Jacob Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Flint Bridle. Craft: Cross-Examination.

Jacob Proctor was born in 1798 on the Harpeth River, in the Tennessee country that would a year later be laid out as the town of Franklin, and lived seventy-five years as a printer and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Flint Bridle, a name that came from his habit of holding a hard line on a loose tongue, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by questions, records and the slow pressure of a good argument rather than by the chase. His craft was Cross-Examination. He never married, he trained under his own father, he fought a long and famously stubborn feud in the tally books with the Faulkner hunters of Kentucky, and he died in 1873 of pneumonia, at seventy-five, with a composing stick still in the drawer of his bench. His father was Jacob Stone Proctor, called in the family simply Jacob Stone, a hunter of the Tennessee settlements, and his mother was Ruth Cutler Proctor, a woman of exact habits and a sharp memory, whose own life is told in her own account. He had one brother, Asa Stone Proctor, born two years after him, who would become a storekeeper and a slayer in his turn. The boys were born in a log house on a bluff above the Harpeth, in the months before Franklin had a name, in a country of canebrakes, limestone springs, cedar glades and scattered clearings where families from Virginia and the Carolinas were building cabins as fast as they could fell the timber. The Indian trace ran a few miles to the west, the Natchez road a few miles to the north, and the nearest doctor was a day's ride away. It was a place in which a boy learned early that a good memory and a steady eye were worth more than a strong arm. His mother saw to his letters. Ruth Cutler had come from a family that kept accounts, and she taught both sons to read, write and cipher before either could sit a horse. Jacob was the quicker at words. He read every page that came into the house, which was not many, an almanac, a hymnal, a psalter and a book of sermons, and then read them again, and at nine he was copying out the almanac's weather sayings in a neat, slanting hand and arguing with them. His father, a man who distrusted cleverness, observed that the boy had a lawyer's habit of asking a second question after the first had been answered. He meant it as a warning. It turned out to be a description of a craft. At fourteen he was bound as an apprentice to a printer in Nashville, who published a weekly newspaper, handbills, blank forms, a yearly almanac and, when the legislature sat, its resolutions. The printing trade of those years was a physical and a literary business at once. The apprentice swept the shop, damped the paper, inked the forms with leather balls, pulled the bar of the wooden press, and learned to set type from the case, letter by letter, upside down and backward, at a speed that would in time reach a thousand letters an hour. He learned the points and the measures, the difference between a pica and a long primer, the habit of reading a proof against the copy, and the discipline of never leaving a mistake in the forme because it was too late at night. Jacob took to all of it. By eighteen he was the best compositor in the shop, and by twenty he was the one who was trusted to read the proofs, which is to say that he was trusted to notice what was wrong. It was the proof reading that made him a detective before he knew what a detective was. A proof reader reads for error, and error has a character. A date that cannot be right, a name spelt two ways, a figure that does not add up, a statement that does not agree with the one before it: these are the small signs of a careless or a dishonest hand, and he learned to see them at a glance. He learned, too, that people lie in patterns, that a false account grows more detailed where a true one grows more hesitant, and that a question asked a third time in a different form will often break a story that the first two would not touch. When in 1821 he set up on his own at Franklin, with a second-hand press and a font of brevier bought on credit, he had already a local reputation as a man who could not be told a tale twice. He was called in 1825, in the yard of an inn on the Natchez road. He had gone there on an errand for his father, to deliver a parcel of printed notices to the landlord, and he was standing by the well in the last of the light when he noticed the guest. The man had arrived that afternoon by coach, dressed well, spoke pleasantly and had dined in his room, and the landlord's wife, who had taken up the tray, had noticed that nothing on it had been touched. Jacob, who was turning a question over in his mind, asked the landlord one, and then another, and then a third, and the account of the stranger, which had sounded reasonable, began to come apart in the telling. The man had given three different towns as his home. He had signed the register in a hand that had not changed in thirty years. And when the landlord, at Jacob's suggestion, invited him to step out to the yard to see the new horses, the stranger said that he was tired and would rather not cross the threshold. He said it three times, in three different ways. On the third Jacob knew what his father had been trying for years to tell him. His father, who had been waiting in the road with his horse, came in and finished the business that night. Afterwards he sat Jacob down in the inn kitchen and told him the whole of the White Ledger, from the Yorkist cousins of the old country to the Proctors of the Virginia valley, and asked him what he thought. Jacob said that he thought the man's alibi had been very poorly made up, and that he would like to see the tally books. The elder Jacob, who was not a man to show his feelings, put his hand over his eyes for a moment and said that the boy would do. Cross-Examination, as Jacob Proctor practised it, was a craft of the long game. He did not hunt by night or in the open. He hunted in kitchens, vestries, courthouses, boarding houses and the back rooms of taverns, and his method was to ask questions, and then to write the answers down. He kept a ledger of his own in which he entered every account he was given, the name, the date, the town, the detail, and compared it with every other. A story told in Nashville in March was set beside one told in Natchez in June. A parish register was set beside a bill of lading. He found that a vampire of any age, however skilful, was a bad witness in the long run, because it had lived through so many years that it had forgotten which version of its life it had most recently told, and the contradictions, once a man had begun to collect them, were a net. He took, by the Ledger's count, some thirty vampires in fifty years, and of these two thirds were taken on a document. His gear was a revolver of the early Colt pattern, which he bought in the 1840s and kept oiled and wrapped in a printer's apron, and silver-cast shot, which he made himself from the melted-down type that had worn out. He said it was the only honest use he had found for a worn sort. The flint in his alias was the old flint lock he had carried before the revolver, a gun that he kept on the wall of his shop long after it was of any practical use, with its bridle, the iron ring that held the flint in its jaws, polished bright. Visitors took it for a curiosity. The cousins took it for a motto. The feud with the Kentucky Faulkners was an affair of the tally books and it lasted some twenty years. The Red Ledger and the White Ledger kept separate accounts, as they always had, and in the Ohio valley the two lines of hunters overlapped. Jacob, who took the Ledger's accounts seriously, discovered in 1837 that a vampire he had been tracking for two years through the records of three counties had been taken by a Faulkner hunter at Louisville, who had entered it in the Red book under his own name. He wrote a letter. The Kentucky cousin replied. The exchange that followed ran to some forty letters in six years, in which every point of precedence, priority and method was argued with a courtesy so exact that it read like a declaration of war. Neither would yield. Neither, it was observed, ever stopped reading the other's letters. Toward the end, in the 1850s, the two men met at a cousin's wedding, discovered that they had a great deal in common, and spent the evening in the garden with a bottle of rye, quarrelling happily about the placement of commas. He never married. He said, when asked, that he had been too busy, and that the work of a printer and a hunter did not leave the hours that a wife was entitled to, but the family suspected that he had simply never met anyone who could be relied on to tell him the same story twice. He lived above his shop in Franklin with a succession of cats and, for the last twenty years, with his brother's children, who came to be taught their letters at the type case. His nephews remembered him as a dry, exacting, unexpectedly funny man who could not pass a misprint on a shop sign without stopping to point it out. He printed the Franklin paper until the war, and then, in the general ruin of the Tennessee country, printed whatever he could, which was mostly handbills, passes and funeral notices. He was a Unionist by conviction and kept his opinion to himself, which his neighbours said was remarkable in a newspaperman. The battle of Franklin in 1864 was fought within a mile of his shop, and he spent that night in the cellar with the type, which he would not leave, and in the morning went out to set the list of the dead. He died in the winter of 1873, of pneumonia, at seventy-five, after a week in bed in which he insisted on reading proof. His brother Asa, who sat with him, reported that his last coherent remark was a correction to the doctor's pronunciation of a Latin word. He was buried on the hill above the town, with a marker of Tennessee limestone on which was cut the single word Corrected. Jacob Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Flint Bridle, the printer of Franklin, the hunter who made a net of questions. In the Slayerverse he stands for the detectives of the White Ledger, the hunters who believed that every monster, in the end, contradicts itself.