Adriana Proctor

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

The house by the Phoenix depot kept a lamp in its window for as long as Adriana Proctor lived in it, and she was the one who trimmed it. She was born in 1944 at Phoenix, Arizona, and lived sixty-two years as a nurse in the port cities and desert suburbs of the American West, and she was not called to hunt. She was the only child of the streetcar conductor Lloyd Stone and of Norma Proctor Thorne, a boarding-house keeper and vampire slayer of the White Ledger known to the family book as The Long Lantern, and she was the granddaughter of the telegraph operator Alexander Proctor Thorne and the seamstress Adriana Navarro, for whom she was named. She belonged to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. She never married and had no children. She died in 2006 of pneumonia, aged sixty-two, of the same disease, and in the same city, as her father. The family remembers her as the nurse of the desert cousins, the one who bound up the hunters' wounds without a question and kept her mother's lamp lit for fifty-seven years. She was born in the front bedroom of the boarding house, on a night of such heat that the midwife fainted, and was laid on her father's chest in his conductor's blue shirt and slept there for an hour. Her mother Norma, who had been married three years, was a tall, composed young woman of twenty-three who ran the house for railwaymen and travelling salesmen. Her father rang the bell on the Van Buren line. The baby was dark, round-faced and silent. She did not cry at the midwife, the doctor or the thunder, and her grandfather Alexander, who came over from the telegraph office with a telegram of congratulation that he had composed in rhyme, said that she had the look of a girl who was waiting to be told something. She was told it in the end, but not by the person who might have been expected to. Her earliest memories were of her mother at the kitchen table, in the evenings, with a magnifying glass, a stick of sealing wax and a pile of letters, and of the oil lamp in the window, which her father trimmed each night and her mother lit. She remembered the smell of the wax, the sound of a pen and, whenever her mother was out, a tall man in a blue cap sitting up in the kitchen, whistling the stops of the line. She remembered, too, the spring of 1949. She was five. Her mother went out at dusk to look at a ranch house in the hills east of the city and did not come home, and her father, who had been told on the step of his bus, came in at midnight with his cap in his hand and picked her up out of bed and sat down with her in the chair by the window, and said nothing at all. In the morning the lamp was still lit. He did not put it out. Neither of them ever said why, and for fifty-seven years it went on being lit. She was brought up by her father and her grandparents. Lloyd kept the boarding house for twelve more years, with the help of a cook, and she grew up with a houseful of railwaymen and salesmen who had been told by Lloyd that the little girl was not to be spoiled, and who spoiled her thoroughly, with oranges, jacks and rides on the last bus. Her grandfather Alexander, who lived until 1974, taught her Morse code on summer evenings, with a telegraph key wired to a battery, and by eight she could take down a message at twenty words a minute. Her grandmother Adriana, for whom she was named, taught her to sew a straight seam and to say very little, and died in 1953, when the child was nine, in the front bedroom where she had been born. The loss was a quiet one. She went on sewing. She was a tall, thin, composed girl, very like her mother, and she was good at school and better at helping. At the age of twelve she was found by a neighbour, holding a railwayman's head in her lap on the pavement outside the depot after a fall, with his scalp bound in her petticoat, and telling him in an even voice that it looked worse than it was. He was fine. She decided on the spot that she would be a nurse, and she did not alter the plan. She went to the nursing school of a big Phoenix hospital in 1962, in a stiff cap and a grey cape, and qualified in 1965, at twenty-one, with the highest marks of her year. She worked first on a surgical ward, then on the emergency floor, and then, in the Vietnam years, at the veterans' hospital, where the men came home damaged in ways that the doctors could treat and in ways they could not. She was good with both kinds. She sat on the edges of beds, held a hand and said very little, and the men said afterward that she was the only nurse who looked at them as though they were still there. Her father, who had been ready for her to be called, said when she qualified that he was glad she had not been. He said it plainly, standing in the front hall, in his retirement watch. Her uncle James Proctor Thorne, who had come down from San Francisco for the occasion, told her the whole story over dinner, the Ledger, the creatures and the work of the hunters, and Adriana listened to the end, in her uniform, with her fork down, and asked a nurse's question. She asked whether the hunters had a doctor. They had not. The Ledger's cousins in the desert, in those years, patched one another up at kitchen tables with whatever came to hand, or went without, or went to a hospital with a lie. She said that she would be glad to see to it. She did, for forty years. It was the work of a nurse, and she did it as one, without fuss. A cousin who had been bitten or cut or burned in the line of duty, a drover from Yuma, a mechanic from Tucson or a young woman from the border country with a shoulder out, was given the number of the house by the depot, and came at night, and was seen. She cleaned the wound, stitched it and wrote nothing down, and the case, which she kept in her head, was filed under the name of a made-up illness at the hospital. She learned in her first year that a bite is different from a cut, in the way the edges heal, and in her second that a certain look in the eyes, three days after, is a sign that a man has been fortunate. She treated the Ledger's wounded through the Vietnam years and the great Arizona boom, when the desert suburbs spread to the horizon and a good many of the old houses on the side streets stood empty. In the autumn of 2001, a week after the attacks, she came off a double shift and found two cousins from Nevada on the porch, dusty and exhausted, and fed them both, bound a wound and sent them on their way before dawn. She never married. She says, in a letter that her cousins keep, that she had a number of excellent proposals and no free evening. She cared for her father in his last years and was at the foot of his bed when he died in the winter of 1988, giving orders to the staff, and it was a point of pride to the family that his last words, according to the ward sister, were the names of the stops. She inherited the house by the depot. She kept it, and the lamp, which she trimmed every evening, and the trunk in the back room that her mother had left, in which were her mother's seals, her mother's magnifying glass and the notebooks that she had kept. They are in the Ledger's archive today. She had read every one, many times, and she could recite the entry for the last day by heart. She was taken ill in the winter of 2006, with pneumonia, a thing that she had treated in other people all her life and that she diagnosed in herself, with some irritation, a week before anyone else. She went to the hospital on her own feet and was found by the ward sister, an hour later, writing her own chart. She died ten days afterwards, aged sixty-two, on the same floor where her father had died, with three cousins in the corridor and a young nurse whom she had trained at her side. The lamp in the window of the depot house, which had been lit every evening for fifty-seven years, was lit that night as well, by a cousin who had not been asked. Adriana Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse who kept her mother's lamp lit, the quiet daughter of a conductor and a hunter who bound up the wounded of the White Ledger and never took a pistol in her hand. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers and keepers of the desert houses, the ones who stayed by the lamp, and who proved that a clean dressing and a quiet word can be as necessary to the long war as any shot.