James Proctor

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

James Proctor was born in 1939 at Houston, Texas, and lived sixty-one years as an electrician among the shipping channel, oil offices and bayous of that city. He was the youngest child of the newspaper compositor and slayer Juan Navarro, The Hollow Ford, and of Harriet Proctor, The Fort Sam Engineer, the army engineer's wife who trained at the base workshop, and he was the brother of Mary Proctor Navarro, Wendell Proctor and the vampire slayer Raymond Proctor Navarro. He was not called and carried no alias, craft or gear of his own, though he grew up in a house where all three were discussed at supper. In 1958 he married the hospital cook Mildred Chandler, and they raised two sons, Marcus Chandler Proctor and Scott Proctor, neither of whom was a hunter. He belonged to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line of the White Ledger, through his mother, and he descended, with the rest of the family, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. He died in 2000 of a sudden collapse, aged sixty-one. The family remembers him as the man who made the lights come on, the electrician of the Ledger, who put wire where the hunters needed a warning. He was born in Houston because of a strike. In 1939 the printers in San Antonio walked out, and Juan Navarro, who would not cross a line and who had four children to feed, took a year's post on a Houston paper, and brought his pregnant wife with him on the Southern Pacific, with a typewriter, a toolbox and a box of lead type. James arrived in the late spring, in a rented bungalow in the Heights, in a week of such rain that the bayou went over its banks and the midwife came by rowing boat. His father, who was setting the evening edition, was sent for by a boy on a bicycle. He came home, looked at the baby, said that the child had a good strong cry for a compositor's son, and went back to the paper. In the autumn of 1940 the strike ended, and the family went back to the Westside house in San Antonio, and the boy who had been born in Houston grew up in San Antonio and said, when asked, that he was a Houstonian by weather and a Texan by accident. He grew up in a household that smelled of lead, machine oil and tortillas, and he was the child who took things apart. His mother Harriet had trained at the base workshop at Fort Sam Houston, where an army engineer's wife with a head for mechanisms had been allowed to learn to dress a rifle, mend a lock and rebuild a wagon hub, and she put into the boy's hands, at six, a screwdriver and a broken lamp. She said that the first law of a machine was that it did what it was built to do, and the second was that nothing was broken that could not be found. He found it. By ten he had rewired the kitchen lamp, by twelve the doorbell and by fourteen the whole of the downstairs, to the horror of the inspector and the gratification of his mother, who said that it was the first time in the house's history that the lights had been on in all the rooms at once. His father, who taught the elder boy Raymond the mission ditches in the yard with a hose, and who understood, in a way that the older man did not talk about, which of his sons would carry the stakes, taught James something else. He taught him to draw. A diagram, said Juan, is a map of how a thing works, and the man who can draw one can always find his way out. He was an apprentice at sixteen, in a union shop on the Westside, and a working hand at eighteen. The Navarro and Proctor cousins were not rich, and the trade was a good one. In 1957, when he was eighteen, he went down to Houston on the Southern Pacific to take a better wage at a contractor that wired the new refineries, tank farms and office towers along the ship channel, and he stayed. He met Mildred Chandler in that first autumn, in a hospital cafeteria on the south side, where he had gone to fix a walk-in freezer. She was a tall, calm, brown-haired young woman of twenty in a hairnet, who ran the line for three hundred patients and staff and was, he saw at once, the best-organised person he had ever met. The freezer, she told him, had been broken for a week, and the cook before her had been telling the administrator that it was a fuse. He looked, and said that it was the compressor. She said that she knew. They were married in the spring of 1958, in a small church on Navigation Boulevard, with his mother in her best grey and his father, a thin, cheerful man in a pressed suit, who had a cough and the beginnings of the chest complaint that would, in the end, kill him. Mildred was, in her way, the equal of any hunter in the family. She fed hospital wards by the hundred, ran a kitchen with a rod of iron, and knew from her pans who in a ward was on the mend and who was not. She was told of the Ledger in the first year, by his mother, who took her on the porch in San Antonio over a plate of tamales and said what the family did, and why. Mildred took it as she took a new recipe, with a nod, a few questions and a request for a written copy. She was never asked to do more than feed people. She did. The Ledger's cousins who came through Houston, in the sixties, on their way from the border to the Gulf, found at Mildred and James's house on Telephone Road a plate on the stove and a bed in the back room, and no one was asked a question, and nobody left hungry. James's part in it was the wire. He was not a hunter and he never claimed to be, but he knew electricity, and electricity, in a household that was watched by the dead, has a use. He rigged the doorbells of half the family's safe houses to ring on a separate circuit, so that a visitor who did not touch the button, and who therefore did not complete it, was reported at once by a lamp in the kitchen. He ran a low-voltage line along the cellar sill of the house on the bayou that Raymond used in the Houston work, so that a creature crossing it would trip a relay that shut every light in the house, in order, as a man puts out a house, and left one lamp burning at the head of the stairs. The cousins called it the Navarro switch. He drew it up on a sheet of his father's carbon paper, in three copies, and sent one to the church by the river, as his father had done with the ditches. His mother Harriet's death in 1976, four years after his father's, was a loss that he handled in the usual way, by putting a new socket in her kitchen. In the Vietnam years he was passed over by the draft, a married man with a child, and his brother Raymond, who was called in 1968 when a sleeper was found in a room with every candle burned to the socket, went about the Houston bayous at night with a pistol while James laid the wire. Marcus Chandler Proctor, born in 1961 at Galveston, where James was wiring the wharf warehouses that season, and Scott Proctor, born in 1963, grew up in the house on Telephone Road, boys of their father's build, who wore their father's tool belts at the age of seven and neither of whom was called. In the oil bust of the mid-eighties, when half of the contractors on the channel failed and the Houston skyline stood half-empty, James lost his post, started his own business with a van and a ladder and, in eighteen months, had more work than he wanted. He wired the houses of the laid-off. He sent a good many of the bills to himself. He died in 2000, in the summer, in a customer's attic, quite suddenly, with a coil of wire in his hand, from a collapse of the heart, aged sixty-one. The customer, a widow in the Heights, said that he had been explaining a fuse box to her, and had said that it was very simple, and had sat down. Mildred, who was living then and is living today, arrived within the half-hour, in her hairnet, and took the wire out of his hand and coiled it. His sons rewired the widow's house for nothing, and it was observed by the neighbours that every light in it was on for a week. James Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the electrician who ran the wire for the hunters, the youngest of Juan Navarro's four children, and the one who made a doorbell into an alarm. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trades-people of the White Ledger, the ones who never took the field and whose small, careful, practical work made the field a safer place.