Levi Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Gentle Spindle. Craft: Seal and Sanction.

Levi Proctor was born in 1774 in the Watauga settlements of what is now eastern Tennessee, and he lived fifty-four years as a teamster and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book calls him The Gentle Spindle, a name he earned by the soft, unhurried way he handled a team of horses and, it was said, a vampire. He was a Spy in the Proctor sense of the word, a hunter who preferred to learn a great deal before acting, and his method, which the Ledger names Seal and Sanction, was a way of closing a house to a vampire and then sitting in judgement on what was inside. He died in 1828 in an ambush on a lonely road, and his sons carried the White Ledger into the next generation. His father was Jonas Proctor, born in 1743 and dead in 1799, a surveyor's chainman who scouted for the army in the Revolution and whom the Ledger calls The Valley Scout. His mother was Charity Woodbury, born in 1741 and dead in 1779, a herbalist whom the Ledger calls The Meek Seal. Jonas had taken his surveying trade across the mountains in the mid-1770s, running lines for land speculators in the Watauga country, and he had taken his family with him, which is why Levi was born among the log houses of the Holston and Watauga rivers instead of in the stone town of Winchester where his elder brother Obadiah had been born. The family came home to the Shenandoah Valley before the end of the decade, and Charity died there in 1779, when Levi was five. He had an elder sister, Mary Woodbury Proctor, born in 1765, an elder brother, Obadiah Proctor, born in 1766, who stayed on the family's farm, and a younger sister, Lydia Proctor, born in 1775. His earliest memories were of his father's chains. A surveyor's chain was sixty-six feet long and made of a hundred iron links, and every mile of the country had been measured with one, link by link, in the rain and the heat, by chainmen like Jonas. Levi was taken on as a boy to carry the marking pins, and by twelve he could run a line through laurel thickets and across a creek without losing a link. The work gave him a feel for distance and direction that never left him, and it gave him the knowledge of the country that a teamster needed. He could say, after one trip, which ford would be passable in spring, which ridge had the best road, and where a wagon would bog. The calling came in 1790, when he was sixteen, beside a river ford. He and his father were crossing the Holston with a pack string when they found a traveller standing in the shallows, in water up to his thighs, who did not come out when the horses approached. The man said he was waiting for a ferry, and he said it in an oddly gentle voice, and the horses, which would cross anything, refused to go near him. Levi, who was in the lead, stopped with his hand on the bridle and did not move. His father called quietly from behind for him to back away. What followed is written in the White Ledger in three sentences. From that afternoon Jonas was his mentor and took him into the hunt as an apprentice. His gear was a long rifle and silver-cast shot, but it was his craft that marked him out. Seal and Sanction was a two-stage method. The first stage, the seal, consisted of closing a house, barn or cave so that a vampire who lay up in it could not leave without being seen: doors blocked with a wedge, windows pegged, the chimney flue stopped, a line of salt across every sill. The second stage, the sanction, was an inquiry. Before doing anything else, Levi sat down inside the sealed place with the thing that lay there, in the dark, and talked. Proctors said he was the only hunter who could sit with a vampire for an hour, ask it where it had come from and whom it had fed on, and then finish the matter. The information he gathered in this way filled the White Ledger with names, dates and places, and it is on his entries that the family's knowledge of the western vampires largely rests. He became a teamster at eighteen, driving freight wagons from the Watauga settlements to the coast and over the mountains into Kentucky and the Cumberland. The work was tough: six-horse teams, bad roads, rivers without bridges, and the ever-present danger of robbers. It was also the perfect cover. A teamster went everywhere and was asked nothing, and Levi's wagon carried, along with its cargo of salt and iron, messages, ammunition and the occasional wounded hunter under a canvas. In 1800 he married Naomi Nichols, a herbalist, born in 1777, from the same Watauga settlements. She was a practical, cheerful woman who kept a garden of medicinal plants behind their cabin and who was not a hunter but understood the work thoroughly. Their marriage, which produced two sons, was a long and affectionate one. Edwin Nichols Proctor was born in 1802 and lived until 1846, and Albert Nichols Proctor was born in 1805 and lived until 1848. Both were called to the work and became vampire slayers of the White Ledger, and Levi trained them on the wagon roads in the same way his father had trained him. He was on the road through the War of 1812, hauling supplies for the Tennessee militia and bringing wounded men home on the return trip. He saw the Watauga country fill up with farms and the Cumberland settlements grow into towns. He went to Winchester in 1819 to bury his brother Obadiah, riding the whole way in nine days, and he came home with the White Ledger, which Obadiah had been keeping, wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of his saddlebag. He died in 1828, at the age of fifty-four, in an ambush on a lonely road in the hills, when a band of men who had been trailing his wagon for two days stopped him in a gap. They were not robbers but the hired servants of a vampire he had sealed and sanctioned a month before, and the fight was short. Two of them died on the road and Levi died that night. His sons found him at dawn. Levi Proctor is remembered as The Gentle Spindle, the teamster who could talk with the dead and never raised his voice. In the Slayerverse he stands for the discipline of knowing before acting, and for the careful, patient gathering of the facts that made the White Ledger the better-informed of the two rival books.