Edwin Nichols Proctor

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Fallow Kestrel. Craft: Witness Reading.

Edwin Nichols Proctor was born in 1802 at Watauga in the Tennessee hills, and lived forty-four years as a boatman and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Fallow Kestrel, a name that goes back to a hawk he was seen to watch, for hours, over a fallow field, and it classes him as a Broker, a hunter whose work is the arranging of other people's help. His craft was Witness Reading, the skill of listening to a frightened person tell a story and hearing in it what they had not meant to say. He was called in 1828 beside a river ford, in the same circumstance that had called his father, Levi Proctor, in 1790. He never married. He trained under his father, he hunted with his younger brother Albert, and he died in 1846 in an ambush on a river road, at forty-four. His father was Levi Proctor, one of the White Ledger's hunters of the Tennessee frontier, a man of the river and the long rifle. His mother was Naomi Nichols Proctor, a farmer's daughter of the Watauga settlements, who managed a small farm on the river flats while her husband was away and raised the children in the company of cows, bees and a large and variable population of visiting cousins. Edwin was the elder of two sons. His brother Albert Nichols Proctor, born in 1805, was called in 1826, two years before him, and served the Ledger for twenty-two years. The family was poor in coin and rich in kin, and in the evenings the cabin held, at times, a dozen cousins and their horses. Watauga in 1802 was hill country, very green, very steep, and cut by fast, cold, clear streams that ran down from the Unakas to join the Tennessee. It had been settled thirty years before by a band of independent frontiersmen who had formed their own government and then, rather to their own surprise, become part of the state. The settlement was old by western standards and proud of its past, and the stories of the early days, the long hunters, the siege of the fort and the march to King's Mountain, were told at every fireside. Edwin grew up on them. He also grew up on the river, in a dugout canoe, poling the shallows with his brother and fishing for trout, and by ten he could handle a boat in white water as well as many a grown man. His mother, Naomi Nichols, had more than farming in her. She had a sharp ear, and a habit, acquired from long years of women's talk over quilting frames, of listening to a story not for what it said but for how it was told. She taught it to her son, without meaning to. A neighbour would come to the door with a tale of a lost calf, and she would listen, and afterward, over the dishes, say to him that the man had not lost a calf at all, he had sold it and was afraid of his wife. She was nearly always right. Edwin, who was nine at the time, thought it the most marvellous talent in the world. At sixteen he went to work on the boats. The Tennessee River was the highway of the district, a long, wild, difficult stream, full of shoals, rapids and sudden bends, and the boatmen who worked it, poling flatboats and keelboats down to Knoxville and on to Muscle Shoals, were a hard, cheerful, sleepless breed. Edwin, who was tall, strong and steady, took to it well. He was a good hand at the pole, better at the steering oar, and best of all at the talk in the evening, when the crew gathered round the fire at a river landing and exchanged the day's news. A boatman hears everything. He hears the price of cotton in Knoxville and the state of the roads in Alabama, and what the new preacher at Kingston said about the old one, and what has been seen on the bluffs at night. Edwin listened to it all. He was called in 1828, at twenty-six, beside a river ford. His father, Levi, had been called in precisely the same circumstance in 1790, when a traveller on the road had refused to leave the water and stood for an hour in the middle of a stream while the company on the bank tried, with increasing embarrassment, to persuade him to come ashore. The Proctors told the coincidence as a sign. Edwin, who had been taking a load of salt across the ford at the hour, had found the thing happening in front of him: a tall, well-dressed traveller on a grey horse, who had ridden into the middle of the river and would not come out. The stranger said that the water was pleasant. He was asked about his journey, and told a story, and Edwin, who had been listening to stories all his life, heard in the telling a thing that nobody had noticed, which was that the man spoke of the shore as if it were a place he had not stood on for a great while. He sent for his father. Levi came, with his rifle, and in the gathering dark the two of them settled what had to be settled. It was after this that Levi told his son the whole of the White Ledger. He said it over a supper of trout, beside the fire, and Edwin took it in with the same attention with which he had taken in all his mother's analysis of the neighbours. He asked only two questions. The first was whether there were others. The second was whether they had any way of finding each other. The answers, in order, were yes and poorly. From that moment he understood what he was for. The craft he developed was Witness Reading. A Broker in the White Ledger, in the family's terms, is a hunter who does not hunt so much as arrange: he finds the people who know something, brings them together and puts the pieces before the hunters who can use them. Edwin found that he had a gift for it. He would sit with a frightened farmer, a widow or a ferryman, and let the story come, and somewhere in it, in the place where the teller's voice changed, he would find the thing that mattered. He would then write it down, and send it, by letter or messenger, to whichever hunter in the Ledger was best placed to act on it. He was the hub of a wheel of cousins across three states. A hunter in Virginia would receive, on a Tuesday, a note in Edwin's neat hand that said the stranger at the mill was the same one who had been seen in Abingdon, and that the miller's wife could be trusted. He worked from the river. The boats gave him a reason to be anywhere, and a boatman's acquaintance with every landing, and in the course of eighteen years he built up a network of ferrymen, storekeepers, preachers and washerwomen on the Tennessee, the Holston and the Clinch who would pass a word along to the man who paid in silver. He took in this way more than fifty vampires, by the Ledger's count, though he seldom fired the shot himself. He carried a revolver, and used it when it was needed, and he carried a length of rope, a lantern and a notebook, in which he wrote the stories that he was told. The notebooks, eleven of them, survive in the Proctor papers, and are still consulted. His alias, The Fallow Kestrel, came from a habit of his. He would sit, in the early morning or the late afternoon, on a rail fence or a boat's gunwale and watch a kestrel hover over a fallow field, motionless in the wind, for a long time, waiting. His brother asked what he saw. He said he saw a bird that did not chase anything. It waited until the thing it wanted moved. The cousins, hearing the story, took it for his name. He never married. There was a girl, the family says, a miller's daughter at Kingston, who would have had him, and to whom he wrote, but the work took him elsewhere, and in time she married someone else and sent him a pair of socks. He was fond of his nieces and nephews, the children of his brother and of the cousins, and of the dog that followed him about, a yellow mongrel named Ford. He was a tall, spare, calm, quiet man, with a habit of looking at the floor when he listened and at the listener when he spoke, and people told him things. He was said to be the only man in the valley who had never been lied to twice. Levi died in 1828 in an ambush, in the same year that Edwin was called, and so the son took over a work that the father had barely finished teaching him. It was a hard year. He buried his father in the hills above the river, and he took up the nets and the notebooks and went on, while his mother, who lived twelve years longer, kept the farm. In the eighteen years that followed, he and his brother Albert held together the White Ledger's western correspondence, and were known in the family as the Watauga pair. In the autumn of 1846 a message came to him from a cousin in north Alabama, asking for his help with a difficult case. He went down the river by boat and then by road. At a bend on the road near the Alabama line, where the trees came down close to the track, he was waylaid by three men who had been waiting for him since the morning. They had been paid, the family later learned, by a vampire whom he had been tracing for two years and who had, in the end, learned the name of his correspondent. He fought. He killed one, and wounded a second, and was shot through the body by the third. He was forty-four. His brother Albert, who came up the river to find him, buried him beside their parents at Watauga and set a stone in the hillside with a kestrel cut on it. Edwin Nichols Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Fallow Kestrel, the boatman of Watauga, the hunter who waited for the thing to move. In the Slayerverse he stands for the brokers of the White Ledger, the hunters who did their work by listening, and who built out of a hundred ordinary conversations the net that caught the night.