Vera Milam

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

Vera Milam was born in 1920 in Dallas, Texas, and lived sixty-three years as a laundress in the rail yards, banks and suburbs of north Texas. She was not a vampire slayer and had no house of her own, but in 1941 she married Norman Proctor, the cotton factor of Fort Worth who became The Narrow Kestrel of the White Ledger, and for nineteen years she was the one person who saw every garment that came home from his work. They had one child, Lois Proctor, born in 1943, who grew up to be a slayer in her own right. Vera was born into a farming family of Johnson County with no tie to either of the great bloodlines, and she married into the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, which descends from Isabel Proctor and Thomas Faulkner and the January of 1486. She outlived her husband by twenty-three years and died in 1983 of a sudden collapse, aged sixty-three. The Proctors remember her as the woman who read the Ledger's business in the wash and who said, of every stain that she ever lifted, that it was a statement and not an accident. She was born in Dallas because her mother went in to the city to have her. It was the end of March 1920, and the family lived on a cotton farm in the black prairie of Johnson County, a long wagon ride and a train away from anything like a hospital, and her mother, who had lost a child the year before, had been told by the Cleburne doctor that she was to have the next one in a bed with a nurse. She went up on the interurban to an aunt in Oak Cliff and was delivered on a Thursday afternoon at a clinic on Zang Boulevard, in a heavy rain, while her husband, who had a wagon of seed to move before the creek came up, was fifteen miles away and learned of it by a card. The child was freckled, red-eyed with crying and remarkably clean, and her aunt, who took in washing, remarked that she had never seen a baby come out so well pressed. She was home on the farm at three weeks. She never thought of herself as a Dallas girl, and said all her life that she had been born there as a person is stopped at a station, on the way to somewhere else. The farm was a hundred and sixty acres of cotton and corn east of Cleburne, and Vera grew up on it in the twenties, with three brothers and a pump in the yard. Her mother did the wash on Mondays, in a black kettle with lye soap she made herself, and the child took to it as other children took to horses. She liked the order of it, the whites first and the colours after, the starch in a basin and the long line in the wind. She was ironing for the neighbours at eleven, at a nickel a shirt, and it was soon noticed that she did not scorch. It was noticed, too, that she counted. When a neighbour's wash came back one handkerchief short she knew it before the neighbour did. The Depression came to Johnson County early, in the drought and the low price of cotton, and Vera left school at sixteen and went into Cleburne, to the steam laundry by the Santa Fe depot, where a hundred women worked in a heat that made the walls sweat. She learned the large trade there, the mangle, the collar press and the great rolling tumblers, and learned that every piece carried a mark in indelible ink, so that a shirt that had been in a hundred baskets could be returned to the same man. She became fond of the marks. In 1938 a cousin told her that a Main Street hotel in Fort Worth wanted a head girl for the sheet room, and she went up on the train with a cardboard suitcase and a hat that she had trimmed herself. The hotel handled four hundred sheets a day, and in the first week she was keeping the count for the whole floor in her head. Fort Worth in those years was a city of cattlemen, bankers and travelling salesmen, with the stockyards to the north and the long grain elevators on the river, and a hotel laundress saw more of it than almost anyone. She saw what came out of the rooms. She could say, by the state of a bed, whether the guest had slept, and, from the pockets, who had been drinking, who had been to the races and who had been in the yards. She did not repeat it. In the autumn of 1940 a man in a good suit came to the counter to collect a shirt that had been sent down in error with the sheets, and she told him that it would be Thursday, and that his left cuff was frayed, and that the mark on the pocket was not ink. They were married in the spring of 1941, in the church at Cleburne where her parents had been married. The sheet room gave her a toaster. She did not know what he had become for the first year after his calling, and she knew, all the same, that something was not as it ought to be. She had washed his shirts since the wedding, and in seven years of marriage she had never washed such shirts. A cotton factor's collar had cotton in it, and a little red dust from the compress, and she knew that. She did not know why there was grave clay in a cuff in the middle of a drought, or a scorch in the shape of a hand on a sleeve, or a faint black bloom, like tarnish, on the inside of a pocket in which he kept his rounds. She said nothing. She had a daughter by then, Lois, born in the spring of 1943 in the front bedroom of the rented house in Arlington, in the summer when Fort Worth was full of soldiers and the bomber plant on the lake ran three shifts, and she had two sheet rooms' worth of sewing and washing from the war. She kept it all in her head. She said later that she had been like a woman who has been handed the same letter every week and has not yet been told to read it. He told her himself, in the spring of 1949, on a Sunday after church, at the kitchen table, in the voice that he used to tell a creature that it had been seen. She was ironing at the time. She finished the sleeve that she was on, set the iron on its heel and said that she would like the rules. He gave them, and she made some changes. What she undertook, in the end, was the shirts. She said that he had been bringing home the truth for a year in his clothes, and that she would sooner be told it than guess at it. From that spring she kept a small book in the linen cupboard, in which she entered, by date and by garment, what she found: the clay, the soot, the burn, the shade of the stain, the smell of the sulphur or the river. She learned to tell old blood from new and silver from steel. She worked out that a particular stiff, brown crust on a cuff, which she could not lift with lye, was something that did not belong to a man, and she kept the piece. The Ledger's Texas chapter, to which Norman took the book, found it of more use than three reports. She had added to the day's account a sense of what the night had looked like at close quarters. It was, she said, the same work that she had always done, in a different light. A person who handles the same man's clothes for years knows his habits as no one else does. She knew by the middle fifties when he was frightened, because he stopped using starch, and she knew when he had been out four nights running by the state of his heels. In the Korean War, when the factors of Fort Worth were rich, she turned down the offer of a maid and did the wash herself, in a basement room with a copper and a mangle. It was the only room in the house with a lock on the inside, and she kept the pistol cleaner there, a rag, a tin of oil and the case of silver rounds that her husband laid out on the table when he came in at dawn. Her daughter Lois learned from her father what the work was and was afterward, in her own time, called. Vera never said much about it. She sewed her daughter's coats with deep pockets, as she had sewn her husband's, and she washed what came home. Norman Proctor was killed in November of 1960, in a barn near Weatherford, when a loft gave way. It was Vera who identified him, and who took his coat and his shirt from the sheriff in a paper bag, and who washed them that night in the basement room with the door locked. It was the last wash. She pressed the shirt, put a dry-cleaner's tissue in the collar and laid it in the bottom drawer, and for the next twenty-three years she let no other person, not a daughter, a cousin or a neighbour, touch the shirts that he had left. Every spring she took them out, washed them in cold water, pressed them, folded them and put them away. It was said in the family that she did it so that she could be sure of the date. Lois, who found her mother at the ironing board one April morning, asked her what year it was. Vera told her that it was Thursday. She worked on through the Vietnam years, at the hotel laundry and afterwards in her own basement, with two girls from the church to help her, and she kept her little book up to the end. She was sixty-three. On a hot afternoon in August of 1983, in the basement room in Arlington, with a load in the tumbler and a shirt in her hand, she sat down on the laundry basket, with great composure, and was gone before the machine stopped. Lois, who came down the stairs a minute afterwards and found her, said that the shirt was perfectly pressed. In the drawer upstairs, folded in tissue, there was a note with the date and the word clean. Vera Milam is remembered in the Proctor family as the laundress who read the Ledger's business in the wash, the wife who asked for the rules and then took the shirts. In the Slayerverse she stands for the women of the White Ledger who kept the hunters fit to be seen, who knew the whole truth of a night by the state of a collar, and who proved that a clean cuff and an honest count are as much part of the long war as a pistol.