Homer Thorne Proctor was born in 1810 in the Watauga settlements of Tennessee, and lived forty-two years as a storekeeper and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The True Heron, a name taken from the bird that stands motionless in shallow water and is never wrong about what is moving beneath it, and it classes him as a Gangster, which in the Ledger's vocabulary means a hunter who works through a crew, a network of favours and an organised company of helpers. His craft was Ledger Recall, the trained memory for names, dates and debts. He was the younger son of the riverboat pilot and slayer Alan Thorne, known as The Red Ledger, and of Lydia Proctor, the Cumberland Widow, and he was called in 1836 in a schoolroom, when a child described someone standing in the corner. He trained under his mother, he never married, and he died in 1852 after a long night on the marsh.
His father, Alan Thorne, born in 1769 and dead in 1840, was a hunter of the House of Thorne, border reivers by descent and mountain hunters by migration, who had taken to the rivers as a pilot and who would, in the family's phrase, take any hunt that paid fairly and finish it properly. His mother, Lydia Proctor, born in 1775 and dead in 1841, was the younger sister of Levi Proctor and a widow when Alan married her in 1805. She kept a trading post on the Cumberland, a long log building with a store at the front and a stockade at the back, and she was, like her brother, a slayer of the White Ledger. By the old custom the children carried the Proctor name. Homer's elder brother Absalom Proctor, born in 1808, was a teamster and a hunter of the White Ledger, and would go to Texas.
He was born on the Watauga, in the old Proctor country, where his grandfather Jonas had run surveyor's lines forty years before. His mother, who was nine months gone with her second child, had gone up the mountain in the spring of 1810 to settle a question about the family's land title, and was delayed by floods at her brother's old neighbours' cabin, and Homer was born there, in a bed of hemlock boughs, in a rainstorm. She brought him home to the Cumberland in a saddle basket when he was six weeks old. He was brought up at the trading post, in the house that stood beside the store, with its stockade, its well and its watch platform on the roof.
The trading post was his school. It stood at a river landing, where the boats of the Cumberland put in for salt, whiskey, powder, cloth and news, and where a constant traffic of keelboat men, hunters, drovers, peddlers, emigrants and Indians passed the door. A child who grew up in that store saw every kind of person, and heard every kind of story. He learned the prices of everything, in coin and in barter. He learned the names of the boats and their owners, the habits of the pilots, the quarrels of the drovers and the last-known whereabouts of half the men in the district. By ten he was keeping his mother's daybook. By twelve he could add, in his head, a string of debts and credits that would have baffled a bank clerk.
His gift was memory. It was the kind that does not know it is a gift. Asked where a particular man had been last March, he could say, at once, that he had bought a keg of powder on the fourth, paid in Spanish silver, and gone downriver on a boat called the Lady Jane. Asked who had been in the store on a certain evening, he could list them in order of arrival, with what each had bought and what each had said. His mother, who had a good memory of her own, found him alarming. She tested him for a year, with longer and stranger lists, and he never failed. She said at last that there was a name for what he had, and that it was written in the White Ledger.
The name was Ledger Recall, and the man who had perfected it, she told him, was his cousin Asa Stone Proctor, the storekeeper of Murfreesboro, who was called the Index, and who knew the tallies of the White Ledger by heart. She took Homer to see him, in the winter of 1829, on a two-day ride across the middle of the state. The two of them, the old storekeeper of twenty-nine and the young one of nineteen, sat at the counter all one night, reciting, and Asa, who was not a demonstrative man, said at the end that the boy would do. Homer wrote to him for twenty years after. They compared notes on a cattle-drover in Kentucky, a peddler in Alabama and a ferryman on the Tennessee, and each learned from the other.
He set up on his own at twenty-two, in the river town of Gallatin, on the road from Nashville to Kentucky, in a store that sold dry goods, hardware and groceries and did a great deal of quiet business in other things. It was a good position. The town was a crossing of roads and a landing for boats, and a good part of the country's traffic passed through it. He was a short, stout, square-faced man with a heavy brow and a slow, deliberate way of speaking, who stood behind the counter like a heron in a shallow, apparently half asleep. He was known in the town for never making a mistake in an account.
He was called in 1836, in a schoolroom. The teacher of the subscription school in Gallatin, a young man from Virginia, had fallen ill in the winter, and the trustees, of whom Homer was one, had asked him to keep the school for a fortnight. He took it on, with some reluctance, and on the tenth day, in the middle of a lesson on the rivers of the world, a small girl at the back put up her hand and said that there was a gentleman standing in the corner who would like to know when the class would be finished. There was nobody in the corner. The other children looked, and saw nothing. The girl said that he was wearing a long coat, and had not got any eyes. Homer asked her, very quietly, to describe him again. She did so, in detail. Then he dismissed the class, walked to the corner, and stood there for some time, looking at the place where she had said the man was.
He went home to his mother that night. She was living, at that time, at a farm on the Cumberland, and she was sixty-one. She listened to his account, looked at him across the lamp, and said that she had been expecting it for twenty years. She said that a child who sees what grown people cannot is never wrong, and that a schoolroom is the best place in the world in which to find out, because children do not know that they are not supposed to say. She taught him the rest of it, over the winter. She had been a hunter for thirty years and had seen a great deal, and she gave him, in a few months, the whole of her experience.
Homer's way of hunting was not his mother's. She had been a woman of the gun and the stockade. He was a man of the ledger. He built, over sixteen years, what his cousins called the Company, a loose and unofficial organisation of several hundred people of the river country, storekeepers, ferrymen, teamsters, drovers, pilots, publicans, and a number of men whose occupations were not specified, each of whom owed him a favour and each of whom knew that he never forgot one. It was a network of obligation, of the kind which in other circles would have been called a gang, and he ran it from behind his counter with a calm that nobody ever saw disturbed. A hunter of the Ledger who was in trouble in the middle of Tennessee had only to write to Gallatin. A vampire, in the same country, who needed a place to sleep or a man to drive it, would find that the usual people had somehow all been told.
He was feared, in a careful way, by a number of people. He was also liked by many more. He kept a fair store, gave credit to the poor and had a sound dislike of violence, which he regarded as an admission of failure. His men were loyal to him because he paid them, because he remembered their children's names and because in sixteen years he had never once sent a man into trouble without knowing precisely what it was. His gear was a revolver and silver-cast shot, which he kept in a locked drawer under the counter and used twice.
His mother's death in 1841, and his father's the year before, left him alone in the world except for his brother, who was in Texas. He wrote to Absalom every month. He never married. He said, when it was suggested, that he had a large family already, of the kind that could not be left at home.
He died in the autumn of 1852, at forty-two, after a long night on the marsh. A message had come to him from a keelboat captain on the Cumberland, that a cargo was lying at a landing below Gallatin which ought not to be, and he went down at dusk, alone, without telling anyone, because it was a small thing and he was tired. It was a trap. He spent the night in the wet bottoms, in a cold fog, and walked home at dawn, having settled the matter. He said that he had taken a chill. It turned to fever. He died nine days later, in the room over the store, with the daybook open on the bed, and the last entry in it was a correct sum.
Homer Thorne Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The True Heron, the storekeeper of Gallatin, who built a company out of favours. In the Slayerverse he stands for the organisers of the White Ledger, the hunters who understood that a network of people who remember what they owe can do what a single gun cannot.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
