Gary Proctor Russell

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

Gary Proctor Russell was born in 1968 at Fort Worth, Texas, and is living today in Fort Worth, where he works as a shipyard welder in the rail yards, banks and suburbs of north Texas and, on contract hitches, on the Gulf Coast. He is a man of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but he is not a hunter and is not a vampire slayer, and he has no alias, archetype or craft. He is the younger child of the high school coach Edward Russell and of the diner waitress and vampire slayer Lois Proctor, The Dry Beacon, and the brother of the slayer Vera Russell. He has not married and has no children. His mother died in 2016 of a fall, aged seventy-three, and the family remembers him as the one who welds: the cousin who keeps the gates, grilles and door-bars of the Ledger's Texas households sound, and who can be rung at six in the morning by a hunter whose truck has lost a tow-hitch. He was born in a Fort Worth hospital not far from the stockyards, in the same part of the city and very nearly the same ward as his mother, in the spring of a year that the newspapers filled with bad news. The family lived in a frame house in Arlington, on a street of new brick ranches between the two cities, and Lois was at the diner on the old highway by day and, as he learned much later, at other places by night. Edward, who coached at a high school on the south side, was the parent who came to everything. He sat in the bleachers at Gary's Little League games with a clipboard out of habit, and wrote down the batting order for a boy who was not in it. Vera, who was two years older, was grave, watchful and bossy, and treated her brother as a junior member of a firm that he had not applied to join. He was not an observant child, and the family has always said so with affection. Vera noticed things. She counted the cars in the drive and the stools at the counter, and she asked her mother questions that her mother answered with a look. Gary, who was four when she began, liked to take things apart. He took the clock from the kitchen wall, the sprinkler head from the lawn and the hinge from the garage door, and he put them back, usually, with a part left over that turned out to be unimportant. He was big for his age, slow to anger and easy to find, because wherever there was a noise of metal he was nearby. His father, who had seen a great many boys discover what they were good at, remarked that this one was going to build a bridge or break one. What he found was fire. In the ninth grade he took shop at the high school in Arlington, a long, tin-roofed building with a smell of machine oil and the hum of a dozen fans, and in the second week the teacher, a retired Navy chief with a burn scar on his neck, put a torch in his hands and told him to run a bead along a steel plate. It was crooked. He did it again, and it was crooked in a different way, and on the fifth try he lowered the hood and saw the pool of metal under the arc, bright as a coin, and understood that it would do exactly what he asked of it if he was patient. He said afterwards that it was the first time that a thing had held still for him. By seventeen he could lay a clean bead in any position, and the chief, who gave grades sparingly, wrote on his card that the boy had hands. He was told what the family was at eighteen, in the kitchen in Arlington, on a Thursday evening, by both his parents together. Lois put her father's grey notebook on the table next to the salt, and said that it was time. Gary listened for an hour. He asked whether his sister had known, and Vera, who had been called at sixteen, said from the doorway that she had been waiting two years for him to ask. He asked next whether he was meant to be a hunter, and his mother said that he was meant to be whatever he was, and that the Ledger had always needed people who could be trusted with a tool. He thought about it for a week. Then he told her that he would rather weld, and she said that she had hoped he would say so, and that she would never ask again. She did not. He did the trade properly. He took a certificate at a technical school in Fort Worth and a first job at a fabrication shop on the north side, making steel stairs and trailer frames, and at twenty-four, when the shop was bought and closed, he went down to the Gulf and signed on at a yard on the Sabine to weld hull plate on a repair barge. Shipyard work was hard and hot and paid very well. He worked in tanks and double bottoms, in a hood and leathers, in air that smelled of paint and hot iron, and he came out each day at four soaked to the skin and perfectly content. He learned to weld overhead and uphill, to read a drawing, to weld a seam that would have to hold water and weather and the sea. The foremen, who prized a man who was neither a drinker nor a talker, kept him on. He took his hitches, three weeks at the yard and one at home, and when the yards were slow he took contract jobs in Port Arthur, Orange and Galveston, and on the long drives back to Fort Worth he listened to the ball game and said very little. The Ledger's work came to him sideways, as it came to every cousin with a trade. In 1994 Vera rang from a payphone in a mill town in the Panhandle to say that a door she needed to hold would not hold, and he drove four hours and welded a bar across it in the dark, with a borrowed machine run off the truck battery, while she stood in the yard with a pistol and an expression of tolerant contempt. After that the requests came regularly. He welded iron grilles for the windows of the cousins' houses in Weatherford and Cleburne, and a lattice of steel across the loft of a granary, and a bracket for a lamp that his mother wished to hang in a particular place behind the pie case in Austin. He charged for the steel and never for the labour. He did not ask what the work was for. When Vera wrote the figures into the White Ledger in the family's way, she entered him on the page for Texas, under the heading of those who keep faith with the Ledger without carrying it, which she said was the only entry that he had ever been embarrassed by. His father and mother moved to Austin in 1998, to a small brick house in Hyde Park, and he stayed in Fort Worth, in a three-room house on the south side with a shop in the garage, a dog named Chief and a collection of welding helmets that had begun to be a joke among the cousins. He was thirty. The attacks of September 2001 reached him at the yard on the Sabine, where the crew stood on the deck of a barge with their hoods in their hands and watched a portable television that someone had propped on a toolbox. He drove home that evening without turning on the radio. The following year the yards were slow, and he put in a winter fabricating roll cages for a racing shop in Fort Worth, and learned a good deal about how to make a thing out of steel that would survive a very bad day, which he put to use, in time, on several households. His mother died in the winter of 2016, on the front step of the diner in Austin, with a pie in her arms and a Thursday shift ahead of her. The step had been wet, and the diner, as his father pointed out in a level voice, had been told twenty years earlier to put a rail on it. Gary was at the yard when he heard, and was at the house in Hyde Park by midnight. On the following Saturday he drove down with his machine and a length of two-inch pipe and, with the owner's astonished permission, welded a handrail along that step in a morning. He painted it grey. It is the only piece of work that he has ever signed, with a small stamped G on the underside of the bracket, and the waitresses who work the Thursday shift now hold it going in, and say that she would have found it ridiculous. He is fifty-eight, a big, quiet, patient man with a grey stubble, a burn scar on the back of one wrist and his father's slow way of looking at a person before he answers. He still takes his hitches on the Gulf, though he says that his knees will end it before long. During the pandemic years the yards ran short-handed, and he went on working through them, with a mask under his hood, and for several months took his meals alone in the cab of his truck. His father, who is in his eighties and lives in Austin with the porch light on, telephones him on Sundays to ask whether he has eaten, and he says that he has, which is not always true. His sister Vera rings in the evenings, and he usually picks up. Gary Proctor Russell is remembered in the Proctor family as the welder who closed the doors that the hunters could not, the steady, unhurried son of The Dry Beacon who said that he would rather weld and never once changed his mind. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kin and tradesmen of the White Ledger who were never called, the men who make the gate, the hinge and the handrail, and who prove that a sound weld, laid by someone who has taken the trouble, can hold a door against the night as well as any pistol.