Edward Russell

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

Edward Russell was born in 1939 at Austin, Texas, and worked for forty years as a high school coach in the rail yards, banks and suburbs of north Texas. He is living today in Austin. He is not a hunter and belongs to no house; the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated. In 1963 he married the diner waitress Lois Proctor, a vampire slayer of the White Ledger known to the family book as The Dry Beacon, and they raised two children, Vera Russell, born in 1966, who is a slayer and is also living, and Gary Proctor Russell, born in 1968, who is not. Through his wife and children he stands in the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger. He was a teacher of boys and a coach of teams for four decades, and for fifty-three years of marriage he was the husband of a woman who did not tell him everything, and who did tell him enough. The Proctors remember him as the one who stayed in the kitchen with the porch light on, and who is still, at the time of writing, available for the telephone. Austin in 1939 was a small, sleepy state capital of about ninety thousand people, with a granite capitol, a university on the hill and the Colorado River dammed into a chain of lakes by the new works above the town. Edward's father was a clerk in the highway department, a neat, anxious man who could fold a map so that it never tore, and his mother taught Sunday school and kept bees in the back yard, an occupation that he credited with giving him his first lessons in the management of large, excitable crowds. They lived in a frame house in Hyde Park, north of the university, under a pecan tree and a line of telephone wires. He was a big, fair, good-natured boy who was slow to speak and quick to help, and who by twelve was the one that the younger children of the street ran to when a ball went on the roof. He was a footballer, and a good one, though not a great one, and he knew the difference, which is the beginning of coaching. He played at tackle for his high school, went on a partial scholarship to a small college in the hill country and came out of it in 1961 with a degree in physical education and a certificate to teach history, which was thought the natural pairing. His coach, a bald, hoarse veteran of the Pacific named Dutton, told him on the last day that he had never been the best player on the field, and had always been the one who knew where everyone else was. It was the finest compliment that Edward ever got. He took a post that autumn at a high school in Arlington, between Dallas and Fort Worth, where the new General Motors plant and the new aircraft shops were pulling the farms into suburbs and the football team had lost eleven games in a row. He met Lois Proctor in the October of 1962 in a diner on the old Fort Worth highway, where he went every Thursday after practice with a clipboard and a ravenous appetite. She was nineteen, a tall, quick, level-eyed waitress with a pencil behind her ear, who took his order without looking up, told him that he would have the chicken-fried steak and not the fish and then told him, correctly, that his team had lost on a fumble. He asked how she knew. She said that she had been listening to the cook's radio, and that she had counted. He said that he would like to buy her a coffee. She said that she was working. He came back the next Thursday and asked again, and the Thursday after, and she told her mother afterwards that he was either very stubborn or very stupid, and that she was inclined to the former. They were married in 1963, in the spring, in a small Methodist church in Arlington, with Lois's mother Vera Milam in grey, her uncle Clifford Proctor up from San Antonio in the back pew and the diner's cook, who had given her away in the absence of a father, in a suit that had been bought for the occasion and was a size too small. It was a short engagement and a long courtship, in the sense that he spent the first year of the marriage finding out what he had married. She was called in that autumn, in an inn yard, and she came home the same night, put her pistol on the kitchen table beside the salt and told him in her flat, unhurried Fort Worth voice that she had something to explain. He listened for an hour. At the end he did not say that he believed her. He said that he supposed she would want her coffee, and made it. He was a coach, and a coach knows a team that has been told the truth when it has been told it; he wished, he said later, that he had been as steady as he looked. She told him the rules in the order that mattered. There were things he must not ask, places he was not to follow her, a window where a lamp would be lit on the nights that she was out, and a number that he was to ring if she was not home by dawn. He learned the number by heart that night. He rang it twice in fifty years, and both times the answer was the same, which was that she had stopped for pie. His work in the matter was the work of a good defensive coach. He did not go into the field. He kept the house, the lamp and the telephone, and he kept something rarer, which was a clear head about what he did not know. Lois, who was a Detective, a hunter of questions and records who prefers a notebook to a gun, used to say that the best listener in the family was her husband, because he never offered an opinion until he was asked. She would come back from a long night of Quiet Confrontation, the art of telling a creature in a calm voice and a public place that it has been seen, and sit at the table, and Edward would put down the paper and let her talk, and would say, perhaps once an hour, a single, plain thing. It was often the right one. He knew the boys of half the town, and so he heard, in the locker room and on the bus, a great deal that never reached the police, a missing cousin, a neighbour who slept all day, a quiet new man in the yard at the rail depot, and he passed it to her over breakfast, without comment, folded into the box score. The Vietnam years were hard for a coach in a suburb that sent its boys by the busload to the induction centre. He wrote to more than thirty of his former players over those years, as a good many coaches did, and he kept the replies in a shoebox. Two of them did not come home. He went to both funerals in his dark suit, and stood at the back, and did not make a speech. He held that a team was a kind of family, and that you did not stop being the coach when the game was over. In 1966 and 1968 the children came. Vera Russell was named for her grandmother, a laundress who had washed a hunter's shirts for twenty years, and Gary Proctor Russell was named, as Edward put it, for no one in particular, but with the family name in the middle, as a precaution. Vera, as a girl, was her mother's shadow, with her mother's eyes, and Gary was his father's, a big, mild, cheerful boy who loved a ball game and could not abide a quarrel. He coached for thirty-eight years, mostly football and baseball, winning rather more than he lost, and he taught history for the most of them, a subject he was convinced that no one remembered if they had not been made to write about it. He was a tolerant teacher and a strict coach, and a good many of his boys came back, as men, to tell him that he had been right. In 1998 he took retirement and moved with Lois back to Austin, to a small brick house in Hyde Park, not a mile from the one in which he was born. They planted a pecan tree. Lois went on working at the diner two days a week, for the company, and came home on Thursdays with a pie, and in the afternoons he sat on the porch with a newspaper and a legal pad on which he kept, in pencil, a running record of everything that the neighbours had said. Lois died in 2016, in the winter, of a fall, outside the diner, on a step that she had been told for twenty years was a hazard. He was with her within the hour. He has not remarried, and he lives in the same house, with the porch light on. He is eighty-seven, a large, stooped, soft-voiced man with a coach's whistle on a hook by the door, and his grandchildren come on Sundays and ask him about the old team. Vera Russell, his daughter, who is a slayer and a Detective like her mother, with her own craft of Seal and Sanction, telephones every evening, and he picks up on the second ring, as he has always done, and says that he is available. Edward Russell is remembered in the Proctor family as the coach who kept the lamp lit, the quiet husband who never asked where she had been and always knew when to put the kettle on. In the Slayerverse he stands for the steady kin of the White Ledger, the spouses and teachers of boys who stayed behind in the light and made the long night's work possible for those who went out into it.