Marcus Chandler Proctor

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

Marcus Chandler Proctor was born in 1961 at Galveston, Texas, and is living today on the island, where he is a high school coach who has taught swimming, and a good deal else, to the children of the Gulf coast for more than forty years. He belongs to the House of Proctor and the White Ledger, the Yorkist line descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, and he is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer. He is the elder son of the electrician James Proctor and of the hospital cook Mildred Chandler, and the brother of Scott Proctor, born in 1963. In 1979 he married the bookkeeper Margaret Nguyen, born in 1958, and it is a childless marriage of forty-seven years and counting. He carries no alias and no craft, and owns no gear beyond a whistle, a stopwatch and a pair of goggles that he has worn thin. His part in the family's work was the water. For forty years, in a pool, on a beach and off a jetty, he has taught the cousins' children, and half the Gulf coast's, to swim, to read a current and to come out of the sea when told, and the Proctors, who take their dead seriously, think this a considerable service. He was born on the island because of a contract. In the winter of 1961 James Proctor, then twenty-two, was engaged for six months by a firm that was rewiring the cotton warehouses on the Galveston wharves, a job that meant lodging on the island, and Mildred, who was a hospital cook of twenty-four and four months gone, went with him rather than stay alone in the east Houston house. They took two rooms on Avenue L, above a boat chandler's, with a gas ring, a window onto the harbour and a landlady who kept a parrot. In the spring, on a night of heavy surf, Mildred went to the John Sealy hospital in a cab, in her own apron, and told the admitting sister that she could manage perfectly well, and the baby, a long, red, wide-mouthed boy who bawled at the top of his lungs, was delivered by the night staff in forty minutes. James, who had been called from a roof, arrived with a coil of wire round his neck. The boy was named Marcus for a wharf foreman who had lent James a ladder, and Chandler for his mother's family. By midsummer the contract had ended, and they went back to Houston, where Marcus grew up, but the island, said his father, had marked him, and it had. He was a tall, square, freckled, solemn boy, and at the house on Telephone Road, among tool belts, pipe fitters and cousins passing through, he was the one who counted. He counted the laps on the ship channel levee, the minutes on his father's watch and the number of fish caught from the docks by the three of them in an afternoon, and a good many of the cousins' children, who were put in his charge as soon as he was ten, learned that a boy who could count could also be trusted. He could not be a hunter, the family had long agreed; he had not the stillness. At twelve he was found to be a strong swimmer, at thirteen a lifeguard, and at fifteen he was sent each summer to his grandmother's house in Corpus Christi, to stay on the bay and be useful. It was there, in the summer of 1976, that he met Margaret Nguyen, who was running the church fund and who told him that he had missed four chairs. He bought a coach's whistle that winter with his own money. In the spring of 1979, at eighteen, he married her in the church hall, with his mother in the front pew and his brother Scott as best man, and took her to Houston in an old truck, with a mattress and a box of books. He took his degree at the University of Houston in 1983, working nights at a swimming pool, and began to coach that autumn at a high school on the south side, where the pool was green, the equipment was a rope and a kick-board and the school's total roster for the swim team consisted of five boys and a girl who swam backstroke in a cardigan. He coached them for eleven years. By 1994 they had a trophy case. He took an assistant's post in a school near the Ship Channel, and a head's post in an island school at Galveston in 2004, and the team that he built there, from a handful of fishermen's children, shrimpers' daughters and the sons of the cousins of the Ledger, took the district title in the second year. He was never a famous coach. He was the one that a parent rang, from a hospital or a ship, when a child was frightened of the water. He said, to anyone who asked, that there was only one lesson, which was that the water did not care, and that a swimmer who understood this was a swimmer who came home. The Ledger used it. The cousins of the White Ledger on the Gulf coast, who had hunted the bayous and the beaches, the mudflats of Baytown and the old fishing camps of the west bay for a century, were obliged to put a good many of their children into boats, and a vampire of the old sort, as every Proctor knew, would sooner follow a shore than a road. A child who could not swim was a child who could not follow. Marcus taught them. He had them in the pool on Saturday mornings in the winters, ten or twelve at a time, nieces, nephews and cousins' boys, and he taught them to float, to tread, to cross a bayou on a rope and to find the bank in the dark by the feel of the current on the face. He never asked why they needed to know. He had the habit, which he had from his mother, of putting a mug of hot chocolate into the hand of any child who came out of the water blue, and of saying, as it went in, that nobody had ever been drowned by being warm. In forty years he did not lose a child. Margaret, who was by then a bookkeeper in the Houston oil offices, kept the accounts of the pool, the team and the family in a single ledger, and in 1982 and 1986, when the oil bust emptied the glass towers and the schools lost half of their funds, she kept the swim team alive on a coach's wage and a shoebox of receipts. Marcus took a second job at the municipal pool in the summers, and a third, as a night watchman at a marina, in the winters. There was never much money. There was, said his wife, a very great deal of chlorine. In the attacks of September 2001 he was on the pool deck, at seven, with a class, and he went on with it, as he said afterwards, because the one thing a child needs on such a day is to be told which end of the pool to swim to. Margaret came to find him at noon. He was sitting on the edge, with a whistle, with eleven wet children round him, listening to the radio. The hurricane came in September 2008, when Ike made landfall on the island, and the weekend house on the east end that they had bought in the nineties, a small bungalow with a deck and a view of the jetty, was under six feet of the Gulf. He had stayed to the last, on the school's account, to see the building secure, and had been taken off the causeway by a cousin in a pickup truck. The school lost its pool. For two seasons the team trained in borrowed gyms and a motel pool in Texas City, and he coached from the back of a truck. He never said that he was discouraged. In the pandemic years the school was closed for most of a year, and he swam, by himself, a mile a day in the Gulf, off the jetty, in all weathers, to the great alarm of the lifeguards, and said that it was the only way to think. His father, James, died in 2000, in a customer's attic, with a coil of wire in his hand, and Marcus, who was thirty-nine, rewired the widow's house for nothing. Margaret left the oil business in 2012 and went home to Corpus Christi, to be near his mother, who was seventy-five and alone in a house by the seawall, and he stayed on the island, with the team, and drives down on the long weekends and for a month in each summer. They talk every night at nine. He is sixty-five, grey and enormous, and the pool, which was rebuilt in 2011, is named for no one, because he would not allow it. His brother Scott's daughters swim in it on Saturdays, and a boy of twelve who has never learned to be afraid of the water takes the lane beside them. Marcus Chandler Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the coach of the water, the elder son of the man who ran the wire and the one who taught the cousins' children to come out of the sea when told. In the Slayerverse he stands for the unnamed teachers of the White Ledger who never took the field, who gave the young a skill and a mug of something hot, and who saw that a hunter's best protection is a child who knows how to get home.