Lorraine Hale

Gangster slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Wild Kestrel. Craft: Record Tracing.

Lorraine Hale was born in 1930 at Birmingham, Alabama, and lived seventy-six years as a telephone operator and, from 1963, as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South. The family book knows her as The Wild Kestrel, the small hawk that hangs over a field on a beating wing and sees the one mouse that moves, and it classes her as a Gangster, a hunter who works through crews, favours and the wide acquaintance of a woman who is useful to everybody. Her craft was Record Tracing, the following of a creature through the paper it cannot help leaving, the waybills, toll tickets, registers and ledgers of a modern town, and her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. She was the younger daughter of the cotton factor Earl Hale and of the seamstress and slayer Evelyn Bowie Proctor, The Steady Tinder, who was also her mentor, and the sister of the slayer Wilma Proctor. In 1954 she married the high school coach William Alden, and they raised two sons, Clifford Alden Proctor, born in 1956 and dead in 2010, and William Alden Proctor, born in 1957 and living, neither of whom was called. She died in 2006 of heart failure, aged seventy-six. She was named for a woman she never knew. Her mother's elder sister, Lorraine Proctor, who kept a boarding house in San Antonio and worked the Quiet Confrontation of the White Ledger from behind the breakfast hatch, died in 1935 in a churchyard, and the child, who had been born five years before in the house on the hill above the Birmingham mills, carried the name as a kind of undertaking. Evelyn carried her to the graveside in her arms. She said afterwards that the small girl had looked at the coffin with great attention, as though she were taking a note of the date. The nickname the family later gave her, the Kestrel, was her father's. He said that she was the only baby he had ever seen that hovered. She grew up among telephones, though she did not know it. The cotton towns of Alabama and Mississippi, where Earl Hale was posted by his firm, were strung together by a very few wires and a great many operators, and the household was moved, in her childhood, from the hill at Birmingham to Montgomery and then back, and then again, so that she learned, in every place, the sound of the local exchange before she learned its streets. She was a small, quick, restless, brown-eyed girl who could mimic every voice on the party line. Her mother, who watched her do it, said nothing, and began to set her small tasks, such as finding, in the telephone directory, the name of the person who had once written a particular letter. She was nine when she learned to read the plate on a railway car and tell from the number where it had come from, and where it had been last week. It was a game. Her sister Wilma, who was older and already, in her serious way, a hunter's daughter, called it the family business. Wilma was called in 1943, in a sickroom, when the fever broke and the patient asked for the shutters to be closed. Lorraine was thirteen, and was given the evening's work of reading out the names on the sickroom's callers' list. She took it very seriously. She said that it was a pity nobody kept a list of who had come to a house before the fever. Her mother looked up, and said that this was the best idea that she had heard that year, and from that evening Lorraine kept one. By seventeen she had a ledger of her own, in which were written, in her round upright hand, the names, dates and addresses of every stranger who had taken a room in Birmingham in two years. She did not yet know that it was a method. Her mother, who did, taught her how to cross-check it. She went to the telephone company at nineteen, in 1949, and was assigned to the long-distance board at the Birmingham exchange, where a girl with a clear voice and a good memory was worth her wage twice over. She sat at a switchboard with a set of cords, a head-set and a pad of toll tickets, and she connected, in an evening, perhaps four hundred calls, each of which she wrote up, with the time, the number, the place and the length, on a card. She learned the voices of the commercial travellers, the cotton factors, the preachers and the men who called from pay-phones at the edge of town at four in the morning. She learned which towns had one telephone and which had six. She became, in a very few months, the best-informed young woman in Jefferson County, and by the beginning of the Korean War she had a crew. This consisted of the other operators, the night girls, the chief operator, the girls at the Montgomery and the Meridian exchanges, a switchman from Bessemer, and a number of women at hotel desks, who agreed, in return for small kindnesses, to tell her things. It was the sisterhood of the board. A Gangster, in the family book's sense, is a person whose power is in the favours she is owed, and the telephone company, which ran on the goodwill of a thousand women, was the best crew in the South. She met William Alden through a wrong number. He had come to Birmingham from Memphis in the fall of 1953, a tall, shy, sandy young man of twenty-two, newly out of the army, with a degree in physical education and a job as assistant coach at a high school in the east of the city, and he had the habit, on Friday nights, of telephoning the football scores to a newspaper. He did it so badly that the operator on the night board, who happened to be Lorraine, stopped him three times and told him how. He said that he had never been spoken to so firmly by a stranger. She said that he had never been so badly in need of it. They were married in the spring of 1954, in the house on the hill, with her father giving her away and her mother in a coat of her own making with the pocket on the left, and the first thing that William asked, at the wedding breakfast, was why the bridegroom's mother-in-law, who was a seamstress, had a pistol in her bag. Evelyn told him. He took it as he took a fumble, with a grave nod, and asked what the next play was. She was called in the autumn of 1963, on a lonely road. She had gone to Montgomery for the day, to see a friend at the exchange, and was driving home after dark through the Black Belt, past the cotton gins and the shut-up stores, when a motor coach came up behind her, lights blazing, and kept pace. It was an ordinary intercity coach, painted blue, with a lit interior and a driver at the wheel, and when it went past, at the crossroads by the old gin, she saw that it had no passengers. There were forty seats and not one soul. The driver, who did not look round, wore a hat. She turned in at the next filling station and wrote down the number on the side of the coach, and the time, and the mileage, and then she drove to her mother's house and asked a question that she had asked a hundred times in a different way. She asked who owned the coach. By morning she knew that the company had never run a service on that road, that the registration was a year old and belonged to nobody, and that three weeks earlier a coach of the same number had been logged at a depot in Meridian, with a driver who had paid in coin. Evelyn said that she would do very well. She worked for forty-three years. Record Tracing, in her hands, was as simple as a switchboard and a good deal more patient. A creature of the old sort, she said, can leave no mark on the world except a paper one: it must hire a car, rent a room, buy a ticket, sign for a parcel, and every one of these acts leaves a slip somewhere in a drawer. She asked for the slips. She had a crew of operators in forty towns, a cousin in the railway offices at Atlanta and a friend at a funeral home in Selma, and at the end of every month she cross-checked them against her own cards. Her mother, who worked in the same fashion by terms, called it the cleanest craft in the family. She took, by the family's count, thirty-nine vampires, of whom she shot six. The rest were found, and the finding was the work. Her sons were raised in the town of Bessemer and then Birmingham, in a house with a telephone in the hall and a whistle on a nail, and William, who was told everything within a week, drove the team bus to the away games and drove Lorraine, on the other nights, wherever she needed to go. He called it the other season. She lost him in 1993, of old age at sixty-two, and her father had gone in 1984, four years after her mother, and in the years that followed she kept her cards in a shoebox on a shelf. She herself died in the spring of 2006 of heart failure, in the chair by the telephone, with a pencil in her hand and a card on her knee. It was dated that afternoon, and recorded a call. Lorraine Hale is remembered in the Proctor family as The Wild Kestrel, the operator who hung over the Deep South with a head-set and watched the one thing that moved. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who fought with records and favours, who proved that a paper trail is a kind of road, and that the woman at the switchboard is sometimes the one who knows where the dark is going.