Gary Proctor

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

Gary Proctor was born in 1996 at Bandera, Texas, and is living today in Bandera, where he works as a line cook among the Hill Country ranches that lie to the north-west of the barrios, river walk and military bases of modern San Antonio. He belongs to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but he is not a hunter, not a vampire slayer, and was never called. He has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of his own. He is the elder son of the bus driver Timothy Proctor and of the librarian Colleen Green, the grandson of the slayer Edwin Proctor, The Iron Otter, and the brother of Michael Green Proctor, born in 1997. He has not married and has no children. The family remembers him as the cook of the Hill Country cousins, the man who for ten years fed the Ledger's yearly meeting in a room full of strangers in camouflage, and whose cooking was, by general agreement, the only thing at it that the whole gathering was able to agree about. Bandera in the week of his birth was a town that was in the habit of being photographed in the autumn, because it had a rodeo, a river and a store that sold hats, and because the first cold front of the season had brought down the leaves of the cypresses along the Medina. He was born at the end of October, in the stone house on the edge of town with the cedar fence and the rain barrel, in the middle of a thunderstorm, on a night when the midwife from Pipe Creek had been fetched in a pickup and the whole of the household had gathered in the kitchen. His mother had been the assistant librarian for two months. His father had driven in from San Antonio in a state of rapt anxiety, having parked his bus at the depot at half past six with eleven minutes to spare. The baby was large, round, red-faced and cheerful, and he ate everything that was put in front of him, including, on one celebrated occasion, a page of the county directory. His grandfather Edwin, who came out from the Southside on the Sunday with a toolbox and a ham, said that it was a good strong lad that had been born to be fed. He grew up in the library, in the back office among the date stamps and the card trays, and out of it, in a town where a boy of eight could be sent on a bicycle to the feed store with a note. He was a solid, fair, freckled child with big hands and a very wide grin, who was happiest wherever there was water, a fire or a horse, and he was the despair of the school librarian, his mother's colleague, who found him in the story corner at three o'clock every afternoon, not with a book but with a plate of her biscuits. He was not a reader. He was a doer. He fished the Medina at six, learned to clean a catfish at seven and at nine was given charge, by the kind of arrangement that is common in small towns, of the barbecue pit at the church supper. He said that it was the best job he had ever had. It was a long, slow job with a fire, and you could talk to a great many people while you did it. The Ledger was explained to him in the back room of the library at fifteen, by his mother, with the key of the locked cabinet on the table between them. She did it as she did everything, in good order, and when she had finished she asked if there were any questions. He said that he had one. He asked whether the cousins who sent the old deeds to the library were ever hungry. Colleen, who had not thought of it, said that she supposed that some of them were. He said that he could do something about that. It was an offer that the Hill Country chapter, who are a modest lot and have always been better at remembering than at feeding, accepted with something close to relief. He went to work at sixteen at a guest ranch on the river, a place of twelve cabins, a dance floor and a cookhouse where the old cook, a stout, silent, tobacco-brown Hill Country man named Teague, who had cooked there since 1971, set him to peeling potatoes in the back. It was a year before he was allowed to touch a pan. By nineteen he was on the grill, and by twenty-three he was the head of the line, a post that Teague, on retirement, signed over to him with a nod and a fork. Gary says that nobody can teach what the old man knew, which is how long a thing takes. A steak has a time, a pot of beans has a time, and a Dutch oven on a bed of live-oak coals has a time that depends on the weather and on the man, and it is only after several hundred disasters that one learns to feel it through the lid. He cooks for sixty a night in the season, on a range that was installed in 1962 and that has never once been persuaded to light on the first match. He is, in the opinion of Bandera, the best cook between Kerrville and the Frio, and he is a little embarrassed about it. His chief service to the Ledger is a thing that nobody could have planned. Every November, in the first weekend of the deer season, the whole Hill Country comes to Bandera with its rifles, and for four days the town is full of men in camouflage, orange caps and mud-spattered trucks, in every cabin, bunkhouse and motel for forty miles. It is the perfect cover. Nobody remarks on a man with a long case in a hotel lobby, or a party of eight in the back of a restaurant who speak low and eat fast, and the Proctor and Navarro cousins of Bandera, Boerne, Kerrville and Medina, who for generations had struggled to find a place to meet without notice, have for ten years held their annual gathering at the ranch, in the last cabin along the river, over a breakfast cooked by the line cook. Gary lays it out on three long tables. He has served, at one sitting, a hundred and twenty cousins, and not one of them has ever been asked what he did for a living. His mother keeps the minutes in her handbag. His father drives up from San Antonio with the old men in a bus. It is an agreeable thing, he says, to feed people who do not wish to be looked at. He learned it from his mother, who catalogued the Ledger without reading it, and from his uncle Terrence, who was called and who came out to the ranch one night in the winter of 2019, a week after Edwin's funeral, to sit in the cookhouse with a cup of coffee and say nothing. Terrence is a man who has not been seen to eat in public for twenty years. Gary made him a plate. It was a large one, with a pork chop, beans, greens and a square of cornbread, and the man, who had been out since four in the morning on a matter that has never been written down, ate it to the last crumb, looked at the plate for a long moment and said that it was the first meal he had enjoyed since the spring. He has come every December since. In the pandemic years the ranch shut its cabins and the cookhouse sold meals through a window, and Gary, who had never in his life worked a day alone, found that he could feed eighty people from a window in an hour. In the freeze of February 2021 he cooked on an open fire in the yard for the whole of the street. He is thirty, a thickset, fair, freckled, good-humoured man with burn marks on his forearms and a beard that comes and goes with the season, and he lives in a small rented house on the edge of the town, a mile from his mother's, with a smoker in the yard and two dogs. He fishes on Mondays, with his brother Michael, when the paramedic is off duty. He is known throughout the Hill Country as a man who has never been heard to say that a meal was ready until it was. Gary Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the cook of the Hill Country cousins, the man who turned deer season into a place to hide a meeting and fed it a hundred and twenty at a time. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kitchen hands and caterers of the White Ledger who were never called, who gave the cousins a fire to sit at and a plate to put in front of them, and who showed that the oldest cover in the world for a gathering of hunters is a good breakfast.