Michael Green Proctor

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

Michael Green Proctor was born in 1997 in the back of an ambulance on the Westside of San Antonio, Texas, and is living today in San Antonio (Westside), where he works as a paramedic among the barrios, river walk and military bases of that city. He belongs to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but he is not a hunter, not a vampire slayer, and was never called. He has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of his own. He is the younger son of the bus driver Timothy Proctor and of the librarian Colleen Green, the grandson of the slayer Edwin Proctor, The Iron Otter, and the brother of Gary Proctor, born in 1996. He has not married and has no children. The family remembers him as the carrier of the White Ledger in Texas, the man who could bring a hurt cousin through the doors of any hospital in the city at three in the morning, and who never in his life wrote a false word on a run sheet. His first call, as he is fond of saying, was the one that he made himself. His mother had come into San Antonio in the last week of January to spend a few days with her mother-in-law, Vera Dawson, who had a bad cold and a great many opinions about the way that the baby's room ought to be arranged, and the baby, who was not due for three weeks and who had been told that he would be born in the stone house in Bandera, decided otherwise. It was a Sunday afternoon, with a cold, thin, steady rain coming down on the Westside and a wind from the north, and Colleen, who was standing at a window in Vera's kitchen with a cup of tea, said in her level library voice that she thought that she had better telephone someone. Vera, who was a telephone operator and a woman who had put through a great many emergency calls in forty years, dialled the number before the sentence was finished. The ambulance was at the door in six minutes. It was a Westside crew, a quick, plump, calm paramedic named Ruth Salinas and her partner, and they had Colleen on the stretcher and into the back and half a mile along Culebra Road in the rain when the baby, who has never since been late for anything, came into the world on a gurney under a reading lamp, in a vehicle that was stationary at a red light. Timothy, who had been driving the number thirty-six and was on his last run, was reached at the depot by radio, and arrived at the hospital in a state that his supervisor described as unprecedented. Ruth Salinas, who had delivered three babies in nineteen years, wrote the time on the sheet and said that he had arrived on schedule. He was a thin, dark, quick-eyed baby who looked at the lights and listened to the siren with every appearance of approval. The family papers record that he was baptised in the old Westside church where his grandmother Vera had been married, and that he spent the first three months of his life between a stone house in Bandera and a brick one on the Southside, in a basket that went in the back of his father's car. He grew up in the library. He was a small, thoughtful boy with his mother's spectacles and his father's patience, and he was quick with a joke, and he had one passion, which he disclosed at the age of four by sitting on the floor of the staff room with a bus timetable and asking why the number thirty-six was never late and the number forty-four always was. His father, who had driven the thirty-six for fifteen years, explained that a bus is only as punctual as the man who sits in front of it. The boy said that it was a very good answer. He kept the timetable in a drawer for the next twenty years. His grandmother Vera was killed on the Loop in the autumn of 2012, when a truck crossed the median on a wet night and struck her car, and he was fifteen. Michael was at home in Bandera when the call came, and he went with his parents to the hospital in the back seat of the car and sat in the waiting room, in a plastic chair, for three hours, watching the ambulance crews come and go through the doors with the patients on the stretchers. It was the stillness of them that he remembered. A crew comes in with a person who is badly hurt, and does the same twelve things in the same order, in a few seconds, in silence, and hands the patient over with a sentence, and goes out again to the next. He thought that it was the most orderly thing that he had ever seen in a place of disorder. It was a timetable made of people. He said to his father, in the car on the way home, that he knew what he would do. Timothy, who had a long-standing habit of waiting until a thing was said twice, said that he would look forward to hearing it again in the morning. He trained as an emergency medical technician at eighteen, in a course held in the evenings at a community college on the Westside, and he worked the nights as a transport driver for a private ambulance firm, which is a hard apprenticeship and a good one. He was a paramedic at twenty-one, with the city's emergency service, on a crew out of a station near the old brewery, and on his first night shift the dispatcher, a veteran of thirty years, put him on a call in a street that he knew, outside a house with a green gate, where a woman of ninety lay on a kitchen floor and said, when he knelt beside her, that she had been waiting for the Proctor boy. Her name was Mrs Navarro. She was a cousin. He knew her name from the cousins' lists and had never met her, and it was by this accident that he found that every hospital in the city had a back door, and that a cousin who had been hurt in a way that could not be explained would send for him. His service is a simple one. A hunter who comes off a night with a wound that was not made by anything on the police blotter has two choices, an emergency room that asks a great many questions or nothing at all, and he has made a third. He knows the city's hospitals as his father knew its bus routes, by their habits, their shifts and the faces on the desks, and he knows which of them has a night nurse who will treat a bite and not look up. He never falsifies a record. He says that it is his only rule, and that it has been kept at some expense. A patient, in the language of the sheet, is a person with a complaint and a time and a place, and he writes down exactly what he sees, which is not always the same as what is said. If the complaint is a dog bite, he writes that it is a bite. He then takes the patient where it will be understood. His cousin at the nurses' station in the second hospital on the Westside, a woman whom he does not name, has been receiving his calls at a quarter past three in the morning for six years and has not asked him once what it was. He also carries in the other sense. He has driven, in his off hours, in a battered white van that his father found for him, cousins who had no cars, a woman with a broken wrist who could not be seen to leave a house, and on one occasion, in the flood of October 2015, when the river rose over the bridges and the Southside was cut in half, a hunter with a leg in a splint, a case of silver rounds, and a very small dog, all the way from Kelly to the Westside by way of the high ground, in the rain, in two feet of water. He kept to the timetable. He arrived at the hospital at twelve minutes to four, as he had said that he would, and the dog was given a blanket. In the pandemic years he was on the road without a break, in a gown and a mask, on a crew that did eleven transports a night and sometimes twenty, and he wrote his sheets in the cab by torchlight. He was twenty-three. Earlier, in 2019, he had sat with his grandfather Edwin in the last weeks of a long illness, in the little house on the Southside with the lathe in the garage, and had driven him to the hospital in a car that he had borrowed, because he did not want his grandfather to arrive in an ambulance. Edwin said, on the last journey, that it was the best-driven ride of his life. Michael is twenty-nine now, a lean, dark, bespectacled man with his mother's habit of looking at a thing a long time before he speaks, and he lives in a rented house on the Westside, three miles from the station, with his grandfather's lathe in the garage. He fishes on Mondays with his brother, in the Medina, and has never missed a bus. Michael Green Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the carrier of the White Ledger in Texas, the paramedic who was born in an ambulance and spent his life bringing hurt cousins to the right door on time. In the Slayerverse he stands for the drivers, medics and ordinary rescuers of the old houses who were never called, who wrote the truth on every sheet and still got the hunters home, and who showed that the most useful kind of courage is arriving when one said one would.