George Foster was born in 1948 in Jackson, Mississippi, and lived sixty-one years as an electrician in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, a man of no house who married into the Proctor bloodline of the White Ledger and who raised in it a slayer. In 1969 he married the nurse Virginia Carter, the daughter of the slayer Wilma Proctor, and they had two daughters, Renee Foster Proctor, who became a vampire slayer in her turn, and Nicole Proctor, who was not called. George was never a hunter, and had no alias, archetype or craft. What he had was a journeyman's card, a ladder and a very good ear for a hum in a wall. He died in 2009 of a long illness, aged sixty-one, and the family remembers him as the electrician who wired half the Ledger's safe houses in Mississippi and never once asked why they needed so many switches.
Jackson in 1948 was a modest capital, a city of government clerks, railroad hands and cotton buyers on the Pearl River, with the old Capitol rising over the downtown, the Illinois Central yards sprawling to the west and the streets laid out in the dust of a very hot summer. The Fosters were a plain family of no great house, his father a railroad hand and his mother a church secretary, who rented a frame house near the yards and ate their supper at six. George, the second of four, was a thin, curly-headed, easy boy who could not leave a lamp alone. He took apart the kitchen toaster at seven and put it back with three parts over, and at nine rewired his mother's sewing-machine light, a service for which he was paid in cake. His father, who worked with his hands, observed that the boy had the touch.
The city of his boyhood was a hard one. The Jackson of the early sixties was a place of fine manners and bad laws, and a boy of fifteen who walked its streets in the summer of 1963 could not help seeing how it was divided. He saw it, and did not like it, and kept his head down, as most boys did. He said later that it was the first thing he had learned that he could not wire around. He learned his trade at the vocational school, and at seventeen was taken on as a helper by a contractor on the north side, who taught him conduit, panel work, and the rule that a man should never trust a wire that someone else had labelled. He was a journeyman at twenty. The Vietnam years had begun, and he joined the Army Reserve, a decision that kept him, by a technicality, at home, and for which he was a little ashamed, and for which he made it up in the only coin he had, which was a willingness to do the wiring on any job that no one else would take.
He met Virginia Carter in the winter of 1967, at a dance for the nursing students in Birmingham, where he had driven a friend. She was eighteen, the younger child of a dockworker and a seamstress, a tall, dark, thoughtful girl in her first year of the hospital course, who said that she was tired of being asked to dance by young men who spoke of their prospects. He told her that his only prospect was a very long extension cord. She laughed. They wrote letters for two years, and he drove the hundred and fifty miles to Birmingham on Sundays in a truck with a bad clutch. They were married in 1969, in the spring, at her parents' church on the hill, with her brother Earl, who was a lineman and a good deal more skilled in his trade than most, standing up for him and giving him, as a wedding present, a pair of insulated pliers.
He did not know the family's secret at the wedding, nor for a year afterwards. Virginia, who had been told at twelve, kept it, as she kept all things, with a nurse's discretion. Her mother, Wilma, a seamstress by trade and a detective of the Ledger by vocation, who was known to the family book as The Rough Shuttle, took him aside after the first Christmas, at the kitchen table, with a pot of coffee and a drawer of papers, and told him in a level voice what she was. George listened to the end, drank his coffee, and said that he had wondered about the extra locks. He asked whether the family had any trouble with its wiring. Wilma said that it had a good deal. He said that he would see to it.
He did. In the first year of his marriage, working nights, he put a second circuit into the house on the hill, so that no single fuse could take it dark. He wired a switch by the front door that threw every light in the house at once. He fitted the lamp that Wilma used in her work, a shaded, heavy lamp, with a fail-safe so that a thing that wished to put out the light would find that the light had a second life. This was the manner of his service, and it was quiet. He did it by letter, by weekend and by truck, for the whole of the Ledger's Mississippi and Alabama houses, for thirty years, and he charged for materials. He had a rule, which he told Renee, that a safe house is a house in which the lights cannot be put out without somebody noticing, and he lived by it.
Their daughters were born in 1970 and 1974, Renee Foster Proctor in the spring and Nicole Proctor in the autumn, and the Ledger enters both under the Proctor name, since the Proctor line runs through their mother and grandmother and George, who had no house of his own, was happy that it should. They lived in a brick ranch house in a Jackson suburb, with a carport, a workshop and a garden of tomatoes, and in the evenings he taught them the electrician's catechism, which was to turn off the power before touching, to label every wire and never to be in a hurry. Renee, who was grave and quick, was called in her time, and he did not argue. He wired her car. Nicole, who was bright and funny, went to nursing school like her mother and never regretted it.
He ran his own small contracting firm from 1978, with two journeymen and a battered van, and did well enough to educate both daughters. He was a respected man in the trade, who sat on the board of the local union hall and trained, in thirty years, fifteen apprentices, to whom he gave the same advice, which was to ask what a wire is for before asking where it goes. He was a quiet man, a little deaf in one ear from a lifetime of fans, and fond of fishing on the reservoir, where he sat for hours with a thermos. The attacks of September 2001 found him on a job in a hospital, and he stood in the corridor among the nurses and watched the television in silence, and then went back up the ladder.
He was diagnosed with his illness in 2005, and went on working part-time until the autumn of 2007, when the last job on his book, which was a library, was finished and handed over. He died in 2009, in the house in Jackson, aged sixty-one, in the spring, with his wife at his side and with Renee, who had come from the road, in the doorway. Virginia, who had nursed him for four years, outlived him by seven, and died in 2016. At the funeral, the pastor said that he had been a man who brought light to a great many dark places. Nicole said that it was true, and that he had never mentioned it.
George Foster is remembered in the Proctor family as the electrician who wired the Ledger's safe houses so that no one could turn out the light without a witness, the quiet Mississippi son-in-law of The Rough Shuttle. In the Slayerverse he stands for the tradesmen of the White Ledger, the carpenters, linemen and electricians who were never called and who built, one wall and one circuit at a time, the shelters in which the hunters could rest.
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