Edwin Menger Proctor

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

Edwin Menger Proctor was born in 1897 in Victoria, Texas, and lived sixty-three years as a dockworker, loading and unloading freight on the platforms of the railway yards and wholesale houses of San Antonio, a cheerful, broad, much-liked man who was said to be able to lift a barrel of flour in each hand and to carry on a conversation at the same time. He was the elder son and eldest child of the court clerk and vampire slayer Barnabas Proctor, The Broadway Clerk, and of the milliner Ada Menger, and the brother of Elizabeth Proctor and Harriet Proctor, both of whom became slayers. In 1917 he married the boarding-house keeper Lillian Seguin, and they raised two sons, Norman Proctor, who became a slayer, and Clifford Proctor, who did not. He died in 1960 of a fall, aged sixty-three. He belonged to the House of Proctor and to the White Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. He was not called, and he did not mind, and he spent forty years making himself useful at the other end of the family business, which was carrying. He was born in Victoria because his father was sent there. In the spring of 1896 Barnabas Proctor, who had been married for a matter of weeks, was lent by the Bexar County court to the district court at Victoria, a cattle and cotton town on the Guadalupe a hundred miles to the southeast, to put its records in order after a clerk had died in office. He expected to be gone for a year. Ada, who had been given a free hand with the family's hat shop and who had no intention of staying in a rented room in a town where she knew nobody, closed the shop for the summer and went after him with her block, her steam kettle and four hatboxes. The Ledger's cousins of Victoria, who kept a feed store and a livery stable, took them in. The child was born in a back bedroom above the livery stable, in February, with the smell of horses coming up through the boards and Barnabas, who had come over from the courthouse at a run, still holding a bundle of deeds. He was named for Ada's grandfather and given, in the Alsatian way, his mother's surname as a middle name. They were back in San Antonio by the summer of 1897. Edwin grew up in the rooms behind the hat shop on Soledad Street, a stout, rosy, cheerful baby who turned into a stout, rosy, cheerful boy, and who was the only one of the three children who could not be made to sit still for fitting. His sisters were thin and watchful and took to the Ledger's work as a duck to water. Edwin took to the street. He knew every drayman, every ice-wagon driver and every stableman on the Westside by the age of ten, and he used to bring home in the evenings a great deal of information about the price of oats, which his father listened to with an expression of respectful interest. He was bad at school. He was pushed through it by his mother, who made him a new collar every September, and he left, at fifteen, having read a great many books and not one that he could be persuaded to finish. His mother, who had hopes, tried three trades. He was taken on for a season as a teacher's assistant at a school on the Westside, and was dismissed for an excess of high spirits in the playground. He was put as a printer's devil at the Express, where the foreman, a thin and weary man, said that the boy had the shoulders for the work but not the patience. Then, in the autumn of 1914, he found it for himself. He was walking down by the freight yards of the Southern Pacific on a Saturday, with his hands in his pockets, when a gang foreman called out that he was short a man on the platform, and Edwin, who was six feet and seventeen, took off his coat and lifted a crate. The foreman looked at the crate, and then at him. By the end of the day he had been hired. His mother, who found out from the foreman's wife in the shop, said that she had made a good many hats for people who had come from their work in a better temper than that. He married in 1917, at twenty, a woman six years older than himself. Lillian Seguin kept a boarding house on the Westside, on a street behind the old Mexican market, where he had taken a room in the spring of that year because it was close to the platform and cost four dollars a week. She was a tall, pale, quiet, practical woman with a Cajun father and a Texan mother, who had kept the house alone since she was nineteen and who ran it, as the boarders put it, like a ship. She had no time for nonsense. She did not hold with a lodger who whistled at the breakfast table, who left his boots in the hall or who sang. He did all three. It was the singing that did it. He had a big, untrained baritone, and on the evening of the first of June she came to the kitchen door to tell him to stop and stayed to hear the end of the song. He proposed that autumn, in the front parlour, in a clean collar, with his mother's hat on the sofa as a chaperon. They were married by a priest on the Westside in November, and the whole of the platform gang came to the wedding in their Sunday coats and ate the cake. Their first son, Norman Proctor, was born in 1918, in the winter of the great influenza, when the city was full of soldiers from Camp Travis and the boarding house was full of the sick. Lillian, who had never been ill in her life, nursed seven lodgers through the epidemic with a pail, a ladle and a very bad opinion of the army, and lost none of them. Clifford Proctor followed in 1919. Norman, who was a dark, grave, watchful boy, was called to the work at nineteen, and became a slayer of the White Ledger in the tradition of his aunts and his grandfather. Clifford, who was round and sunny and took after his father, was never called and never wished to be, and went into the freight offices. Edwin, who had no hunting in him, said that the family had room for one of each. He worked the platform for forty years. He saw the cattle-trail wagons give way to the lorries, and the lorries to the diesels, and the platform itself to a concrete dock. In the twenties he was a gang foreman, with twelve men and a reputation for fairness. In the Depression, when the railway cut its crews, he took a cut himself and kept the men on in rotation, and refused, in the winter of 1932, to load a car that he thought unsafe, and was suspended for it and reinstated when the car came off its wheels at Seguin. The Ledger, which he served in a plain and cheerful way, used the dock as it had always used the wharves and counting rooms, to move small things unobserved. A hatbox, a trunk of linen or a crate of cattle-feed marked for a ranch in the Hill Country could go through his hands in an afternoon without being opened. His mother, who sent him a parcel every few weeks, said that he was the only member of the family who could be trusted with a parcel and who could not be trusted with a secret, and that this was the beauty of it, because nobody ever told him one. His mother died in 1938, from a fall off a stepladder in the workroom, and his wife died in 1943, in the war years, of a chest that she had never looked after, in the back bedroom of the boarding house, with a lodger holding the basin. He kept the house. He did not marry again. He worked on, through the war, when the freight yards ran day and night and the city was filled with soldiers, and through the years after it, when his hands began to stiffen. In 1950, when the Korean War filled the troop trains, he was fifty-three and was put on the passenger platform, to carry bags, and sang there for ten years, to the astonishment of generals. He died in the spring of 1960, of a fall, from a loading ramp, at sixty-three, in the middle of the morning, with a trunk on his shoulder. The porter, who had been walking behind him, said that he had stepped back to let a woman pass and had missed the edge. His son Norman, the slayer, died in the same year. The platform gang, who had no great respect for ceremony, took up a collection and bought a wreath of straw, which was what they had in mind. Edwin Menger Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the dockworker of the Westside, the son who carried what the others had written. In the Slayerverse he stands for the labourers of the White Ledger, who lifted, loaded and delivered, who kept no secrets because they were never told one, and whose strong backs and plain good humour carried more of the cause than anyone remembered to credit.