Wallace Carter

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

Anything that came up the Memphis levee in the middle years of the twentieth century passed, sooner or later, through the hands of a dockworker, and Wallace Carter spent sixty years making sure that the heavy things that came ashore on the Ledger's behalf were never asked about. He was born in 1922 in Memphis, Tennessee, and died in 2005 of a stroke, aged eighty-three. He worked as a dockworker on the cotton wharves, the barge landings and the freight sheds of the river, in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, and he was not a vampire slayer and belonged to no house, though he married into the Proctor bloodline that keeps the White Ledger. In 1945 he married the seamstress and slayer Wilma Proctor, The Rough Shuttle, and they had two children, Earl Carter Proctor, born in 1948, and Virginia Carter, born in 1949 and dead in 2016. Neither child was called. The Proctors remember him as the big, slow, careful man who could lift any crate in Memphis and who never once looked inside the ones that he was told not to. Memphis in 1922 was the cotton capital of the mid-South and a river town to its boots. The bluff above the Mississippi was covered with warehouses, the compresses stood along Front Street and Riverside Drive, and the levee, a cobbled slope that ran down to the water, was lined with steamboats, cotton barges and flatboats, unloaded by gangs of Black and white labourers who sang to keep the time. Wallace was born in a frame house on the north side of town, near the Wolf River harbour, the third child of a compress hand and a washerwoman, in the year of the great cotton crash, when a bale that had sold for a hundred dollars was worth forty. He grew up with the whistle in his ears. Before he was ten he had been up and down the levee so many times that the watchmen waved at him, and by twelve he was carrying water for a gang of stevedores at a nickel a shift. He was a large child, and a slow one. He was not stupid. He thought about things for a long time before he did them, and when he did them, they stayed done. The Depression was a hard school for a boy on the waterfront. The river traffic dwindled, the compresses ran short weeks, and the men who had been hired by the day stood on the levee in the morning with their hats in their hands and were looked over by a foreman. Wallace, who was fourteen and as tall as most of them, was picked every day. He had a gift for knowing how a load would shift. He could stand on a wharf and say, by looking at a stack of bales, which one would give if it was moved from the left, and he could tell a bad rope from a good one by the sound it made in the block. At sixteen he was a regular hand on the cotton wharves, at eighteen a gang boss's mate, and in the autumn of 1941 a bale slipped from a sling at the Wolf River landing and came down on his left foot. It was a bad break. The army doctors, who looked at him a year later, gave him a card that said that he was not to march, and he was not best pleased. He had wished to go. He carried the card in his hat for the rest of the war, and was sometimes asked what he did at home. He said that he held up the end of the river. He met his wife in the winter of 1944, in a freight shed on the river front, in the sort of cold that goes through boots. The war years had filled the city with soldiers, nurses and war-workers, and the wharves had been busy day and night with the Army's cargo. Wilma Proctor was eighteen, a slight, quick, brown-haired seamstress with a sewing bag over her shoulder, who had come up from Birmingham on the train, on business that she described to him as a delivery of buttons, and who stood in front of a gang of eleven dockhands and said that she was looking for a box that had come off the barge from Vicksburg and that she would be glad of an honest answer. They were not accustomed to being spoken to like that. It was Wallace, who was at the back of the shed with a cotton hook, who walked forward and said that the box was in the third bay, that it was heavy, that it had been paid for by a man in a grey coat and that it had been sent on to a warehouse on Front Street the evening before, in a dray, with a driver who did not wish to be looked at. She wrote it down. She asked him what he thought was in it. He said that he did not know, and that he had thought it better not to find out. She said that this was the first sensible thing that anyone had told her since Birmingham. He told his mother that he was going to marry her within the month. They were married in 1945, in the spring, in a Memphis church with a red door, before a congregation of dockhands who had been told that the groom was to be on his best behaviour, and a family from Alabama, two of whom, Wilma's father, the cotton factor Earl Hale, and her mother, Evelyn Bowie Proctor, observed the bridegroom with the particular courtesy of people who are considering whether to tell him something. They told him a week later. Evelyn took him into the kitchen of the house on the hill and said, in her plain way, that her daughter was a vampire slayer, that she had been one for two years, and that she supposed he would like to sit down. He said that he was already sitting. Evelyn, who had done a good deal of bargaining in her time, said that she believed this was the most satisfactory marriage settlement she had ever concluded, because it had been concluded in advance. He asked what he could do. She said that she would have to give him a few days. It took him a few hours. He said that he knew who in Memphis moved heavy things at night. That was his service, and it was a considerable one. A river port is a city of boxes. Everything that comes into it comes in a crate, a hogshead, a bale or a drum, and the Ledger's hunters, who had to move a creature's earth-box, a coffin or a trunk of the household it had taken, from the place where it was found to the place where it could be burned, needed a man who could do it without a question. Wallace did it. He knew the watchmen and the carters. He knew which warehouse was empty on a Sunday night and which shed had a back door, and he knew, by the draught of a dray, the weight of what was in it. He could have a crate off a barge and into a closed truck in four minutes without anyone seeing it, and he did, with a great many witnesses and not one of them able afterwards to say what he had seen. His wife called it the longest sentence in the family, because he said so little and it did so much. The cousins called him the Hook. They had two children. Earl Carter Proctor was born in 1948 at Birmingham, in the house on the hill, and was given his grandfather's name, with Proctor at the end, in the family's old custom of passing a name through the women. Virginia Carter was born the next year, in the autumn of 1949, in the cold, in the middle of a strike on the wharves, and Wallace, who was walking the picket line when the news was brought, said that he had a prior engagement and went home. They grew up loved and unhurried. Wilma, who was away for a good many nights, hired a neighbour and left her husband a list, and Wallace, who could not read well but could follow any plan that was drawn out for him, kept the house and the children by the list for thirty years. The children, who were never called, said afterwards that he was the only father on the street who could cook, mend, carry a refrigerator up a flight of stairs and sit with a child who had had a fright. In the Vietnam years he was a union steward, and he sent the young men on the dock to the recruiting office with a handshake and the older ones to the hiring hall with a lecture. The river changed in his time. The cotton went to other ports, and then to the interstate, and in the sixties the great steamboats that had kept the levee alive had gone and the barges were being pulled by diesel tugs, and in the seventies the containers began to come, in steel boxes of a size and weight that no man's back could manage. Wallace, who was fifty-four, learned to run a crane. He did it, as he did everything, with care. He was among the last of the old gang to retire, in 1984, with a pension and a gold hook that the men on his shift had made from a brass fitting, and he kept it on the mantel. Wilma had died in 1998, suddenly, and he lived another seven years, in the house in the north of the city that he had bought in 1946, with the picture of her on the sideboard and a window open on the river. He died in the spring of 2005, of a stroke, on the porch, in the late afternoon, with a view of the water. His son Earl, who is living, found him sitting upright in the chair, with his hands on his knees, as if he had been told to wait. A neighbour said that she had seen him an hour before, looking down the hill at a barge going downstream, and that he had lifted his hand to it, the way that he used to, in greeting. They buried him in a plain coffin, which six of the old dockhands, with an average age of seventy-nine, insisted on carrying down the hill themselves. Wallace Carter is remembered in the Proctor family as the dockworker who could move any crate in Memphis and who never opened the ones that he was told to leave shut. In the Slayerverse he stands for the labourers and carriers of the White Ledger, the men with no craft but a strong back and a still tongue, who shifted what the hunters could not be seen to shift and who proved that a river is crossed as often by a pair of hands as by a pistol.