Earl Hale was born in 1905 at Savannah, Georgia, and lived seventy-nine years as a cotton factor, most of them in Birmingham, Alabama, where he set up as a broker between the Black Belt growers and the mills. In 1924 he married the seamstress Evelyn Bowie Proctor, a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, known to the family book as The Steady Tinder, and they raised two daughters, Wilma Proctor, born in 1926, and Lorraine Hale, born in 1930, who both became slayers in their turn. He died in 1984 of a sudden collapse, aged seventy-nine, four years after his wife. Earl was not a hunter and was not born to any house; the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated, and he never carried a pistol or learned a craft. But he married into the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and for sixty years he gave it the thing that a travelling hunter cannot buy, which was a respectable man with a respectable calling who was never surprised by where his wife had been.
Savannah in 1905 was a city of squares and live oaks and cotton, and the cotton was the point of it. Earl was born in a rented house two streets back from the Bay, the son of a bonded warehouseman who weighed bales on the river front for a factor's firm, and he grew up on the wharves among drays, scales and the smell of tar. He was a thin, pale, dutiful boy, quick at figures and slow to speak, and he learned the grades of cotton at the age at which other children learned to swim. His mother, a schoolroom woman with firm views on penmanship, taught him a clear hand, and that, together with his father's gift for being believed, made a cotton clerk of him at fifteen. At eighteen the firm, which had a customer in the Alabama mills and wanted someone steady to send, put him on a train to Birmingham with a sample case, a letter of introduction and a warning not to lose either.
He did not lose either. He lost, in the course of a spring, his heart to a seamstress in a dress shop on Second Avenue. Evelyn Bowie Proctor was twenty-two, a short, plain-spoken, brown-haired woman with her mother's hands, who had come to Birmingham with her father, a cattle drover who was working the stockyards that year, and who altered the suit that Earl wore in front of the mill agents and found it sadly cut. She said so. She told him, without being asked, that his only jacket made him look like a bookkeeper at a funeral, and that if he would stand still she would put it right. He stood still for forty minutes. She fixed the jacket, and on the way out he asked her, with a gravity that she remembered all her life, whether she would marry a man who could not afford a second one. They were married in 1924, in the front room of her father's rented house, with Frederick Adams Proctor, The Lone Reeve, giving her away and asking the groom a set of questions that seemed to Earl a very odd way to meet a son-in-law. He asked the same question three times in three different words, and Earl, who was a cotton man, answered it the same way each time. The old man grunted and shook his hand.
It was two years before he was told what the questions had been for. Evelyn was called in 1926, in a cellar, when she had gone to deliver a dress to a customer in the mill village at the edge of the city and found the house empty, the stores in the cellar untouched, and the household gone. She came home white and silent and sat in the kitchen for an hour, and then she told her husband all of it, in the order of a seamstress laying out a pattern. Earl listened, and then he did what a factor does with unwelcome news. He asked what it would cost. She said nothing, and that it would cost her a good many nights. He said that in that case he had better learn to explain them, and from that evening he did.
The arrangement lasted fifty-four years, and it was a good one. Evelyn was a Broker, which the Proctors count among the hunting styles, a hunter who deals in advantage, who knows who owes whom and who can be made to talk, and her craft was Procedural Trapping, the patient use of rules, forms and routine to pin a creature in a place where it has to answer. Earl supplied the paperwork. A cotton factor in the Deep South in those years travelled constantly to the mill towns and railroad cities, had friends in every depot and could be anywhere, and nobody thought it strange that his wife went with him, or sometimes ahead of him, with a sewing bag. He wrote her letters of introduction. He booked her rooms. He learned to say, in a tone of mild regret, that Mrs Hale was indisposed and could not come down to supper, and to say it so smoothly that nobody remembered it afterwards. He was, she said, the best liar in the family, because he never told one.
The daughters came in the late twenties. Wilma Proctor was born in 1926, and Lorraine Hale in 1930, in the house on the hill above the mills that Earl bought on a mortgage in 1929, a few months before the market made such a thing foolish. They did badly, as everyone did, in the Depression years, when the mills ran three days a week and the growers paid in promises, and Earl, who had been taught that a promise was a form of credit, spent the thirties carrying men on his books that no bank would have touched. It cost him a great deal, and he never once raised his voice about it. Evelyn took in sewing. Frederick had died in 1928, in a car accident on a wet road, and Effie, who had come to live with them, died in 1936, and it was Earl who sat by her bed, with the girls, and held the lamp.
Both daughters were called in their time, and Earl met each calling with the same dry composure. Wilma, called in 1943 in a sickroom, when a fever broke and the patient asked for the shutters to be closed, learned from her mother, took the craft of Seal and Sanction and was known as The Rough Shuttle; she married the dockworker Wallace Carter in 1945 and gave Earl two grandchildren. Lorraine, called in 1963 on a lonely road, when a coach arrived with a driver and no passengers, became The Wild Kestrel, married the high school coach William Alden in 1954 and gave him two more. Earl was fifty-eight that spring, and when Lorraine told him he put down his coffee and said that he supposed the family would need a bigger table. In the war years, when the city filled with soldiers from the camps and the mills worked three shifts, and again in the Korean War, when the price of cotton rose and fell like a nervous heartbeat, he kept his small firm going, and in the Vietnam years he did the thing that proved to be his last service, which was to keep two daughters and a wife out of the paper, as he put it, by being the dullest man in Jefferson County.
Evelyn died in 1980, of old age, and he went on for four years, at the table on the hill, with her thimble on the windowsill where she had left it. He was seventy-nine. He fell in the front hall one October afternoon, quite suddenly, with his hat in his hand, as if he had been called to the door, and the doctor, who came within the hour, said there was nothing to be done. Lorraine, who got there first, found the hat on the floor beside him, and set it on the hall table, and straightened it.
Earl Hale is remembered in the Proctor family as the cotton factor who never carried a pistol and never once asked his wife to stay at home, the man who explained her absences so well that nobody ever asked. In the Slayerverse he stands for the husbands and wives of the White Ledger who stayed on the safe side of the door, who kept the books and the porch light and the pretences, and who proved that the dullest man in town can be the best fortification a hunter ever had.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
