Scott Proctor

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

Scott Proctor was born in 1963 at Houston, Texas, and is living today in Houston, where he has worked for forty years as a shipyard welder along the shipping channel, oil offices and bayous of that city. He belongs to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line of the White Ledger that descends, with the Faulkners, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but he is not a hunter and has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of his own. He is the younger son of the electrician James Proctor, who died in 2000, and of the hospital cook Mildred Chandler, who is living, and the brother of Marcus Chandler Proctor, born in 1961. In 1988 he married the secretary Lisa Perry, and they raised two daughters, Lisa Perry Proctor, born in 1990, and Shannon Proctor, born in 1992, neither of whom was called. The family remembers him as the welder of the Ledger, the man who joined the iron where the hunters needed a door that would hold, and who learned from his father that a trade is the best way of being useful to people who do not wish to be thanked. He was born in a hospital in the Medical Center, a few floors above the kitchen where his mother had run the line, in the early spring of a year that people in Houston remember for its rain, and he was taken home, at three days, to the brick house on Telephone Road with the carport and the pecan tree. His elder brother Marcus, who was two, was waiting on the porch with a toy truck, which he held up, and said that it was for the baby. It was the first and last time that the brothers were known to agree on the ownership of a toy. The house was a tool shop with a kitchen attached. His father James kept a bench in the garage, where he wound coils and soldered relays, and his mother Mildred kept a green tin box of recipe cards on a shelf over the stove, and between the two of them the boys learned a great deal about fire, one of them how to make it behave and the other how to eat it. He took to the torch before he took to a pencil. At seven he wore a tool belt of his father's that came down to his shins. At eleven he was allowed to hold the leads at the bench, and at fourteen, the summer that his uncle Raymond Proctor Navarro came to stay and slept on the sleeping porch with his boots on, he was shown by the foreman of a fabrication shop on the east side how to strike an arc. It was an afternoon that he never forgot. A welder's arc is a small, white, spitting star at the end of a rod, and it must be looked at through a dark glass, and the first time that the metal ran together under it in a clean bright bead he said, aloud, to nobody, that it was the most sensible thing that he had ever seen. The foreman, who had been welding since Korea, agreed. He told the boy that most of life was gap and a little was bridge. His uncle Raymond was the man that he watched. Raymond was a hunter of the White Ledger, a thin, grave, travelling cousin who tracked records and rumours across half of Texas and came to the house on Telephone Road, at night, wet to the knees, for a plate of beans and a bed on the porch. He never spoke of what he did. He once, when Scott was twelve, asked him whether the boy could weld a hinge. Scott said that he could. Raymond handed him a heavy iron hasp from the pocket of his coat, and asked for it by Thursday. It was for a cellar door in a house at Baytown, he said, and the door was old and the wood was soft, and the hasp must not fail. Scott made it in the garage, with his father standing by, and tested it by hanging his own weight from it. On Friday Raymond took it away. He did not say what it had held. In the following spring he came by again and put into the boy's hands a short, battered silver coin, and said that it had been in the pocket of the door. He left school in 1981, with a diploma and a good deal of calluses, and took an apprenticeship at a repair yard on the Ship Channel, where the tugs and tankers and the long grey barges of the Gulf trade came in for patching and where a young man with a steady hand could find work by noon. He learned the grades of steel, the angles of a seam and the work of the underwater cutting crew. He learned to keep his head in a tank, on a ladder, in the dark, with a torch and a bit of rope. He was, from the beginning, a quiet and exact worker, and the foreman, who gave out a nickname to every man in the yard, called him Church. He did not ask why. It was, someone told him later, because he never spoke in the building. The oil bust of the middle eighties came to Houston like the weather, a long grey drizzle that went on for years, in which the oil offices on Louisiana Street emptied, the refineries laid off a third of their crews and half of the contractors on the channel closed their doors. Scott, who was twenty-two, was laid off in the spring of 1986. His father James, who had also been laid off, started his own business with a van and a ladder, and in eighteen months had more work than he wanted. Scott went with him as a helper, wiring the houses of the laid-off, and learned the second trade of the family, which was to keep a good humour while explaining a bill. He took a part-time job welding gates, security grilles and burglar bars for a company on the east side, which was a rare growth industry in a bad time. It was in this work that he began the Ledger's iron. For it was iron, in the Proctor houses, that did the work that wire could not. He made doors. The White Ledger had safe houses all along the Gulf, small, ordinary dwellings with a spare room for a cousin, and an electrician could light them and warn of a visitor, but a cellar door that would hold against something strong enough to take a man's arm off at the shoulder wanted a welder. He hung grilles with a hidden bolt, a cage in an attic that bolted from outside, a gate with a long iron bar that dropped across a passage at a pull of a cord. He charged for materials and nothing else, and his father drew the plans on carbon paper. He never asked what the doors were for. He understood it as one understands the weather, from what was kept out of the house. In 1988 he married Lisa Perry, a secretary at a shipping agent's office on Navigation Boulevard, who had typed more than a hundred bills of lading by the day he met her and could tell, by the sound of the keys, when her employer was lying. She was twenty-seven, a quick, direct, freckled woman with a sharp tongue and a very kind heart, and she had come to the yard to ask why a delivery was three weeks late. He said that it was the weather. She said that it was the foreman. He said that it was both. They were married in a church on the east side, in the spring, with his mother Mildred in her best brown dress, who cried a little, and his father James, who told the priest that the lights in the sanctuary were wired in a manner that he could not approve. Lisa was told the truth about the Ledger within the year, by Mildred, at the kitchen table, over a pan of cornbread, and took it as she took everything, with a nod and a list of questions. Lisa Perry Proctor was born in 1990, and Shannon Proctor in 1992, and the girls grew up in a house with a small shop at the back, under the great trees of the east side, and neither of them was ever called. His father died in the summer of 2000, in a customer's attic, with a coil of wire in his hand, and Scott and his brother Marcus rewired the widow's house for nothing, and every light in it was on for a week. The following year, in the morning of the eleventh of September, Scott was in the yard, with a torch in his hand, when the radio in the foreman's shed said what it said, and he put the torch out, and the whole crew stood in the sun with their helmets in their hands for a quarter of an hour. He went home at noon. He found Lisa at the kitchen table, with the television on and a pen in her hand, writing a list of who to ring. In the pandemic years the yard stayed open as an essential trade, and he went on welding in a mask, in the heat, by himself in a tank, and did not mind it. His mother, who is living, in Corpus Christi, telephoned on Sundays, and said that she did not recommend the news. He is now one of the oldest hands in the yard, a large, quiet, grey-bearded man of sixty-three, in a flameproof jacket that has more scorch marks than cloth. He mends the Ledger's doors on Saturdays. His daughters are grown, and both of them, as it happens, can strike an arc. Scott Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the welder of the White Ledger, the man who made doors and never asked what they were for. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trades-people of the old houses, the electricians, cooks and welders who were never called, and who made the work safe by joining the iron properly and holding their tongues.