop, and the whole floor stood round a radio on the bench, and when it was over the foreman said that he supposed they should go on. They did. In the same year he turned fifty-five thousand parts. His father died in 1993, and his mother in the spring of 2006, in the chair by the telephone, with a pencil in her hand and a card on her knee. It was Clifford who found her. He picked up the card, which was dated that afternoon, and put it in the aluminium box. In the winter of 2009 he was told by a doctor in Birmingham that he had a cancer, and that it had gone too far to be stopped. He took it as he took a drawing, by reading it twice. He worked on until the spring, finishing a set of dies that he had promised to a cousin in Texas, and he put them in the post with a note giving the tolerance. He died in 2010, at home, aged fifty-four, with his brother William at the bedside and a clock ticking on the wall. At the funeral a hunter of the Ledger stood up and said that he had never once carried a weapon of Clifford's that had failed him. Nobody had anything to add. Clifford Alden Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the machinist of Bessemer, the quiet son of The Wild Kestrel who made the dies for the silver and the keys for the safe houses and never made a part that was wrong. In the Slayerverse he stands for the makers and menders of the White Ledger, the ones who were never called, who worked at the bench and the lathe to a thousandth of an inch, and who proved that a hunter is only as good as the thing that goes off when she tells it to.