William Alden Proctor

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

William Alden Proctor was born in 1957 at Memphis, Tennessee, and is living today in that city, where he drives a city bus. He is a man of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger, the Yorkist line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, though he has never been a hunter and is not a vampire slayer. He is the younger son of the high school coach William Alden and of the telephone operator Lorraine Hale, The Wild Kestrel, who was a slayer of the White Ledger, and the brother of Clifford Alden Proctor, born in 1956 and dead in 2010. He has no craft or alias of his own and no gear beyond a transit pass, a trip sheet and a flask. He has not married and has no children. The Proctors remember him as the driver of the family, the man who goes round the same loop all day and sees everything on it, and who has for thirty-odd years handed his mother's old habits of paper to anyone in the Ledger who needed them. He was born in Memphis, and not at Bessemer where his parents lived, because of his grandmother. In the autumn of 1957 Lorraine was expecting her second child and had a toddler on her hip, and her husband's mother, the Sunday school woman at the end of the Poplar Avenue streetcar line, announced that no grandchild of hers would be delivered by a stranger in a mill town when she had a perfectly good back bedroom and a midwife three doors down. Lorraine, who had not yet been called and who was the sort of daughter-in-law who gave way on points that did not matter, took the Illinois Central north with Clifford and a suitcase and was confined in the house with the pecan tree in the yard. William Alden, who could not leave a team in mid-season, drove up on the Sunday and held the baby with the grave care of a man who had once held a clipboard in the rain. The child was named for his father, and the house, which had been built for a compress hand and was now occupied by three generations, rang with it. He was carried back to Bessemer at six weeks, and grew up in the house with the telephone in the hall and the whistle on a nail. His childhood was loud and ordinary, which his parents intended. He and Clifford slept in the room above the porch, played catch in the road with the sons of steelworkers and were taken, on Friday nights, to the high school field, where their father stood on the line in a windbreaker and their mother sat in the stand beside the visiting scorekeeper with a thermos and a pad. William was a plump, cheerful, watchful boy who talked to everybody and was, for that reason, a good deal better informed than he looked. He did not suspect that anything was unusual until he was fifteen. In the winter of 1972, in the garage, over a bicycle with a bent wheel, his father told him what his mother was. He did it in the same voice in which he had given the plays to the team, with the main point first and the reasons after, and he said that William was to ask any questions he liked and that Clifford had already asked his. William asked only whether the thing with the pistol in the hatbox was his grandmother's. It was. He was told, in the same conversation, that he would very probably not be called, and that if he was it would be plain, and that his work in the family, in any case, would be to be dependable. He took it as he had once taken the news of the tooth fairy, with a short silence and a decision to be useful. The Vietnam years had ended by the time he was old enough to be touched by them, but they had marked the house. His father kept in a drawer the postcards of forty former players, and in the spring of 1975, when Saigon fell and the last of them came home, William sat in the stand beside him at the memorial game and was given the job of reading the names. He left school that June, a month after his eighteenth birthday had gone by, and took a place with the telephone company, as his mother had, on a cable crew in Jefferson County, splicing pairs in manholes and learning from older men how to find a fault by the sound of it. His mother, who had run a switchboard for the better part of her life and had never in her life been so pleased with a boy, taught him her cards. He learned that a company could be read like a tide table, and that every line, in its own way, was a record. The breakup of the Bell system in the early eighties thinned the crews, and he was one of the men let go in 1984. He went to Memphis, to the old compress district, to his grandmother's house, which had been left to his father and had stood half empty since her death, and he took, in the spring of 1986, a place with the city transit authority as a driver. He told his mother that it was a step down. She told him that it was a step into a seat from which one could see a city go by for eight hours a day, and asked which routes he had been given. He was given the Poplar line, the Union Avenue line and, for eleven winters, the night run across Midtown to the river and back, and he drove them with the same patient, even, slightly dreamy competence that his father had shown with the team bus. What he gave the Ledger was the trip sheet. A city bus driver is required to write down, at every stop, a count of those who got on and those who got off, and the manager of the depot, who never read the sheets, was astonished to find that William, from his second week, kept two, one for the authority and one that he posted on Sundays to his mother in Bessemer. It recorded a number and a time. It recorded, in the margin, in a small round hand, which regular passengers had missed a week and why, which man had boarded at a stop where there was no house, and who had paid in a coin so old that it had not been in circulation in his lifetime. The tally, his mother said, was the best record she had ever been sent, since it came from a man who was not looking for anything and who therefore noticed everything. She cross-checked it against her cards. Three of her last six vampires, as she counted, were found by it. She died in 2006, of heart failure, in the chair by the telephone, and William, who was forty-eight, drove down from Memphis in his own car for the first time in six months and found the card on her knee with the date on it. He kept the shoebox. He did not stop writing the second sheet, and a cousin of the Ledger in Nashville, who had once been his mother's friend on the board, receives it now by post once a month, with a note about the weather. In the last twenty years he has had a great many passengers and a very few that mattered. In the morning of the attacks of September 2001 he was on the Poplar line, with a full bus, and heard it on the radio in the cab and said nothing, and drove his route to the end, and then drove it again, because nobody had told him to stop. A woman in the third seat took his hand at the terminus. He remembers that she had a coat of an unusual green. In the weeks afterwards, when half the city was afraid of its own streets, his night bus carried more regulars than it had in a decade, and he put the second sheet in the post with a longer note. His brother Clifford, who became a schoolteacher in Birmingham, died in 2010, and William rode the bus the whole morning of the funeral, as he did not know what else to do, and went to the church in his uniform and sat at the back. He lives in the old house near the compresses, with a cat, a large collection of dated transfer slips and a great many opinions about the traffic signals of Memphis. He is unmarried, and says, to any cousin who asks, that a man who drives a bus has already in a sense a family, and that it is made up of strangers who all, eventually, get off at their own stop. William Alden Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the driver who kept the second sheet, the quiet son of the Wild Kestrel who proved that a city bus can be a ledger on wheels. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ordinary men and women of the White Ledger who keep to their route, who write down what they see and who send it on, and who understand that to be dependable is, in the end, a hunter's virtue as much as a coach's.