Mildred Petrov

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

On the third of April 1974 a tornado crossed the north of Alabama, a lineman was called out from his own wedding, and his bride, who was a bookkeeper, told him that the work would not wait. That bride was Mildred Petrov, and the story is the best short account of her that the family has. She was born in 1952 in Jackson, Mississippi, and died in 2025 of kidney failure, aged seventy-three. She worked as a bookkeeper, in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, mostly in Birmingham, and she was a woman of no house who married into the Proctor bloodline that keeps the White Ledger. She was not a vampire slayer and was never called. In 1974 she married the lineman Earl Carter Proctor, the son of the slayer Wilma Proctor, and the marriage lasted fifty-one years and was childless. She had no parents in the Ledger and no alias, archetype or craft. What she had was a sharp pencil, a column that always added up and a second set of books, and the family remembers her as the bookkeeper who kept the accounts of the Birmingham cousinhood and who never once let a figure stand that she could not explain. She was born in Jackson by an accident of her father's employment. Her father was a Serbian-American steelworker from the west side of Birmingham, a big, patient man who had come to the furnaces from a family of miners, and in the winter of 1952 the mill had lent him, for six months, to a foundry in the Mississippi capital that was short of men who could pour a clean casting. Her mother, who spoke the Serbian of her own mother and the English of the street, went with him, in the bitter cold, to a rented upstairs flat near the railroad yards, and the baby arrived in the spring, in the middle of a thunderstorm, in a Jackson hospital where nobody could pronounce her surname. They took the train home to Birmingham the following winter, with the infant in a shawl, a hatbox of cooking pots and a certificate that said she was a Mississippian. She was, she said, the only member of the family who had been born in a state that she had never had occasion to defend. She grew up on the west side of Birmingham, in a street of frame houses behind the mills, where the air was red with ore dust on a windy day and the church bells rang in three languages. Her family kept its feast days. She was taken at Christmas, which fell for them in January, to a plain church where the candles were beeswax and the singing unaccompanied, and she learned from it, as a child learns from a ritual, that there is a right way to do a thing and that it is the same every year. She was a small, quick, dark-haired girl with a straight look, and her gift was figures. She could add a column of numbers before the teacher had finished writing it on the board, and she found that she could not bear a total that was wrong. At nine she corrected the grocer's bill. At twelve she was keeping the books of her father's burial society, a modest association of steelworkers that paid for funerals, on a sheet of ruled paper in her very small upright hand. The members, who had never been so accurately accounted for, voted her a vote of thanks and a pair of gloves. She went to the commercial school in the city in the late 1960s and left it, at eighteen, with a certificate in bookkeeping and a firm opinion about the ledger as an institution. She took her first place with a heating contractor on the east side, a family firm with eleven vans and a very bad system, and she put it straight in a month. The Vietnam years were then at their height, and the young men of her street, who were drafted in a steady stream, sent their allotments home to be banked, and she did the sums for half a dozen mothers at her father's kitchen table on a Saturday, in return for a plate of stuffed peppers. She did not, she said, care for war, but she cared a great deal for accounts. She was twenty when she met a young lineman at a church supper in the autumn of 1972, who told her that his work was a living and was told in return that it was no way to get anywhere. He replied that he had got to the church supper, which was a considerable distance for a man on a Wednesday. She laughed. They were engaged by Christmas. She was told about the Ledger by her husband-to-be, in the spring of 1973, on the porch of the house on the hill that had belonged to his grandfather, in the plain voice of a man who works with things that can kill. Earl said that his mother was a hunter, that his grandmother had been one before her and that there was a book. She asked what was in it. He said that it was mostly accounts. She said that she would very much like to see them. When she had read the Birmingham pages, in an evening, with a pencil, she said that there were three entries in the funds that did not agree with the entries in the receipts, and that the mistake had been made in 1951. Earl's mother, who had sent for a bottle of the family's best brandy to be opened for the occasion, said that it was the first time in twenty years that anyone had found the error. They were married in 1974, in the first week of April, in the middle of the great tornado outbreak that struck the state on the third, and the lineman was called away from the wedding to restore the power on the west side. She took it, as she took everything, as an item to be entered. She told him that the work would not wait and that she would see him when it was done. He came home at three in the morning in his wedding trousers, covered in mud, and she was waiting at the kitchen table with a thermos of coffee and the account book, in which she had already entered the day. It was, he says, the best start to a marriage that any man could have. They lived in a brick house in the hills in the same neighbourhood as his grandfather's old home, with a garden of roses, a porch, and a garage full of tools, and she kept two sets of books. The first was for the household, and for a succession of small businesses, among them the heating contractor, a funeral home and two churches. The second was in her own hand, and consisted of the family's small funds, the pennies and the dollars that the Birmingham cousins put by for the hunters' needs, the bail, the train fares, the medicines, the funerals, the coat from the laundry and the silver for the rounds. She kept them as a good bookkeeper keeps anything of the kind, with a double entry, a balance carried forward and a rule that nothing was to be written down that could not be said aloud in a kitchen. She never carried a pistol, and she never wished to. She said that a hunter without a ledger was a hunter who would be broke by the spring. She did not have children, and she did not speak of it. She had her husband's mother, Wilma Proctor, whom she called Mrs Proctor for twenty years and after that, to Wilma's secret delight, by her Christian name, and her husband's sister Virginia, who was a nurse and who took her to lunch, and in later years her husband's niece Nicole, who treated her as an aunt. She took the older generation's deaths in order, as she would have entered them. Wilma died in 1998, in the middle of a fitting, and Wallace in 2005, and Virginia in 2016. In the month of September 2001 she was working late at the contractor's office when the news came, and she did what she was able to do, which was to telephone every cousin on her list, in alphabetical order, and ask whether they were all at home. In the late autumn of 2005, when her husband went down to New Orleans with a crew to put the lights back on, she kept the accounts of the venture, found the fuel, the lodging and the lost hours in a week, and told the company that it had been underpaid by eleven hundred dollars. She was paid within the month. She retired from the contractor in 2012, at sixty, after forty-two years, and kept the family funds, the roses and her husband until the winter of 2024, when her kidneys, which had been poor for years, began to fail. She was on dialysis three days a week, in a chair by a window, with a notebook, and she wrote, in the margin of it, the dates of each session. She died in the spring of 2025, aged seventy-three, in the house in the hills, with her husband in the next chair and the accounts in order. They were balanced to the cent. Earl, who is living, found the final page, which had been written a week before, and which said only that she had paid the roses. Mildred Petrov is remembered in the Proctor family as the bookkeeper of the Birmingham cousinhood, the wife of the lineman who kept the books of the hunt with a sharp pencil and a double entry. In the Slayerverse she stands for the accountants and clerks of the White Ledger, the ones who were never called, who kept the funds that paid for the trains and the silver and the funerals, and who proved that a column of figures that adds up is a form of defence.