Earl Carter Proctor

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

Earl Carter Proctor was born in 1948 in Birmingham, Alabama, and is living today in Birmingham, where he worked for forty-one years as a lineman for the power company and has never in his life been called to hunt. He is a man of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. He is the elder son of the dockworker Wallace Carter and of the seamstress and slayer Wilma Proctor, The Rough Shuttle, and the brother of Virginia Carter. In 1974 he married the bookkeeper Mildred Petrov, who died in 2025, and the marriage was childless. He carries no alias, archetype or craft. What he carries is a climbing belt, a pair of spurs and a set of rules about live wire, and the family remembers him as the man who went up the pole in the dark so that everyone else could have the light on. Birmingham in 1948 was the iron and steel capital of the South, a city of blast furnaces, red ore, railroad yards and hills, with the great Vulcan statue standing on Red Mountain above the smoke. His mother's family had been there for two generations, and he was born in the house on the hill above the mills that his grandfather Earl Hale had bought on a mortgage in 1929, a few months before the market made such a thing foolish. His father Wallace worked the docks and the freight yards, loading steel and coal for the barges on the Warrior River and the cars on the Southern, and his mother Wilma, who was twenty-two and a slayer of five years' standing, made dresses in the front bedroom and went out at night on business that she described to the neighbours as church work. He was named for his grandfather, and he arrived, in the family's telling, at the end of a long night and a fine morning, with his mother's hands and his father's calm. He was a cheerful, unadventurous boy who liked heights. At six he was found on the roof of the coal shed, and at nine on the roof of the church, and at twelve at the top of a power pole near the school, having climbed it on a dare and found that he did not want to come down. His mother, who had seen a good many things in her profession, said that she was not alarmed by this, and that she would rather have a son on a pole than one in a barroom. His father, a big quiet man who had spent his days under a crane, said only that the boy had the head for it. His sister Virginia was born in 1949, and was the quieter and the more careful of the two, and was in due course a nurse. He was told what the family was at twelve, by his grandfather Earl Hale, who was fifty-five, who took him for a walk on the hill and put it to him in the voice of a man explaining a bond. The old cotton factor said that the family kept a book, that his grandmother Evelyn and his mother were hunters of that book, and that his task, and his sister's, was to be the dullest children in Jefferson County. The boy, who was twelve, asked whether he could still climb the pole. His grandfather said that it was the most useful accomplishment he had heard of in a long time. Wilma was called in 1943 in a sickroom, when a fever broke and the patient asked for the shutters to be closed, and was by now a detective of the Ledger in the Birmingham way, patient and documentary, and her craft was Seal and Sanction, the art of closing a house against a thing, with a form of words, a mark and a locked door, and making the closure stick. He saw it done once. He was fourteen, and held the lamp. He did not hunt. He did what his grandfather had done for the Ledger, which was to be useful in a respectable manner. He left school at eighteen, took a job as a groundman on a line crew of the power company, and by twenty was an apprentice lineman, climbing in the cold, in the rain and sometimes in the dark. The Vietnam years called him up in 1968, and he served two years in the Signal Corps, at Fort Gordon in Georgia and then in Germany, stringing field wire and learning to splice a cable by feel, and he was home in the summer of 1970 with a good discharge and no stories. He returned to the company and to the pole, and was a journeyman by 1972. He met Mildred Petrov at a church supper in the autumn of 1972. She was a young bookkeeper of twenty, the daughter of a Serbian-American steelworker's family from the west side of the city, who kept the accounts for a heating contractor and who said that she did not care for men who climbed things. He told her that it was a living. She said that it was no way to get anywhere. He replied that he had got to the church supper, which was a considerable distance for a lineman on a Wednesday, and she laughed, and they were engaged by Christmas. They were married in 1974, in the first week of April, in the middle of the great tornado outbreak that cut across the state on the third. He was called out on the afternoon of the wedding to restore power on the west side, and she, who was nothing if not practical, told him that the work would not wait and that she would see him when it was done. He came back at three the next morning, in his wedding trousers, covered in mud, and she was waiting with a thermos of coffee and the account book. It was, he says, the best start to a marriage a man could have. The marriage was childless, which they both took with a quietness that the family noticed and respected. They lived in a brick house in the hills, in the same neighbourhood as his grandfather's old home, with a garden of roses, a garage of tools and a large and cheerful porch, and they became the unofficial depot of the Birmingham cousins, as his grandparents had been before them. Mildred kept the house's books, and, in her own hand, a second set for the family's small funds, as a bookkeeper will, and he kept the lines. When a hunter's house in the eastern counties lost its power in an ice storm, Earl was on the pole before the dispatcher had finished the call. He also noted, as a careful man will, the houses that stopped drawing current for days at a time, and where the meter turned slowly, and where it did not turn at all, and he told his mother, who wrote them down. He never cut a wire for the Ledger. He read the meters. His mother Wilma died in 1998, when he was fifty, and his father Wallace in 2005, having outlived her by seven years and spent them in a chair, watching the river. In September 2001 he had spent a week on a pole line in the rain with the radio on, and said nothing for the whole of it. In the autumn of 2005 the hurricane that wrecked New Orleans sent a trail of broken lines across the Gulf States, and he went down with a crew from Alabama, at fifty-seven, for twelve days, to get the lights back in a city he did not know. He retired from the company in 2010 after forty-one years. He was an ordinary, steady man, large and white-haired, who played the bass at a church band on Thursdays, and who has, as his cousins say, the finest set of climbing spurs in the Deep South. Mildred died in 2025, after fifty-one years of marriage, at seventy-three. He is living today in the house on the hill, with the roses, the porch and a drawer of photographs, and he is looked after by his niece Nicole and by a loyal body of cousins. His sister Virginia, who died in 2016, is much missed. In the autumn, when the leaves are down and the wires stand out against the sky, he sits on the porch and looks up the street, as a man will who has spent his life reading it. He says that he cannot hunt, but that there is not a pole in Jefferson County that he could not climb in the dark, and that, if the Ledger ever needed a light, he would know where to find the switch. Earl Carter Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the lineman of the Birmingham cousinhood, the quiet son of The Rough Shuttle who kept the lights on and the meters honest. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people of the White Ledger who were never called and who worked in the high, plain and necessary trades, the ones that kept the dark from being any darker than it had to be.