Henry Thorne Proctor

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

Henry Thorne Proctor was born in 1846 at Maysville, Kentucky, and lived sixty-four years as a militiaman of the Kentucky home guard and, for the greater part of his life, as the keeper of his mother's shop in Lexington. He was the younger son of the boatman and vampire slayer Callum Thorne, The Bitter Bridle, and of the shopkeeper Minnie Proctor Thorne, and the brother of the slayer Hob Proctor Thorne. He belonged to the House of Proctor through his mother and carried its name in place of his father's, by the old custom of the western Thornes. He never married and had no children, and he died in 1910 of cancer, aged sixty-four. He was not a hunter, and he never pretended to be one. In the long work of the White Ledger he was the man who stood at the landing with a musket and a lantern, and who was always, as his mother said, where he had been told to be. He was born at Maysville because his mother had gone there on purpose. Minnie's father, Hob Thorne the circuit preacher, had been born at that landing when it was still called Limestone, and in the winter of 1846 a Proctor cousin kept a house there, on the steep road above the wharf, with a spare room and a stove. Callum had been sent up the Ohio on a hunt, which was expected to last a month and lasted three, and Minnie, who was thirty and did not intend to have a child alone in a shop, left the counter in the hands of a niece and took the stage road up the river. Her sister Hannah, the midwife, came after her on a mule. The boy arrived in a thaw, in a room above the cousin's kitchen, and the first sound he heard, Hannah said, was a steamboat whistle, which struck her as a good omen for a child of that family and a poor one for a quiet life. He grew up in Lexington in the small brick house behind the shop, in a household that smelled of tea, sealing wax and wet hound. His brother Hob, four years older, had his father's dark brows and his grandfather's temper, and went about the place like a thundercloud with a dog at its heel. Henry was the other sort of child. He was round, fair, slow to anger and partial to books, and he was given the job of the accounts at nine. His father, who could not read a figure without suspicion, said that it was a mercy, and took him aside at twelve, on a wet afternoon in the kennel, and told him what the family was. Henry listened, scratched the ear of the old brindled bitch, and said that he supposed somebody had to mind the shop. It was the right answer. His father looked at him for a moment and then said that in his experience the people who minded the shop were the ones who held the rest of them up. Lexington in the fifties was a handsome town of hemp factories, horse sales and old brick, at the heart of the Bluegrass, with stud farms stretching out in every direction along white plank fences and limestone walls. The horse farms were the money. The breeders came in to town to sell, the trainers to hire boys, and the grooms, who were mostly black and mostly free of any illusions about their employers, to buy ribbon, tea and tobacco. Minnie's shop did business with all of them, and Henry, who sat behind the counter in the afternoons after school, learned a good deal about horses, a little about sermons, and a great deal more about what people say when they think the boy behind the counter is counting change. It was in the militia that he found the thing he was good at. Kentucky had kept up, as a relic of frontier days, a loose, sociable militia of the able-bodied men of each county, who were supposed to drill four times a year and mostly met to drink. In 1861, when the state declared itself neutral and then found it could not stay so, the militia became the Home Guard, and Henry, who was fifteen and looked twenty, presented himself at the courthouse with a borrowed musket and a note from his mother. The captain, a tanner, looked at the note, looked at the boy and told him to fall in at the back. He was at the back, in a line of hemp-factory clerks and horse-dealers, when John Hunt Morgan's raiders came through the Bluegrass in the autumn of 1862 and in the summer of 1864, and he was with the company that stood on the road outside Lexington and watched the cavalry go by, at a distance of a hundred yards, and did not fire because it was the sensible thing. He was not a brave soldier, and he knew it, and he did his duty regardless. He stood guard at a bridge. He stood guard at a depot. He stood guard over a warehouse full of Union stores that nobody had any intention of stealing. He learned to cook in a camp kettle and to sleep in the rain, and he wrote to his mother every week, in a large, upright hand, with careful accounts of his rations. His brother Hob, who was in a cavalry company and saw a great deal more of the war, said that Henry's letters were the only ones in the regiment that were not full of lies. The family held that Henry had the most dangerous job in it, because it was the one nobody could see the point of. A militiaman who guards a bridge all night, for four years, has to go on believing that the bridge matters. It did matter, for the Ledger. What the family needed in those years, more than another hunter, was a man who could be counted on to be at a particular ford at a particular hour, with a musket and a lantern and no questions. The western Proctors and Thornes, dispersed from Maysville to Frankfort, used the Home Guard companies, in a quiet way, as a screen. A hunter passing through a town at night was stopped by a sentry who had been told to expect him and who asked him the wrong password, so that he might be waved through by the officer of the guard. Henry stood at the ford. He never knew what passed. He was told only that a man in a brown coat would come at midnight and that he was to be let by. He let him by. On one occasion a second man, who was not in a brown coat, turned up at the same ford an hour later and asked to be let by. Henry asked him his business, politely, three times. He said afterwards that there had been something wrong with the way the man had said his name, and that he had not gone back to sleep till morning. After the war he went home to the shop, and by the end of the decade it was his. His mother kept a stool behind the counter, from which she could see the street, and he kept the books, the stock and the cash drawer, and in the evenings, in a small room at the back, he kept something else, a green-bound ledger of the people who came in, which he had taken over from her. He continued in the militia, which had been reorganised as the State Guard, and was made a sergeant, and then a lieutenant, and he drilled the Lexington company on the old fairground on the first Saturday of the month, with a great deal of method and no ambition. He was a good officer because he was a shopkeeper. He knew what everything cost and where it was kept. His father's death in 1896, in the little house behind the shop, left him the old brindled hound. It was a bitch of the Reiver line, so ancient that it had to be carried up the stairs, and he carried it, for two years, and buried it in the yard. His mother had died in 1887, in the room at the back, of a stroke. Hob, who had gone on hunting into his fifties, came and went. Henry stayed. He never married, and he gave no reason, except once, to a niece, who asked him, and he said that he had found in the course of time that he was already a good deal of trouble to himself. He was a large, placid, bald, bespectacled man with a silver watch chain, who was known to every stud groom in the county and to every child in the street, and who kept a jar of peppermints on the counter, in memory of his aunt Hannah. He began to be ill in 1908, and was told in the spring of the following year that it was cancer, and that nothing could be done. He took the news in the way that he took most things, by asking for a pencil, and making a list. He put the shop in order. He wrote to every cousin of the Ledger whose name was in the green book. He gave the silver watch to his brother, and the musket, which had been carried at Lexington, to the State Guard. He died in the autumn of 1910, at sixty-four, in the room at the back of the shop, with the window open on the street. Henry Thorne Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the sergeant of the ford, the shopkeeper who stood his post and never asked what it was for. In the Slayerverse he stands for the watchmen of the White Ledger, the ordinary men in uniform and apron who held a bridge, kept a book and were in their places when they were needed.