Edwin Eaton Proctor

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

Edwin Eaton Proctor was born in 1830 in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and lived seventy-eight years as a blacksmith in Franklin and the river towns and rail junctions of the middle South. He was the son of the blacksmith and vampire slayer Albert Nichols Proctor, called The Wild Sieve, and of the shopkeeper Nettie Eaton, and the elder brother of Naomi Eaton Proctor. He never married and had no children of his own, which he put down, when pressed, to being already married to a forge. He was not a hunter. But for some sixty years he made, mended and kept the iron that the White Ledger's hunters of the middle South carried, and he died in 1908 of cancer, aged seventy-eight, at a bench in the same shop in which his father had taught him to hold a hammer. His birthplace was a matter of his mother's good sense. Nettie Eaton had been married two years and was twenty-three when her first child was due, and her husband's work took him for weeks at a time along the Natchez road, where the freight was heavy and the quarry was light on its feet. She did not mean to be confined alone in a house beside a forge. She took a place on a wagon going east, crossed the mountains to the Watauga settlements, and was delivered in the log house of her mother-in-law, Naomi Nichols, the herbalist, who had gone back to her own people after her husband Levi Proctor was killed in 1828. The child was born in the spring, in a house smelling of sage and woodsmoke, and was named for his father's brother and his mother's family, Edwin Eaton Proctor, which his uncle Edwin Nichols Proctor, who came down from the hills that week to look at the baby, pronounced a fair bargain. By midsummer the boy was back in Franklin, in a basket on the counter of his mother's dry-goods shop. He grew up with iron in one ear and calico in the other. The forge stood in the yard of the frame house, the shop in the front room, and he moved between them as a boy moves between two kinds of weather. His father was a big, slow, cheerful man with a forge-scarred forearm, and Edwin took to him at once, and to the work. He blew the bellows at six, held the tongs at ten, and had learned by twelve the great rule of the trade, that a smith does one thing at a time, in order, and does not move on until it is done. He was a patient, broad-shouldered, thoughtful boy with his father's black hair and his mother's quick eye for a figure, and it was said in the town that he could tell a horseshoe from a bad one by the sound it made when it was dropped. His father's death in 1848, after a blow taken in a churchyard, came when he was eighteen. He stood at the graveside with his sister and his mother, and he said afterward that he had never before understood how much a forge depends on a particular pair of hands. His mother hired a young smith named Hale to run it, a sober, skilful man who stayed for twenty years, and Edwin, who might have resented it, instead put himself to Hale as an apprentice and learned everything the man knew. He learned to set a wagon tyre, to forge a chain, to hang a gate, to weld a broken axle and to shoe a mule that did not wish to be shod. By twenty-five he was the better smith of the two, and Hale, who was honest, said so. The work that he did for the White Ledger was the work of a man who had been told what his father did and had decided, at eighteen, that he would be useful without being a hunter. He cast silver shot. He did it in his father's own crucible, in the back of the forge, after the hired men had gone, and stamped each bag with a mark that only the cousins knew. He made moulds, tested them, filed the sprues and kept a locked box of finished shot under the anvil, from which the Proctor hunters of the Harpeth country drew their supply. He mended the things that a hunter breaks. A holster strap, a spring, a dented flask, a cracked stake, a gun-case hinge that had caught on a fence. He made a number of small tools for which there was no catalogue name, a hooked iron for lifting a cellar hatch, a spike for a lock, a collar of hammered steel for a dog. It was not glamorous work, and the hunters who came to the shop for it were never introduced. He preferred it that way. The railroad changed his world. When the line from Nashville reached Franklin in the 1850s, the smithy, which had lived on wagons, horses and farm iron, found itself making brackets, couplings, lamp irons and track spikes for the company, and Edwin, who could see that a man who shod mules would soon be shoeing locomotives, took the contract and hired two more hands. Rail junctions, he observed, were places where a great many people arrived at night and were not remembered, and he passed to the cousins, through the shop's correspondence, which trains came in late and which passengers wore heavy gloves in July. He was not a spy. He simply noticed what a man with a forge at the depot could not fail to see. The Civil War came to his door and did not go away. He was thirty-one in 1861, unmarried, and the owner of the only forge in the town with a steam hammer, which brought him attentions from both armies. He shod cavalry horses for whoever was in Franklin that week. In the autumn of 1864 the armies met a mile south of the square, in a few desperate hours on a November afternoon, and by nightfall his shop was a field hospital, with the anvil used as a table and the forge fire heating water. He stayed at it for four days and nights beside his mother and his sister. He was not one to speak of it, but he kept a musket ball that had been taken out of a boy's shoulder, in a tin on the forge shelf, and he would take it down in November and turn it over. After the war he rebuilt. Hale retired in 1868 and Edwin took the forge outright, and when his mother died in 1883 he took the shop in the front room too, leaving the dry goods to a niece of the Eatons and keeping the ledgers. He grew heavy, deliberate and grey. The town thought of him as a solitary, and so he was, but the children of the street knew that his forge was warm and that he would make a hoop for them out of anything. He kept his father's hammer on a nail above the bench. He had a long, slow illness at the end, working at the anvil until it was no longer possible and then sitting on a stool beside it, directing a boy, and he died in the spring of 1908, in the back of the shop, with the fire banked and the shot box locked. Edwin Eaton Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the smith of Franklin, the son who took up the tongs his father left and never asked to be anything more. In the Slayerverse he stands for the men of the forge and the anvil who supplied the White Ledger, who stamped every bag of silver with a quiet mark, and who held that a hunter is only as good as the iron he carries.