Jacob Stone was born in 1776 at the Chickasaw Bluffs on the Mississippi, in the country that would later become the city of Memphis, Tennessee, and he lived sixty-seven years as a blacksmith and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The Ledger calls him The Wild Stave, a name taken from the barrel stave, the curved oak plank of a cask, that he was said to carry as a club before he could afford a rifle. He belonged to the Spy type, a hunter who worked by gathering information, and his craft, which the family calls Ledger Recall, was a trained memory. He married Ruth Cutler Proctor in 1795 and died in 1843 in an accident, long after the forge at the Stones River crossroads had made his name.
The Stones were not a famous family of hunters, and nothing in the Proctor archive explains how Jacob came to be born on the Mississippi bluffs in 1776, at a time when the only people there were Chickasaw, a few French and Spanish traders and the occasional boatman. The best account, repeated by his grandchildren, is that his father was a keelboat hand who had been wrecked on the river and had taken up with a Chickasaw trading family, that the boy grew up between two worlds, and that he came to the Cumberland settlements at twelve, walking the Natchez Trace in company with a party of traders. By fourteen he was apprenticed to a blacksmith in the Cumberland country, and by seventeen he was working his own anvil at a crossroads near the Stones River.
A frontier blacksmith was the most useful man in the country. He shod horses, mended wagon tyres, forged axes, hoes, plough points, hinges, nails, chains, locks, fish hooks and rifle barrels, and in a region where nothing could be bought, everything had to be made. Jacob had large hands, a short temper and a fine sense of the colour of hot iron, and he soon had more work than he could handle. His forge stood under a lean-to of rough boards, with a clay chimney and a bellows of ox hide. He worked at it from before dawn until after dusk, and the ring of his hammer became the sound of the crossroads.
He married at nineteen. Ruth Cutler Proctor, who was four years older, born in 1772, was a shopkeeper whose store stood across the road from his forge, and the two were well matched. She was exact, he was impulsive, she was slow to anger and he was not, and the combination worked. They were married in 1795, the year before Tennessee became a state. She brought with her a connection to the Proctor family of the Shenandoah and its White Ledger, and he brought a pair of strong hands and a way with iron. Their sons, Jacob Proctor, born in 1798, and Asa Stone Proctor, born in 1800, were both called to the work, and both became slayers of the White Ledger.
His own calling came in 1798, three years after the wedding, on a morning when a sleeper was found in a cabin with every candle in the room burned down to the socket. The man was a peddler who had taken a bed for the night in a travellers' house at the crossroads. The landlady, who had set out six fresh candles, found him in the morning lying on the bed with his eyes open, cold, pale and bloodless, while the candles, every one of them, had burned right down and gone out in a pool of tallow. Jacob was sent for to break down the door, and was the first to notice that the tallow on the floor was not from the candles at all. The matter was put to rest that week. Ruth's cousins in the Proctor line arrived, took him aside and told him what he had seen, and within a month he was a hunter.
Ledger Recall was the discipline that made him. The Proctor family had long kept its White Ledger as a written record, but a written record could be lost, burned or stolen, and a hunter on the frontier could not always carry a book. Jacob, who was no great reader but had an astonishing memory, devised a method of committing entries to heart. Every name, date, place and description of a vampire was assigned to a part of his forge: the anvil, the bellows, the slack tub, the hearth, the rack of tongs. To recall an entry, he walked through the forge in his mind. He could recite two hundred entries from the Ledger without a slip, and he did so more than once, in the dark, to hunters who had lost their books or been robbed on the road. His gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, and the barrels of both were forged by his own hand.
He served in the War of 1812 with the Tennessee riflemen, at the age of thirty-six, and saw a good deal of fighting in the Creek country. He was a mediocre soldier, and his officers remarked that he was more at home with a horse's hoof than a drill manual, but he was the best armourer in the regiment, and his repairs kept more than one company in action. He came home in 1815 and went back to his anvil.
His old age was quiet. Ruth died in 1832, and he mourned her for the rest of his life, keeping her shop open in her name and letting his sons run the rest. He was a widower of eleven years, a grey-bearded man with a stoop and a voice like a gravel road. In 1843, at sixty-seven, he died in an accident, a fall from the loft of his own barn while mending the roof in a storm. His sons buried him beside his wife, and on the stone they had cut a single hammer.
One small story about the forge survives in the family. A cousin from the Shenandoah, arriving in the winter of 1810 with a fever and a stolen horse, found Jacob at the anvil at midnight making a set of silver-tipped bolts for a hunter who would pay him in corn. The cousin asked how he kept so many entries of the White Ledger in his head when he could barely sign his name. Jacob, without turning round, said that a man could forget a word but never the weight of a hammer, and that every entry he knew hung on one of the hooks above his bench. The cousin slept by the fire and left before dawn with a hundred names in his head.
Jacob Stone is remembered as The Wild Stave, the blacksmith who kept a hundred years of vampire history in his head. In the Slayerverse he is held up as the man who proved that a memory could serve as well as a ledger, and that a good forge could be a library.
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