Colleen Evans

Spouse of Harold Kalteyer Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Colleen Evans was born in 1962 at Memphis, Tennessee, and lived sixty-three years as a bookkeeper in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, a woman of no house who married into the White Ledger of the Proctor bloodline and spent forty years making its small expenses look like ordinary ones. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she had no alias, archetype or craft of her own. In 1984 she married the postal clerk and slayer Harold Kalteyer Proctor, a son of the diner cook Lloyd Kalteyer and the hospital cook Mary Proctor Navarro of San Antonio, and in 1985 they had one daughter, Cynthia Evans Proctor, who was not called. She died in 2025 of a stroke, aged sixty-three, at the desk where she had worked for so long. The Proctors remember her as the keeper of the books behind the Ledger, the woman who knew to the dollar what silver and train fares and a hundred hot suppers cost, and who never once wrote down what they were for. Memphis in 1962 was a river town of cotton brokers, barge lines and railroad yards, with a bluff over the Mississippi, a street of cotton factors' offices on Front Street and a great deal of old money living on the proceeds of a crop that it never saw. Colleen's parents, whom the family papers do not name, lived in a narrow frame house in Midtown with a magnolia in the yard and a porch that the whole street used. Her father worked in the freight office of a railroad and her mother took in typing, and the household was, as she put it later, run on carbon paper and good manners. She was the middle one of three, a freckled, steady girl with a habit of lining up her pencils, who at seven kept a ledger of the pennies that her brothers owed her and at nine charged interest. She was taken before the parish elder of the Baptist church at the corner, who suggested that she forgive the debts, and she agreed to forgive the interest. It was a compromise that she was to apply for the rest of her life, to people and to figures alike. She was good at arithmetic and better at paper. At school she was the girl who found the teacher's mistakes and put a very small tick beside them, and who was not unpopular for it, since she did it kindly. She took a course in bookkeeping at a business school on Union Avenue at seventeen, in the last year of the seventies, and she came out of it at nineteen with a certificate and a pair of reading glasses that she did not yet need. Her first post was with a cotton factor on Front Street, one of the old firms that still bought and sold the crop of the Delta and the Mississippi hill country from rooms with ceiling fans and brass spittoons, under a stooped, pleasant partner who had been in the trade since before the war. She kept the cash book. She learned the cotton year, which has a season of weighing and a season of waiting, and she learned that a counting house is a place where nobody asks questions about a payment so long as it is entered in the right column. She met Harold Proctor in the autumn of 1983, in the sorting room of the main post office on Third Street, where she had gone with a bundle of insured letters to be posted before the closing. He was twenty-six, a thin, watchful, slow-spoken clerk from San Antonio with a pencil moustache, who had taken a transfer to Memphis that spring and who looked at her bundle and said, without a smile, that one of the envelopes had been sealed twice. It was a joke, though she did not know it, and she gave him a look that her partner on Front Street would have recognised. He asked her to a cup of coffee the next week and, in the course of it, told her that he was a good deal more careful than he looked. She said that she was a good deal more careful than she looked herself, and that the two of them might well run a very quiet house. They were married in the spring of 1984, in the church on Poplar Avenue, with his mother Mary in her best blue dress, up from San Antonio, and his father Lloyd, who made the cake, and his brother Derek as best man, and her own mother, who cried at the wrong moment and was forgiven. She was told the truth on the first anniversary. Harold had put it off, he said, until he was certain that he would not be believed, and then until he was certain that he would. He told it plainly, at their kitchen table, with the baby asleep upstairs: that his family hunted, that they were called to it and always had been, and that he had been one of them since he was twenty. She listened to the whole of it with her chin on her hand. She asked three questions. The first was whether the silver was expensive. The second was whether he had been receiving cheques from anyone. The third was whether she might have the receipts. He gave her, that night, a shoebox. In it were four years of bills for silver, ferry fares, bus tickets, rope and a good many cups of coffee, all in his own handwriting and none of it in order. She sat up until three, put it in order and sat back and said that it was the most disgraceful set of books she had ever seen, and that she would take it on. That was her place in the Ledger. She was not a hunter and made no claim to be, and she was a great deal more use than a good many who were. A slayer of the White Ledger spends money in odd places. He buys silver in small lots, he travels at short notice, he pays for lodging in a name that is not his, and he needs, from time to time, to explain to an official why the household has a great many receipts for railway fares. Colleen kept the accounts of the Memphis cousins, as she called them, in a ledger of her own devising, with columns labelled in a private shorthand that she said would pass, to a stranger, for the books of a small church bazaar. She paid the silversmith. She reimbursed the cousin who had driven four hours through a flood. She entered, under the heading of choir expenses, the cost of a case of silver rounds for a cousin in Tupelo, and nobody ever audited the choir. Cynthia Evans Proctor was born in 1985, the year after the marriage, in a Memphis hospital in the heat of August, and she grew up in a house in which the dinner table was laid with the knife on the right and the pistol, on the nights when it was out, locked in the drawer of the sideboard. She was a quiet, exact, cheerful child who inherited her mother's pencils and her father's way of watching a room. She was never called, and she was told, at fifteen, that it did not matter. She became an accountant. Her father hunted, over the years, along the river bluff and in the railroad yards of a city that had been a junction since before the war, and he was away for an evening here and a night there, and Colleen, who had a clean ledger and a lamp in the window, never in forty years had to ask what a night's absence was for. Her own work was a steady one. She stayed with the cotton factor on Front Street for eleven years and then took a post, when the old firm was sold, with a freight forwarder near the rail yards, where she kept the books for twenty-two. In the great ice storm of February 1994, when half of Memphis lost its power for a week, she kept the freight books by lamplight in a building without heat, and was not at all surprised to find that they balanced. She was among the first in the family to follow the news of the eleventh of September 2001 with a notebook, in the kitchen, noting down who had telephoned, because it was the day that the Ledger's cousins wanted a count of who was where. In the pandemic years she worked from the dining table, with the door closed, and found that it made no difference to the books, which were exactly as untidy as they had always been, and she tidied them. Her mother-in-law Mary had died in 2007, and Lloyd had gone before, in 1989, and Colleen kept up the Sunday telephone call to San Antonio, to the cousins who remained, for another eighteen years. She had the stroke in the spring of 2025, at the table, at the end of a day. She had said that she had a headache, and had gone to finish the quarter. Cynthia found her. She was taken to the hospital and did not wake, and died in two days, at sixty-three. At the funeral, in the church on Poplar Avenue, Harold, who is living, stood at the front with his hat in his hand, and a dozen cousins of the White Ledger from four states stood at the back. A man in a grey suit whom nobody knew came up afterwards, and said that he had been the Tupelo cousin's choirmaster, and that he had always wondered why the choir's expenses were so extraordinarily well kept. Colleen Evans is remembered in the Proctor family as the keeper of the Memphis books, the woman who gave the hunt its receipts and who could make a case of silver look like a hymnal. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and bookkeepers of the White Ledger, the unnamed hands who never carried a gun and who, in a column of small honest figures, held the whole of the work together.