Isaac Kincaid Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Ash Yoke. Craft: Cross-Examination.

The White Ledger of the Proctors records a good many hunters who never married and never wrote a line of their own, and Isaac Kincaid Proctor is the one whose silence the clerks found most useful. Born in 1738 at Bristol, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware a few miles above Philadelphia, he spent seventy-one years hauling freight over the roads of a province that had more Quaker meetinghouses than taverns and more wagons than either. He was a teamster by trade and a vampire slayer by calling, and under the alias The Ash Yoke he became the Proctor line's most patient questioner of the dead, a man who preferred to get an answer out of a creature before he put a silver-cast ball through it. Bristol in the 1740s was a river landing with a ferry, a market house and a scatter of brick and frame dwellings along Radcliffe Street, facing Burlington across the water. Flour, iron, salted pork and barrelled shad went down to Philadelphia; cloth, tools and molasses came up. Roads were mud in March and iron in January, and the men who moved goods over them lived by their teams. Isaac's father, William Kincaid, was a wheelwright, and his shop smelled of oak shavings, hot tar and hoof-parings. His mother, Mary Lister, was a dairywoman who kept cows on a rented meadow and sold butter and cheese to the Philadelphia market wives. The couple were also, quietly, slayers of the White Ledger's persuasion: William was known in the lists as the Still Bridle and Mary as the Still Scythe, and the family surname of Proctor came down to their sons by the old custom of passing it through the women of the line. Mary Lister died in 1750, when Isaac was twelve and his brother William Kincaid Proctor, born in 1742, was eight. The boys were raised after that in the wheelwright's shop, and the house took on the tidy, cheerless competence of a household run by men. William Kincaid Proctor was never called to the work; he grew into a steady, practical man who kept accounts, mended harness and served as the family's fixed point when Isaac was away on the road. Isaac, by contrast, inherited his mother's watchfulness and his father's economy of speech. Neighbours in the Quaker farms round the landing remembered him as a tall, stooped, mild-faced boy who listened to carters swap news at the ferry and never seemed to forget a word of it. He took up teaming in his late teens, first driving for a Bristol carrier and then buying his own wagon and four-horse hitch. The work made him. A teamster in the middle of the eighteenth century knew every ford, inn yard and toll gate between the Delaware and the Susquehanna country, and he learned who paid, who lied, who drank and who sent word ahead. The wars with France on the frontier stretched the trade northward and westward, and Isaac carried army stores, powder and biscuit to the forts along the Blue Mountains. In those years he learned how rumour travelled and how a frightened settlement decides what is true. It was the schooling in listening that his craft would later rest on. His calling came in 1768, when he was thirty. He had stopped for the night at an inn yard on the Lancaster road, watering the team under a lantern, when a guest arrived on foot after dark and asked the landlady for lodging. She bade him come in. He stood at the edge of the cobbles and would not cross the threshold, and did not seem to notice that he was refusing. Isaac saw the landlady's face change, and he understood before she did what the man was. What he did next was not violent. He walked across the yard and asked the stranger, in a level voice, where he had slept the night before and whom he had spoken to on the road. The guest answered, half against his will, and the answers did not agree with one another. Isaac kept asking until the visitor left. By morning he had a page of contradictions in his head, and his father William Kincaid, called to the yard, recognised what he saw and took him on as his pupil. The training that followed was patient and plain. William taught him the standard lore of the Proctor slayers: silver, the threshold, the hours a creature must be abroad, the signs of a house that had been fed upon. What Isaac made of it was his own. His craft, which the ledgers name Cross-Examination, was a method of questioning that rested on patience and a memory for small contradictions. He learned to ask a question three ways at three different hours, to let a silence do work that a threat could not, and to carry the answers from one tavern to the next until the pattern showed. In the taxonomy of the family's archivists he was a Spy. His tools were a long rifle and silver-cast shot, which he cast himself over the fire of a wayside inn, and his method was to be certain before he raised the piece. Fellow hunters said The Ash Yoke never shot a creature he had not first understood. The Revolution ran through the middle of his working life, and it suited his trade. Armies wanted wagons, and a teamster could travel in any uniform's territory with no more trouble than a bad road. Isaac hauled for the Continental commissaries in the winter of 1777, and he passed through more than one town that was fearful of British foraging parties and more fearful, privately, of something else. Two entries in the White Ledger from those years credit him with unmasking a creature that had been feeding under cover of a camp fever near a hospital in the Lancaster country, and with settling another that had followed a supply column out of Philadelphia. The White Ledger entries are short and dry. They give the date, the place and the count, and they do not mention the teamster's method, which the clerk evidently found hard to describe. He never married and had no children. Those who knew him gave several reasons and he offered none. The road kept him from home more than half the year, and there is a family tradition that a Quaker widow near Newtown, whose name is not preserved, refused him twice and he took the refusal as final. What he did have was his brother's household. William Kincaid Proctor's family sheltered him between journeys and kept his gear, and it was through them that Isaac kept the ledger connections of the Proctor line alive. His father William Kincaid died in 1782, at seventy-one, and Isaac carried the old man's coffin out of the meeting yard himself. From then on he was the elder hunter of the Delaware side, and younger Proctors from Pennsylvania and the Virginia valley wrote to him for advice. Rivalry with the Faulkners touched him lightly and mostly by report. The Red Ledger's slayers were in Massachusetts and, by then, in Kentucky and beyond the mountains, and the two houses met in letters more than in company. Isaac read the Faulkner tallies when they came through and grumbled, in the dry manner of the Proctors, that a ledger which counted every rumour as a kill was not a ledger. Still, he kept the tradition that the creature called the Guest, who escaped at Towton in 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, was as much a Faulkner failure as a Proctor one, and he was not above saying so to visiting Faulkner hunters over supper. He died in 1809, aged seventy-one, in an accident on the fells. The family used the northern word for the high ridges of the Kittatinny country, a habit brought over from the Yorkshire dales generations earlier, and it was on one of those ridges, on a wet autumn track above a gap he had crossed a hundred times, that his wagon or his footing gave way. The White Ledger records the date and the bare fact of it, and it credits him with the closing of his last file in the year before he died. His brother's grandchildren kept the rifle. In the family's later Slayerverse tradition The Ash Yoke stands as the Proctor who showed that a hunter may win as much with a question as with a bullet.