Michael Collins

Spouse of Renee Foster Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Michael Collins was born in 1964 at Jackson, Mississippi, and is living today in Jackson, where he has worked for more than forty years as a postal clerk among the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South. He belongs to no house; the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated, and he entered the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, by marriage. He is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and he has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of his own. In 1988 he married the seamstress and slayer Renee Foster Proctor, the elder daughter of the electrician George Foster and the nurse Virginia Carter, and they had two children, Gary Collins Proctor, born in 1991, and Erin Proctor Collins, born in 1992, both of whom became slayers. His wife is living, and so are both children. The family remembers him as the man at the window, the clerk of the White Ledger, who for four decades saw that the right letter reached the right cousin, and who learned to tell, from the weight of an envelope, a great many things that were not in it. He was born on a hot night in the middle of July 1964, in the old hospital near the capitol, in the summer when the state of Mississippi was in the newspapers every day and the people of Jackson went about their business with a careful politeness that fooled nobody. His parents, whom the family papers do not name, kept a small house in a neighbourhood north of the railroad. His father was a mechanic on the city buses and his mother worked in the office of a wholesale grocer, and they raised their boy, the third of four, on the principle that the way to deal with a difficult year was to do one's job and put the porch light on. He was a thin, cheerful, bespectacled child with a brown cowlick and a talent for being where he was wanted. At eight he delivered the newspaper on a bicycle, and was paid by the week, and kept, in a school notebook, the name of every customer, the day that he was paid and the number of times that he had been given a biscuit. He was fond of the routine. He was, he said, a person who liked to see a thing arrive. His grandmother lived two streets away and kept a bundle of letters from a brother killed at Anzio, tied with a blue ribbon, and she read one aloud to the boy every Sunday. He grew up convinced that the written word that travels is a sacred thing. At fourteen the postman on his paper route told him that a boy who put his customers' papers on the right side of the door for six years was a boy that the Post Office would be glad to have. He took the civil service exam at eighteen, and began, in the autumn of 1982, as a clerk on the night shift at the main post office on the edge of downtown, where the great sorting floor ran from nine in the evening till dawn. He learned the trade by the hand. A good clerk can sort two thousand pieces an hour without looking up, and he learned the zones, the routes, the dead-letter drawer and the registered counter, and that a post office is the nearest thing in the modern world to a confessional. His supervisor, a spare, humorous woman named Mrs Peabody, who had run the night shift since 1951, told him that there were two kinds of clerk, those who read the mail and those who did not, and that the second kind was the only one that she kept. He met Renee Foster in the spring of 1987, at the registered counter. She was seventeen, a grave, quick, slight young woman with her father's curls, in a plain print dress, with a small brown parcel tied in string and sealed, at the knot, with a thumbprint of red wax. It was addressed to a cousin in Tupelo. He took it, weighed it and turned it over, and said, as a matter of regulation, that wax was not permitted. She said that it was a family habit. He said that it was a very neat seal, and that he had never seen one that so exactly looked as though it had been lifted and put back. Renee looked at him for a long moment and then asked him, in a voice that dropped, what he meant. He said that it had a hair of a different colour under the wax, and a trace of the string that did not match the knot. She said that her grandmother would be delighted. Her grandmother was Wilma Proctor, a seamstress of Birmingham, the family's great lifter of seals, who had taught Renee the art on a summer holiday, and the parcel, as it turned out, was a test. She told him the truth the following Sunday, at her parents' kitchen table, in front of her father, who had put the kettle on and was wiring a plug. She said that her family hunted. She said it quietly. She had been taught by her grandmother that it was best to tell a man the whole of it in the first month, in the plainest words, and then to watch what he did. He did what a post office clerk does. He asked her to repeat the address. George Foster, who was thirty-nine, put down the plug and said that he thought the young man had taken it rather well, and Virginia, who was a nurse, said that he looked pale. Michael said that he had always thought that the extra locks on the doors of the Foster house were a bit much for a family of two daughters. He said that he would be glad if somebody would explain the rest. She was a seamstress, she told him, and a hunter, and the two were the same trade, in that both of them worked on the seam. He said that he supposed it was rather like the post. They were married in the spring of 1988, when she was eighteen and he twenty-three, in a small Methodist church in Jackson, with her father to give her away and her mother, in a pale green dress that she had made herself, to cry. Wilma Proctor came from Birmingham on the bus, aged sixty-two, with her sewing box, and lifted the seal on the wedding invitation of a cousin, as a joke, in the front pew. She died in 1998. Michael, who had not been a hunter and did not wish to be, understood from that day what the family was and what he was for. He was the one who could carry. The White Ledger in the Deep South was a great many small families, widely scattered, who wrote to each other in a private shorthand, and the postal system was the one thing that connected all of them. He did not break a rule. He took the view, shared with Mrs Peabody, that to carry a letter swiftly and unopened was the whole of the oath. His service was a modest one and very exact. A cousin in Greenwood who wished to warn a cousin in Meridian would write a note, put it in an ordinary envelope, address it in a hand that was only slightly unusual, and drop it in the box, and Michael, who was at the sorting belt at midnight, would see it, put it in the right bin and ensure that it was on the six o'clock truck. He could send a registered letter to a house where nobody would sign for it. He could tell, from the change-of-address forms on the table, when a householder in a small town who had died a decade ago was, extraordinarily, still collecting his mail. He told Renee, and in two cases she and a cousin called on the address. The Ledger gave him, in return, the name of the Clerk of Jackson, which he did not like, and which he allowed to be used only in the family. The children came in 1991 and 1992. Gary Collins Proctor was born in the August, in the heat, and Erin Proctor Collins in the following autumn, and the two of them grew up on the sorting floor, in the staff room, with a glass of milk and an old stamp album. They were quick, fair, watchful children. They were taught their letters by their father and their seams by their mother, and both of them, in their time, were called. Michael said that he had always known that they would be, and that he would have been glad to be wrong. He told them what he told himself, which was that the person who carries the post has a very fine view of how much trouble the rest of the world is in. He had a good record. He moved from the sorting belt to the registered counter, and then to the supervisor's desk, and on the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 he was at the window, selling stamps, when the television in the back room came on. In the weeks that followed, when a few envelopes in Washington and Florida were found to be carrying anthrax and the whole Postal Service went about in gloves and masks, he put on a pair, and went on sorting. It was a frightening autumn. He said, to a cousin, that he had no idea what was in the post and he was not in the least afraid, because he had never in his life been afraid of the post, only of what came after it. In the pandemic years the post office was classed as essential and he stayed at his window, in a plastic shield and a mask, with a line of people at the door and a pile of parcels to the ceiling. He was fifty-six. He did not take a day off for seven months. He is a thin, grey, spectacled man of sixty-two, with a cowlick that has survived, and he has been at the same window for nineteen years. He and Renee, who is living, have a house on the north side. On Sunday evenings he reads the mail, and on Monday mornings he reads it again. Michael Collins is remembered in the Proctor family as the clerk of the White Ledger, the man at the window who saw that every letter went where it was meant and who knew a sealed thing from a seal that had been lifted. In the Slayerverse he stands for the carriers and clerks of the old houses, the people who were never called and who, by a steady hand and a plain stamp, kept the hunters in touch with one another across a whole country.