Curtis Proctor

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

Curtis Proctor was born in 1999 in Atlanta, Georgia, and is living today in Atlanta, where he works as a bartender. He is a man of the House of Proctor and of the White Ledger, the Yorkist line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but he was never called, is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. He is the only son of the software tester Travis Lewis and of the nurse Nicole Proctor, who were married in 1998, the grandson of the electrician George Foster and the nurse Virginia Carter, and the nephew of the slayer Renee Foster Proctor, The Grey Latch. The family remembers him as the barman who hears everything and repeats nothing, the cousin who keeps the long counter in Atlanta and who has never once asked a customer why he sat with his back to the wall. A bar, Curtis says, is a very old kind of confessional with a worse class of penitent. People come in at ten with a story and leave at two having told a different one, and the person who stands behind the wood and keeps the glasses full is the only one who has heard both. He has worked behind a counter in Atlanta for the better part of a decade, in a hotel lounge, a neighbourhood tavern in Little Five Points and, at present, a long, dim cocktail room not far from the old railroad yards, and he is good at it in the way that the Proctors have always been good at the plain work that stands beside the hunt. He remembers faces. He remembers what a regular drinks. He can tell, from the way a man sets down his keys, whether he is going to be a pleasure or a problem, and he has an exact and unsentimental sense of when to stop pouring. He was born in the spring of 1999 at a hospital on the north side of Atlanta, the one place in the family's recent history where the Proctor line, which had spent a century in Mississippi and Alabama, put down a root in Georgia. His parents had come to the city the year before. Nicole, who had grown up in Jackson and trained as a nurse in Charleston, where she was born, had taken a post on a surgical ward in the city, and Travis, a quiet, bespectacled, sandy young man from Birmingham with a degree in computer science, had found a job with a firm that wrote software for hospitals and needed somebody to try to break it. It was an excellent trade for a patient person. He sat in a windowless room with a list and a cup of coffee and pressed every button that a customer might press, and several that no customer would think of, and he wrote down what happened. Nicole said that it was the only job that she knew in which a man was paid to be suspicious of things that were working. They lived in a brick duplex in a part of town of old oaks and cracked pavements, within earshot of the freight line, and Curtis was a loud, funny, round-faced baby who was soothed only by trains. His grandfather George Foster, the electrician, drove down from Jackson with a ladder in the car and rewired the duplex over a long weekend, to the despair of the landlord and the permanent safety of the child, and left behind him a small label, in his careful capitals, on every circuit breaker. Curtis can still read it. George was a man of no house, who had married into the Proctors and raised a slayer, and he talked to the boy, who was barely able to stand, as though to a journeyman. He said that the first rule was to turn off the power before touching, the second was to label everything and the third was never to be in a hurry. Curtis has found, to his surprise, that they are also the rules of tending a bar. He was two when the attacks of September 2001 happened, and remembers nothing of them but the sound of a television in a room with all the grown-ups in it, and his mother standing very still. He grew up in the long, flat, sunny sprawl of the suburbs, with school buses, summer storms and a church that his mother attended and his father, with great courtesy, did not. He was told what the family was at sixteen. It was his aunt Renee who did it, on a visit from Birmingham, over a plate of her own sandwiches at the kitchen table, in the plain, grave, exact way in which she did everything, and she put the question as she had put it to her own children, which was that there was a family business, that there was a choice, and that no one would think the less of him for whichever way he went. He thought about it for a week. He told her that he supposed he would be a better help with a clear head and a steady hand than with a pistol, and she said that this was the most sensible thing that she had heard from anyone in the family that year. He left school in 2017, spent a year at a technical college, and found, as many do, that the room was too quiet. He took a job as a barback at eighteen, carrying ice and washing glasses in a hotel lounge, and was behind the counter before he was twenty-one, working the rail in the early shift. He had the temperament. He was easy, wary, slow to laugh and quick to listen, and the older bartender who trained him, a tall Georgian with a grey moustache and a lot of opinions, said that a young man who knew when to say nothing was worth more than one who could shake a drink behind his back. Curtis can shake a drink behind his back. He considers it the lesser skill. In the spring of 2020, in the pandemic years, the bars closed. It was the hardest season of his working life. The lounge shut on a Friday in March, with the chairs upturned on the tables and the bottles left behind the bar, and for the better part of a year he lived on a small cheque and a series of odd jobs, delivering groceries, moving furniture and, for one long cold winter, driving a van of medical supplies for a pharmacy that his mother knew. His mother, who was on a ward full of the sick in a mask, rang him every night. His father, who worked from a kitchen table in Birmingham, rang him every morning, and the two of them, who had by then gone separate ways in the ordinary manner of a long marriage that had run its course, were agreed on one point only, which was that the boy was to eat. His cousins in the Ledger sent soup. His aunt Renee sent a box of surgical masks, sewn by herself, in a very small neat stitch, with a note that said only that they were washable. When the bars came back, he came back with them. He is now the head bartender in a cocktail room with a long zinc counter and a lamp over the register, and he is, in his gentle and unassuming way, a good deal more than that. A bar is a place at which a creature of the night, if it wishes to pass as a person, has to behave like one: order a drink, hold it, make conversation and eventually pay. The Ledger knows this, and a number of its cousins have been known to drift in on a quiet night and take the stool at the end. Curtis has never been told what any of them was doing. He has learned to read the slip of paper under a saucer, to seat a certain kind of customer by the front window, where the lights are bright, and to ring the number on a card that his aunt gave him, once, in November of 2022, when a man in a good coat asked him for a glass of water and did not drink it. That was all. He does not regard it as hunting. He regards it, with some justice, as hospitality. His mother Nicole now lives in Charleston, where she is a nurse, and his father Travis in Birmingham, where he is a software tester, and Curtis divides his holidays between them with a good deal of tact and a rental car. He is a tall, dark-haired, heavy-lidded man with his grandfather's ears and his mother's laugh, a black waistcoat that he wears with some ceremony and a habit of polishing a glass that is already clean. He is single, has a cat named Fuse, a small apartment above a bakery and a shelf of cookery books that he does not cook from. On the first Sunday of every month, he drives to Birmingham for dinner with his aunt, his cousins Gary and Erin, and whichever of the Proctors has come through town, and sits at the end of the table, where he is given the washing-up and a list of questions that nobody asks aloud. Curtis Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the Atlanta bartender who kept the long counter, a quiet great-grandson of The Rough Shuttle's line who learned his grandfather's three rules and turned them into the best-run bar in the district. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kin of the White Ledger who were never called, the hosts, the listeners and the keepers of the lamp over the door, who proved that a warm room, a steady pour and a good memory for faces are as much a part of the defence of a city as a pistol, and that a house which is well kept at two in the morning is the oldest ward there is.