Norman Proctor was born in 1918 at Austin, Texas, and lived forty-two years as a cotton factor in the rail yards, banks and suburbs of north Texas and, for the last twelve of them, as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Narrow Kestrel, a name that recalls a thin hawk sitting very still on a wire, and it classes him as a Spy, a hunter who works by observation, access and permission and relies on the gun only when everything else has failed. His craft was Quiet Confrontation, the art of telling a vampire, in a calm voice and in a public room, that it has been seen, and of leaving it nowhere to go. His gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He was called in 1948, in a boarding house, when a lodger paid in coins older than the building. He was the elder son of the dockworker Edwin Menger Proctor and the boarding-house keeper Lillian Seguin, and the brother of Clifford Proctor. In 1941 he married the laundress Vera Milam, and they had one child, Lois Proctor, a slayer. He died in 1960, beneath a collapsed barn during a night hunt, aged forty-two.
He was born in the front bedroom of a boarding house near the depot at Austin, where his mother Lillian, a Seguin from the Gulf coast who had married a Proctor in 1917, kept eight rooms for railwaymen and legislators. His father Edwin, a cheerful, round-faced man who had gone to the docks for the wages, was at Galveston on the night, and arrived on the Thursday train with a bunch of flowers and an apology. The baby was long, dark and silent, and the boarders said that he looked at the lamp as if he were trying to catch it out. He was a watchful child. At three he had learned the names and habits of all eight lodgers, and at five he could tell from the step on the stair who was coming up. His mother called him the inspector.
The family moved to Victoria in 1919 and to San Antonio in the winter of 1933, after the boarding house failed in the Depression, and Norman, who was fifteen, left school that spring and took a job as a runner for a cotton buyer on Commerce Street. He was good at it. He had a flat, pleasant manner and a memory for faces, and he learned in two seasons how the trade worked, from the compress and the gin to the long counter where the factor stood with a sample in his hand and a pencil behind his ear. A factor, he found, advanced money against the crop, sold it for the grower and stood between a hundred small farmers and the mills. He was an honest broker in a trade where honesty was not the commonest virtue, and he took to it. At twenty he had a desk. At twenty-two he was offered a place with a firm in Fort Worth, and took it.
Fort Worth in 1940 was a city of stockyards, rail yards and a good many banks, with the packing plants to the north, the grand old hotels downtown and, along the river, a district of rooming houses where the cattlemen, the cotton men and the men from the railway lived side by side. Norman took a room in a frame house on the South Side, and learned the city. He liked it. He liked the long hot evenings, the band at the Casino and the sound of the switch engines in the yards at night, which he found as restful as the sea. He had been rejected for the army, in the autumn of 1941, on account of a punctured eardrum, which he regarded as an injustice and his mother as a mercy, and he went on with the cotton. In the war years it ran at the government's pace, and the factors of Fort Worth were kept busy putting the crop in the mills that made the uniforms.
He met his wife in the same year. Vera Milam was a laundress at a hotel on Main Street, a tall, freckled, patient girl of twenty-one from a farm in Johnson County, who handled four hundred sheets a day and kept the count in her head. He went there to collect a shirt. She told him, without looking up, that it would be Thursday, and that his left cuff was frayed, and that the stain on the pocket was not ink. He said that it was coffee. She said that she knew. They were married in 1941, in the spring, in the church at Cleburne where her parents had been married, and his brother Clifford, who was up from San Antonio, spent the service with his eyes on the door, which was a Proctor habit and which Vera, who noticed everything, took in at once and set aside for later.
The calling came in 1948, on a wet night in November, in a boarding house on Jones Street where he had gone to see a client who had gone missing. The house was kept by a Mrs Haskell, a broad, deaf woman with a cat, and the lodger in the back room, a pale, soft-spoken man in a good grey coat, had been there a week. He came down to settle his account while Norman was sitting in the hall. He paid in coins, and the coins were old, Spanish dollars and a clipped silver crown, black with handling, and some of them had been struck before the house was so much as a plan on a surveyor's table. Mrs Haskell counted them without comment. The lodger turned, bowed and, as he went out, looked at Norman, with a look that had no breath in it. Norman, who had spent thirty years studying who in a room was lying, knew at once what he had seen, and what he had been born to do.
He was trained by a cousin, a retired railway detective of the White Ledger who lived in Dallas, in the manner of the Proctors, slowly and without much fuss. He was taught that a Spy does not fight and does not hide, that he is simply the one man in the room who is paying attention, and that a vampire who is seen, plainly, in a place with a great many witnesses, loses the one thing that it has, which is the right to be overlooked. Quiet Confrontation was a thing that he did in a hotel lobby, in a bank, in a Pullman car, with a hat in his hand and a calm, pleasant voice. He would sit down opposite the creature, say its name, say the date on which it had come to the city and say that three other people knew. Then he would wait. A good many left Texas on the next train. A few, who did not, he met afterward in other places, with the pistol.
His wife learned of it in 1949, and took it, as she took everything, with a silence that went on for a week. She then asked for the rules. He gave them, and she made some changes, chiefly in the matter of the laundry, where she undertook to see to the shirts, which she said told her more than he ever would. His daughter Lois Proctor, born in 1943, grew up in a house on a quiet suburban street in Arlington, with a father who travelled and a mother who counted, and became, in her time, a slayer of her own. He taught her very little. He said that the work was caught, not taught, and that he would sooner see her at a piano.
He worked the cotton by day and the other work by night for twelve years, and in the Korean War, when the market jumped and every factor in the city was richer than he wanted to be, he gave a good deal of what he earned to the Ledger. He was not a rich man, and not a famous one. He was, by the account of his colleagues, a pleasant, slightly dry man who did not drink, and who disappeared on Thursday evenings. His father, who had come up from San Antonio in the spring of 1960 to see him, was taken ill on the journey home and died in the autumn, and Norman, who was at the funeral, was observed to be standing at the back, as though he were still counting the room.
He died that same year, in November, on a night hunt, near a farm outside Weatherford, where a creature that had been living in a hay barn was said to be taking the farm hands in their sleep. He went in alone. The barn was old, the beams were rotten, and in the struggle a loft gave way and the roof came down on him. He was found at dawn by the farmer, under the timber, with the pistol in his hand, and on his face, they say, an expression of calm, as though he had at last sat down opposite the thing that he had been looking for. Clifford drove up from San Antonio that night and brought him home. Vera, who outlived him by twenty-three years, never let anyone else wash his shirts.
Norman Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Narrow Kestrel, the cotton factor who said a creature's name aloud in a crowded room and waited. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet hunters of the White Ledger, the spies and watchers who did not fight where they could look, and who proved that the thing that a vampire most fears is being plainly and politely seen.
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