Evelyn Bowie Proctor

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Steady Tinder. Craft: Procedural Trapping.

Evelyn Bowie Proctor was born in 1902 in Birmingham, Alabama, and lived seventy-eight years as a seamstress and, for fifty-four of them, as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South. The family book knows her as The Steady Tinder, the little fire that is kept going all night so that the big one can be lit in the morning, and it classes her as a Broker, a hunter who works by terms, bargains and the careful setting of conditions, and who would rather close a door on a thing than chase it. Her craft was Procedural Trapping, the art of making a creature walk, one reasonable step after another, into a position from which the rules, and not the hunter, will not let it leave. Her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes and a sealed ledger. She was the younger daughter of the cattle drover and slayer Frederick Adams Proctor, The Lone Reeve, who was also her mentor, and of the seamstress Effie Bowie, and the sister of the slayer Lorraine Proctor. In 1924 she married the cotton factor Earl Hale, and they raised two daughters, Wilma Proctor and Lorraine Hale, both of whom became slayers in their turn. She died in 1980 of old age, aged seventy-eight. She was born at Birmingham because her mother went along on a cattle contract. In the autumn of 1902 Frederick Adams Proctor was engaged to take a consignment of Texas beef by rail to the stockyards of the new steel city, a long and awkward journey by way of New Orleans and Mobile, and Effie Bowie, who was seven months gone and had a cousin married to an ironworker in the Birmingham suburbs, decided that she would see the cousin and the hills in the same trip. The train was held for a day at Meridian, the baby was early, and Evelyn was delivered in the cousin's parlour, in the red dust and the furnace glare, by a doctor from the Tennessee Coal and Iron works who had only ever delivered the families of foundrymen. He said that she had very decided lungs. Her mother, who was a woman of few words, said that it was an ugly town, but that the baby had been sensible to come in a place where there were so many chimneys to look at. They went home in a fortnight, by the Southern, with the baby in a box that had held a bolt of linen. She grew up in San Antonio, in the rooms over the saddler's, and her earliest memory, as she liked to say, was of a pocket. Her mother made the long coats of the Ledger on a treadle by the window, and the child, who was left in a basket at the foot of the machine, learned to tell the cloth by the sound it made. She was the quiet one of the two sisters. Lorraine, a year older, was the watchful one, long, solemn and silent, and Evelyn, who was a small, sandy, bright-eyed girl with her mother's hands and her father's slow smile, was the one who wanted to know what things cost. At six she went with her father to the stock pens, and listened, with an expression of great interest, to a trader and a rancher haggling over a string of steers. She repeated the figures at supper. Frederick, who had spent his life in the business of asking a question three ways, said that the child had found a fourth. What she liked was terms. She liked the idea that a thing might be settled by what each party gave and what each was owed, and she liked, above all, to watch a bargain close, for there was a particular quiet that followed it. She learned the trade of a seamstress as her mother had learned it, and made good coats, but she learned, in the evenings, from her father, the other thing that he had learned in forty years on the cattle roads, which is that a man who has agreed to something cannot easily go back. He taught her the order of an account. He taught her the importance of a witness, a signature and a date. He said that a hunter who wanted to put something on the books should begin by getting it to sign for a thing it did not need to sign for. She was married young, and sensibly, in 1924, at twenty-two. Earl Hale was a cotton factor's agent from Mobile, a tall, soft-spoken, fair young man of nineteen who had been sent to the Guadalupe valley to buy the season's crop at the gins of Seguin and Gonzales for a coastal house, and who had given his age as twenty-one to a banker and had never been able to take it back. He came into her mother's workroom with a torn sleeve in September and stayed until Christmas. She liked him because he did not hurry. He said that he had never met anyone who could tell, by looking at a bale, what the buyer would pay for it, and she said that this was because he had never met a seamstress. She told him what the Proctors were on a Sunday, on a bench by the river, and he took it as he took a contract, by reading it twice, and said that he could see no clause that he objected to. They were married in the spring. Her mother, who had cut the dress, said that he would do. They lived in the Deep South from the first, because the cotton did. Earl was moved by his firm, over the years, from Mobile to Selma, from Selma to Montgomery, and from Montgomery to Meridian and Vicksburg, and Evelyn, who had expected to be homesick, found that she liked it. The cotton towns and the railroad cities of Alabama and Mississippi, with their compresses, their depots, their courthouse squares and their cotton brokers' offices full of men in shirt-sleeves, were exactly the places where a Ledger hunter was most needed and least noticed. She took in sewing. She learned, in each town, the names of the sexton, the railway agent, the county clerk and the man who ran the funeral home, and she put them in a small book. She was called in the autumn of 1926, in a cellar. The Hales had taken a house in a small river town on the Tombigbee, and a neighbour's family of five, who had been known to Evelyn by sight, had not been seen for nine days. She went round with a pie, as one does, found the house shut and the back door open, and went down to the cellar after a cat. The stores were there, all of them: flour, lard, jars of peaches, a ham. Nothing had been touched, and the household had gone. It was not the absence that struck her. It was that the stores were arranged, very neatly, in the manner of a bargain, as if someone had been paid for them. She stood in the cold for some time, with the cat under her arm, and she saw the thing as a matter of terms. Something had been given in exchange. She wrote to her father, who answered by return that she had called. Her daughter Wilma Proctor had been born that spring, and with an infant asleep in the next room she could not go about it as her sister did. She learned the households of the town, found the one that had been offered terms and walked into the debt. Procedural Trapping, as she practised it, was the art of the long reasonable conversation. A creature of the old sort cannot enter without leave, and she saw that it can also not leave without a form of words. She drew up, in her own hand, the invitation, with the date, the hour, the witnesses and the terms. She sealed the ledger. She sat the creature down at her own kitchen table, in a house that she had made ready, and offered it a bargain that it could not refuse, because the refusal was written into the terms. The family book dates her first taking to the spring of 1927. She said that it had been the cheapest night's work of her life. Her father, who died in 1928, came east once, in the winter of 1927, and watched it done from the next room, and said afterwards that she had improved on his method. Her sister Lorraine died in 1935 in a churchyard, and Evelyn, who came home to San Antonio for the funeral with her second daughter, named in her memory, born in 1930, in her arms, said at the graveside that she had never been as angry in her life. She went back to the Deep South and worked. Her mother died the next year. Her daughters, who grew up in her kitchen in a house full of seams and receipts, were called in their own time, and she taught them as she had been taught, with a pencil, a ledger and a clear head. Her husband, who knew what she did, kept her books. He said that a cotton factor and a hunter had one thing in common, which was that neither could afford to be vague. She worked through the Depression, when the cotton towns were poor and the cellars were many, and through the war years of the forties, when the railroad cities were full of soldiers and strangers and a great many fresh arrivals. The Korean War found her in her late forties, and she was by then something of a legend in the Ledger's Southern chapter. She took, by the family's count, forty-one, and not one of them in the open. Earl retired in 1967. She died in the autumn of 1980, of old age, in a house in Meridian, with her husband and her daughters beside her, and he outlived her by four years. A coat of her mother's was hanging in the closet with the pocket on the left. Her ledger was found beside the bed, balanced, and on the last page, in her hand, was a line saying that all accounts were settled. Evelyn Bowie Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the seamstress of the cotton towns, the quiet one who closed the door on a thing and kept the key. In the Slayerverse she stands for the brokers of the White Ledger, the hunters who worked by terms, witnesses and signatures, and who proved that a clause carefully written can hold a creature more surely than a stake.