Virginia Carter

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

Virginia Carter wrote everything down, and in thirty-seven years on the wards of Mississippi she never once wrote down what she actually thought. She was born in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama, and died in 2016 of cancer, aged sixty-seven. She worked as a nurse in the hospitals of Jackson, in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, and she was a woman of the Proctor bloodline, which keeps the White Ledger, though she was never called and was not a vampire slayer. She was the younger child of the dockworker Wallace Carter and of the seamstress and slayer Wilma Proctor, The Rough Shuttle, and the sister of Earl Carter Proctor. In 1969 she married the electrician George Foster, and they had two daughters, Renee Foster Proctor, who became a slayer, and Nicole Proctor, who did not. Virginia had no alias, archetype or craft. She had a steady hand, a dressing tray and a night nurse's habit of looking at a patient's neck, and the family remembers her as the nurse who asked no questions of a wounded cousin and kept a very good chart of the other kind of patient. She was born in Birmingham because that was where her grandmother was. In the autumn of 1949 the wharves of Memphis were closed by a strike, her father Wallace was walking the picket line with a hook in his belt, and her mother Wilma, who was heavily pregnant and in no mood to be confined in a house with a picket outside it, had taken the train to the house on the hill above the Birmingham mills, where Evelyn Bowie Proctor kept a spare bed and a pistol in her sewing bag. The baby arrived in the cold, in the small hours, with Evelyn presiding and Earl Hale, her grandfather, adding up a column of figures on the stair. The news went to Memphis by telegram. Wallace read it on the line, said that he had a prior engagement, and was on the next train south. She was named for nobody in particular, which in the Proctor family was unusual and was taken as a compliment to her. She grew up between two houses, the sewing room in Memphis, with its pins, its pattern books and its harsh dry machine, and the house on the hill at Birmingham, where she spent the long summers and where her grandmother taught her, at an age when other children were learning to skip, how to fold a bandage so that it would lie flat. Her brother Earl was the one who climbed things. Virginia was the one who watched him do it, with her hands behind her back, and who was usually right about when he would come down. She was a tall, dark, thoughtful girl, a little formal, who preferred a clean surface to a pretty one, and who could be trusted, from the age of nine, to carry a full cup of tea across a crowded room. Her mother told her about the Ledger in the spring of 1961, when she was twelve, at the sewing room table, with a mouthful of pins, in the same plain order in which she had once been told herself. Virginia listened to the end, asked whether anyone in the family had ever been hurt, and was told the truth. She said that she would like to be the person who dealt with that part. It was, in the family's telling, the shortest vocation on record. She went into the hospital course at Birmingham in the autumn of 1966, at seventeen, and found it exactly to her taste. Nursing in those years was a trade of starch, discipline and long shifts, taught in a hospital school by sisters and head nurses who held that a probationer who could not make a bed with a drawn sheet had no business near a living patient. Virginia made the bed. The city that she trained in was a hard one in those years, a place of mills and fine manners and bad laws, and she saw, on the wards, that the same blood was the same colour in every bed, which she said was the one thing that she had been taught that she never had to unlearn. In the winter of 1967 she went to a dance for the nursing students, at which a thin, curly-headed young man from Jackson, who had driven a friend, told her that his only prospect was a very long extension cord. She had been about to say something sharp. Instead she laughed, which she did not often do in public. They wrote letters for two years, and he drove up from Jackson on Sundays in a truck with a bad clutch. They were married in the spring of 1969, at her parents' church on the hill, with her brother Earl standing up for George and giving him a pair of insulated pliers, and she moved to Jackson, transferred to a hospital school there and finished her course in the summer of 1970. Their first daughter, Renee Foster Proctor, was born that spring, a month or so before the examinations, and was brought along to the last of them in a basket and slept through the pharmacology. Virginia passed. She said that she had been well prepared for anything involving a patient who could not tell her what was wrong. She was a ward nurse at one of the city's hospitals by the autumn of 1970, and it was there, on the surgical floor, in the years of the Vietnam war, that she did most of the ordinary good that the White Ledger could ever claim from her. She nursed the boys who came home. She sat up with the ones who could not sleep and charted, without comment, the ones who would not talk, and she was said by the surgeons to be the only nurse on the floor whom a patient would tell the truth to at three in the morning. Her service to the Ledger was a careful one and she kept it within her trade. A nurse sees what a doctor does not. She sees the patient who is brought in pale and bloodless and with no wound that anyone can find, the traveller whose neck has two small marks that the intern has taken for a rash, the man who will not be examined in daylight and checks out against advice before dusk. She noted them. She kept, in the back of a small black notebook, a private ward book, with the date, the bed, the symptom and the name, and once a month she copied it out and sent it to her mother, who sent it on to the cousins of the Mississippi chapter, who compared it with the other sheets from the other towns. In thirty years it put the hunters on the trail of nine creatures that they would otherwise have reached too late. She also did the other thing, more simply. When a wounded hunter came in at the back of the casualty ward, in the small hours, with a torn sleeve and a story about a dog, she took him to a side room, cleaned and closed the wound, and wrote on the chart that it had been a dog. She carried in her bag a stick of silver nitrate, the old cautery pencil that a ward nurse keeps for a bleeding that will not stop, and she used it, as she told her daughters, for the two things that it was good for. It was, by the family's account, the only piece of Ledger gear that a nurse could carry in a uniform pocket and be thanked for. Her husband learned what she was within a year of the wedding, and she was relieved. They made a quiet household in a brick ranch house in a Jackson suburb, with a carport, a workshop and a garden of tomatoes, and on the nights that she worked and he did not, George left the porch light on, wired to a second circuit, and on the nights that he was out wiring a safe house she left a plate under a cloth. Their second daughter, Nicole Proctor, was born in the autumn of 1974. Nicole, who was bright and funny and not called, followed her mother into nursing and never regretted it. Renee, who was grave and quick, was called, and Virginia, who had spent years preparing for exactly that afternoon, put a first-aid kit in the back of her daughter's car, with the stick of silver nitrate on top, and said nothing except to remember to eat. She took her mother's death in 1998 as a nurse takes things, by arranging them. She went up to Memphis, wrote the notices, found the bride's mother, who was still holding a hem, and then sat down, and she looked after her father Wallace on the telephone for seven years, until his own end on the porch in 2005. In September of 2001 she was on the ward when the television was wheeled in, and she stood with the other nurses in the corridor, next to a number of visitors and one electrician, and went on with the round. The year after her father's death her husband was diagnosed. She nursed him for four years in the house in Jackson, in a bed that he had wired himself, with a lamp on a second circuit, and she did it as she did everything, with a chart, which she kept in her own hand until the morning in the spring of 2009 when she wrote the last line of it. He died with Renee in the doorway. Virginia, who had never been ill in her life, was told of her own cancer in the winter of 2014, in the corridor of the hospital where she had worked, by a young doctor who had been trained on her floor. She asked him to speak plainly, and he did. She lived two more years, at home, with Nicole in the next room and her brother Earl on the telephone every Sunday, and she died in 2016, aged sixty-seven, at ease, having told everyone what she needed them to know. Virginia Carter is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse of the Jackson wards, the quiet daughter of The Rough Shuttle who closed the wounds of the hunters and kept the ward book of the ones who never came back to the light. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses and carers of the White Ledger, the people who were never called, who looked at the neck of a patient before they looked at the chart, and who proved that a clean dressing and an honest note are as much a part of the hunt as any silver round.