The machine shop at Kelly Field kept a lathe by the east window that nobody but Clifford Proctor was allowed to set, and the foremen said it had never once been out of true. He was born in 1919 at Victoria, Texas, and lived eighty-four years as a machinist in San Antonio, a man of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger who was never called to hunt and who spent his life making the parts that other men's work depended on. He was the younger son of the dockworker Edwin Menger Proctor and of the boarding-house keeper Lillian Seguin, and the brother of the vampire slayer Norman Proctor. In 1942 he married the bookkeeper Dorothy Schleicher, and they raised two children, Edwin Proctor, a slayer, and Ethel Schleicher Proctor, who was not. Clifford died in 2003 of pneumonia, aged eighty-four. The family remembers him as the shy man at the lathe, whose tolerances were finer than most men's promises.
Victoria in 1919 was a cattle and cotton town on the Guadalupe, a few miles from the coast, with a brick courthouse square, a railway depot and a great many sheds that served the Gulf ports. His mother had moved there a year after the birth of his brother, from Austin, where she had kept a boarding house near the depot, because the rents were cheaper and the lodgers, who were mostly railwaymen and cotton buyers, were steadier. His father Edwin, a cheerful, round-faced man who had grown up among hats and printers' ink on Soledad Street in San Antonio and had gone to the Gulf as a young man because the wages were better, worked the docks at Port Lavaca and Galveston, unloading what the coastal steamers brought and loading what the railway sent down. He was away on the coast most of the week. Lillian ran the house at Victoria, six rooms and a gallery, with a cook, a washerwoman and an iron will, and the boy was born on the second floor, in the front bedroom, in a thunderstorm that took the power from half the street.
He was a small, fair, careful child, and the lodgers took to him because he fixed things. At five he took the works out of a clock belonging to a travelling salesman in cotton goods and put it back together, with two screws over, and it kept better time than before. At eight he had his own toolbox, a gift from a retired railway fitter who rented the back room and who taught him to file a flat surface by feel. His brother Norman, a year older, was the talker and the traveller, quick, dark and watchful, who was always on the porch looking at the road. Clifford was the one who stayed in. Their mother, who had views on the proper division of a family, said that she had a son for the road and a son for the workshop, and she saw no reason to quarrel with providence.
The Ledger came to him through his father's mother, the milliner Ada Menger, in the matter-of-fact manner of a Proctor household. He was told as a boy, in the kitchen, in his mother's presence, that his father's family kept a book and that the book had a purpose, and that no one in the house would be asked to do anything that he could not do with his hands. He was not called. He knew it as early as he knew anything, and it did not trouble him. He did not have the stillness that the slayers had, or the particular attention that Norman, from the age of twelve, had begun to show. What he had was a steadiness with metal. He thought that a good machine was a kind of honesty, and that a family that dealt in matters of life and death might as well have an honest machine in the house.
The boarding house was lost in the Depression, along with half of Victoria. Edwin was laid off from the docks in 1931 and spent two years on the road looking for work, and Lillian took in lodgers at a dollar a week and sewed in the evenings. In the winter of 1933 the family moved to San Antonio, to a rented house on the Westside near his grandmother's old shop, which by then was a shoe repair, and Clifford, who was fourteen, went to the vocational school on the Southside and learned the trade properly. He learned the lathe, the milling machine and the surface grinder, and at the end of three years he could turn a shaft to a ten-thousandth of an inch without a glance at the gauge. A teacher called him the best pair of hands the school had seen. He was taken on at sixteen at a machine shop on the Roosevelt Road, sweeping floors, and was at a lathe within a month.
Kelly Field, which he joined in 1940, was the great employer of the city, and in the war years it grew to a town of its own, with thousands of civilians and soldiers working on aircraft engines in sheds as long as a street. Clifford, who was twenty-one, was given a bench in the engine repair depot and a pair of calipers, and within a year he was a leading hand. He worked on radial engines, on propeller hubs and on the small precise fittings that held everything together at ten thousand feet. He took the work home. On the evening he met Dorothy Schleicher, on the bus, he was reading a handbook of lathe tolerances, upside down, a circumstance that she turned to his lasting advantage. They were married in 1942. His brother Norman, who was in north Texas and had little leave to give, came down for two days and stood up with him and watched the church door the whole time, which Clifford took, rightly, as a compliment of a sort.
His mother Lillian died in the spring of 1943, at fifty-two, after an illness that she had refused to see a doctor about until the week before the end, and Clifford, who was working nights, was at her bedside on the last evening. She said that he had never in his life been late, and that she had been proud of it. His father, who had moved by then into a room above a grocery on Zarzamora Street, lived on alone until 1960, and came to Sunday dinner at the house on the Nogalitos Road with a loaf of bread and an opinion. Clifford's children, Edwin Proctor, born in 1945, and Ethel Schleicher Proctor, born in 1948, grew up with their grandfather's stories of the docks, and with their father's silence, which the daughter found restful and the son studied.
When the war ended, the base cut its workforce by half, and Clifford, who was twenty-six and had a family, stayed because the engine shop kept its best. He was promoted to a leader of a section in 1951, and in the Korean War the shop worked three shifts, and he worked two. He never complained. He came home at night smelling of cutting oil and solvent, washed his hands for ten minutes with a pumice soap, sat down to supper and said that the day had been fine. In the family, which had a good deal to be silent about, this was thought a particularly useful virtue. He did not talk about the work, and he did not talk about the other work, which was done at the kitchen table by Dorothy, with a notebook, and by his son, with a pistol, and by his brother Norman, until the night in 1960 when a barn fell, and the machinist drove up to north Texas to bring him home.
He did the one thing for the White Ledger that nobody else in the family could do. He made things. He made the silver-tipped stakes that his son carried, turned from stock on the shop lathe on Saturday mornings, with a taper that did not vary by a hair. He made the clasps for the old book, new ones in brass, when the old ones wore through, and he filed, for his niece Lois, a small steel key that opened a certain cellar door. He charged nothing. In the Vietnam years, when the base ran hot day and night and the city's young men went overseas, he kept his shop open on the Sunday afternoon for any hunter who needed a part, and he said, when asked, that it was a hobby.
He retired from Kelly in 1984, at sixty-five, with a watch that he put in a drawer, and spent the next nineteen years in a garage workshop behind the house, making clocks. He made a great many. They hung in every room on the Nogalitos Road, and they never agreed, which he said was the point. He lost Dorothy in 1996 and was inconsolable in a way that showed only in the tools, which he cleaned and oiled until they shone. He died in the winter of 2003, of pneumonia, at eighty-four, in a hospital bed, in the presence of his daughter. The last thing that he said was that the east lathe needed a new bearing. It was entered in the Ledger as a work order.
Clifford Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the machinist who kept the hunters supplied and the clocks wrong on purpose, the quiet brother who stayed at the bench. In the Slayerverse he stands for the makers of the Proctor line, the smiths, turners and fitters who never walked a night road and whose fine and patient work was nevertheless in every pistol, every stake and every lock that the White Ledger ever trusted.
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