Lewis Proctor

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

Lewis Proctor was born in 1896 in Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi opposite New Orleans, Louisiana, and lived fifty-two years as a carpenter, the younger of two brothers who worked wood in the same city and who were, between them, the nearest thing that the White Ledger's New Orleans chapter had to a building department. He was the younger son of the dockworker Lewis Eaton and of the seamstress and vampire slayer Nettie Thorne, The Narrow Seal, and the brother of Benjamin Eaton Proctor. The family papers name no wife and no children. He died in 1948 of heart failure, aged fifty-two. He belonged to the House of Proctor and to the White Ledger, descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he was not called. He was named for his father, he looked like him, and he had his father's way of standing quietly in a room until it had forgotten that he was there. He was born in the rented house on Pelican Avenue, two years after his brother, on a hot night in August when the ferry ran late and the doctor was fetched by a drydock boy on a borrowed mule. His mother, who was a hunter and was not accustomed to being kept in bed, got up on the third day and went out to the market. His father, who was frightened of her, said nothing. The baby was a quiet child and a watchful one, and he was called by the family, from the start, the Shadow, because wherever Benjamin went, Lewis was a few paces behind, holding a plank. He did not mind. He said, when he was eight, that a person who carried the other end was as necessary as the person who sawed. He followed his brother in everything but the temperament. Benjamin was grave, silent and certain. Lewis was cheerful and wandering, a boy who forgot his cap, mislaid his rule and lost, on one occasion, an entire boat. He went to the drydock school for five winters, and was kept in for most of them, but he drew, and his drawings, which were of the ferry, the shipways and the horses of the railway yard, were so exact that the master put them on the wall. He liked machinery. When he was fifteen his mother, who knew that he would never be as patient with wood as his brother, got him a place in the railway shops at Algiers, among the lathes and the steam hammers, as a machinist's helper, and he spent six years there, learning to run a drill press and a planer and to keep his hands where he could see them. It was the work that he enjoyed. He said afterward that carpentry was what he did and machinery was what he loved. The Great War came to him as a railway shop. He was twenty-one in the spring of 1917, and the shops, which were under federal control, were working three shifts to make and mend the locomotives and cars that were carrying the army to the coast. He was not sent overseas. He was kept at the planer, with a bonus and a badge, and he saw his brother go off on the troop train with a bag of chisels and a sergeant's stripes in prospect. In the autumn of 1918 the influenza closed the shops for a week and killed two of the men on his shift, and his father, who had been carrying the dead down to the Algiers landing, came home one night so exhausted that Lewis, who had never touched a drop of anything in his life, gave him half a glass of whiskey and held it to his mouth. The old man took it, and did not speak, and the next morning went down to the wharf again. When the war was over the shops cut back, and he went, as his brother had, to a joiner's. He found that he had been right about himself. He could build a staircase, but he could not build one as well as Benjamin could, and he built, in the end, the things that Benjamin did not care for, such as roofs, floors, framings and the long rough work of a house, which a man could do cheerfully and fast. The two of them took a shop together in 1922, in a rented shed near the foot of Dauphine Street, with a sign that said Proctor Brothers and a bench between them, and for twenty-six years they worked from either side of it. Benjamin did the finish and the secrets. Lewis did the rest. A customer who wanted a cabinet or a closet went away satisfied, and a customer who wanted a house or a wall got a better price than he had expected. The family counted him useful in a particular way. He was the one who carried. He could walk into a house with a toolbag and a ladder, in daylight, in plain sight, and no one in the street would give him a second glance, since a carpenter with a ladder is an invisible man. He took messages to hunters in the Faubourg Marigny in the guise of a quote for a gutter. He took a pair of long cases into an uptown garden in the guise of a trellis. He took, on one night in the winter of 1931, a hunter's unconscious cousin out of a house on Esplanade Avenue in a rolled carpet, over his shoulder, past two policemen, and said as he passed that the carpet was for the Cathedral. The policemen touched their helmets. The cousin, who was alive, was said to have remarked afterwards that she had never been so well treated by a carpet. He lived with his mother in the rooms over her sewing table on Dauphine Street, along with his brother, until she died in the spring of 1944, and he was the one who sat with her. She was a small, dark, dry, upright old woman who had been a hunter for fifty years and who found, at the end, that she was frightened of the dark, and he would not leave her alone in it. He read to her from the newspaper. He read her the name of every street on every map that he could find. In the last week she held his sleeve, and on the final evening, with the black book on the quilt and the lamp lit, she asked him whether the shed had been locked, and he said that it had. She said that he had always been a good boy, and slept. He was beside her when she died, as the family has always said, and he did not tell his brother that she had been afraid. The war years that followed filled the city with soldiers, sailors and men from the shipyards, and the carpenters of New Orleans worked every hour that God sent. Lewis put up barracks, billets and partitions in the old warehouses by the river, and put up in the evenings a number of shelves, doors and frames for the Ledger. He was tired. He had never been strong in the chest, and in the autumn of 1947 he was found to have a weak heart, and was told by a doctor to rest. He did not. He went on with the shed, with the sign and with his brother on the other side of the bench, until the morning in the spring of 1948 when he sat down on a pile of boards at the foot of Dauphine Street to eat his lunch and did not get up. Benjamin built the coffin, and carried the front of it. Lewis Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the other brother of the Dauphine Street shed, the Shadow who carried the far end of the plank. In the Slayerverse he stands for the labourers and helpers of the White Ledger, who stood at the edge of the work and held the far end, and who by being easy to overlook were among the least easily caught.