Obadiah Proctor

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

Obadiah Proctor was born in 1766 in Winchester, Virginia, at the top of the Shenandoah Valley, where the Great Wagon Road ran through a market town of limestone houses, stone walls and taverns that never seemed to empty. He became a farmer, worked one patch of valley ground for most of his life and died in 1819 at the age of fifty-three in an accident on the high ground above his fields. He never married and had no children. What he left was a well-kept farm, a reputation as the steadiest man in the Proctor family of the White Ledger, and a tradition of being the one relative everybody in a family of vampire slayers could stay with without being asked a single question. His father, Jonas Proctor, was born in 1743 and died in 1799. He began as a surveyor's chainman, dragging the iron links across the ridges of the valley in all weathers, and he later scouted for the army during the Revolution, riding ahead of columns to find fords and count campfires. In the White Ledger he is The Valley Scout, a vampire slayer whose tallies were taken in the quiet hours after the scouting was done. Obadiah's mother, Charity Woodbury, was born in 1741 and died in 1779, when her son was thirteen. She was a herbalist, and the Ledger names her The Meek Seal, a hunter who was gentle in manner and deadly with a blade, and who sealed the cellars and barns where a vampire had lain up so that nothing could come back to them. The two were married in the years before the war, and their household was a sober, churchgoing one of the kind that the Virginia back country produced in great numbers, its Bible on the table and its powder horn behind the door. Obadiah was the second child. His elder sister, Mary Woodbury Proctor, was born in 1765 and did not take up the hunter's work, though she was close to her brother all her life. His younger brother Levi Proctor, born in 1774, and sister Lydia Proctor, born in 1775, were both called to the work, and Lydia later went west to the Cumberland country and became a frontier figure in the family's story. Obadiah was the sibling who stayed. As a boy he could already see that hunting ran in the blood of the Proctors and that it would run through his brother and sister, and he settled, in his quiet way, for being the one who was there when they came home. The valley of his boyhood was a place of Scots-Irish and German farmers, Quakers, Lutheran and Presbyterian meeting houses, and the long wagon road that carried flour, iron and whiskey south. Winchester had been a frontier stockade in the days of Braddock's war, and the old men still told stories of Shawnee raids and of the militia that drilled in the muster fields. Obadiah was a child during the Revolution. He remembered Hessian prisoners marched through the town and the smell of the powder stores in the courthouse cellar. His father went away for long stretches, scouting for the army, and came back thin and silent, with a notebook full of river crossings. By the time Charity Woodbury died, the boy had learned to milk, to plough, to read a sky and to keep his mouth shut, which was as much education as most valley farms could afford. After his mother's death the household needed a steady hand, and Obadiah became the man of it while still a youth. He took the family's limestone farm a few miles from Winchester in hand, worked wheat, corn and a small orchard, and kept a few dozen sheep on the ridge. The soil was good but stony, and every spring the plough turned up stones that he piled into walls. By his thirties the walls were one of the landmarks of the road, straight, tight and as high as a man's chest. He built a spring house over the creek, and in the spring house kept the milk, the butter and, in a locked chest at the back, the family's White Ledger whenever it was in his keeping. It was Obadiah, not a hunter, who was trusted with the book between entries, and he was careful with it in a way that became a family byword. He dried it beside the hearth if the damp got in, he wrapped it in oiled cloth, and he never read an entry that was not his business. The White Ledger was in some ways his great charge. The Proctors of Yorkshire had opened their ledger in 1455, at the start of the Wars of the Roses, and kept it up against the Faulkners' Red Ledger ever since, a rivalry of tallies and reputations rather than bloodshed. Obadiah's own tally was nil, and he joked about it without bitterness. When visiting cousins boasted of the vampires they had taken in the Carolinas or over the mountains, he would pour them cider and say that he had taken a great many weeds. Yet the hunters trusted him with their equipment, their maps and their wounded, and on more than one night in the 1790s he sheltered a Proctor hunter at the farm who had been hurt in a chase along the river. He asked no more about it than he needed to, and he made sure the horse was rubbed down and the shutters fastened before anyone slept. He never married. The valley had no shortage of women who might have taken him, and his neighbours pitied and teased him about it, but he took in his brother Levi's children and his sister Lydia's when they passed through, and he said that there was enough noise in the house already. He served in the militia during the War of 1812 as a wagoner, never a fighter, hauling flour and lead to the depots, and he came back with a cough he never lost. The years after the war were the farm's best. The price of wheat rose, the new turnpike brought traffic, and he built a bigger barn with a stone foundation that stood well into the twentieth century. Obadiah died in 1819 when he was fifty-three. He had gone up to the high pasture in a wet spring to see to a fence, and a slab of limestone slid under him on the slope. A neighbour found him at the foot of the ridge the next morning. The Proctor family buried him in the churchyard at Winchester beside his mother, and his brother Levi came from Tennessee for the funeral, having ridden the whole road in nine days. The farm passed to a cousin of the Woodbury side, and the ledger he had guarded went with Levi to the west. Obadiah Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the keeper, the farmer who was the quiet centre of a line of hunters and who never once put his name in the White Ledger as a tally. His stone walls still run along the road outside Winchester, and the spring house is marked on a county map. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people who held the lines, sheltered the wounded and guarded the record so that the slayers could do what they did.