William Alden

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

William Alden was born in 1931 at Memphis, Tennessee, and lived sixty-two years as a high school coach, most of them in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, and for thirty-nine of them as the husband of a woman of the Ledger who in her thirties became a vampire slayer. In 1954 he married the telephone operator Lorraine Hale, The Wild Kestrel, of the White Ledger, and they raised two sons, Clifford Alden Proctor, born in 1956 and dead in 2010, and William Alden Proctor, born in 1957 and living, neither of whom was called. He was not born to any house, and the Ledger lists him as unaffiliated. He was not a hunter, never carried a pistol and never learned a craft, though he married into the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and he served it for the whole of his married life in the one way that a man with a whistle and a bus can. He died in 1993 of old age, at sixty-two, which is the phrase the family papers use for a man who spent himself on other people's children and his own wife's business. The Proctors remember him as the coach who got everyone home. He was born in Memphis, in the autumn, in a frame house near the cotton compresses on the river front, the son of a compress hand and a schoolroom woman who ran the Sunday school. His parents appear in the Proctor papers only as decent, hard-working people who lived at the end of the Poplar Avenue streetcar line, and the Ledger never asked more. He was a tall, fair, shy, long-limbed boy with a surprisingly steady temper, and from the age of eight he was to be found wherever a ball was being thrown. He was no star. He was a good guard, an average runner and a mediocre shot, but he had the quality, unusual in a boy, of being able to tell what the other eleven were about to do. His own coach at the junior high, a gruff veteran of the first war named Pruitt, said that the lad could read a field like a newspaper, and that he would do better holding the clipboard than carrying the ball. He left school in 1949 and worked a summer on a cotton platform, and then, in the autumn of 1950, with the Korean War a few months old, he was drafted. He spent two years in the army, the greater part in a supply depot in Georgia, where he learned to drive a truck, to read a map, to make a duty roster that nobody could dispute and to take thirty strange young men from one end of a state to the other without losing any. He came out in 1952, twenty-one, with a sergeant's stripes and a grant for college, and took a degree in physical education at the teachers' college in Memphis in a year and a half, and a post, in the autumn of 1953, as assistant coach at a high school in the east of Birmingham, Alabama, a town of steelworks, mills and Friday-night football. It was the sort of post that a man took when he did not mind being underpaid. He met Lorraine Hale on the telephone. He had a habit on Friday nights, after a game, of calling in the scores to the Birmingham paper, and he did it in the manner of a man who has never telephoned anyone in his life, that is, with a great many pauses. The operator on the long-distance board stopped him three times and told him how to do it. He said that he had never been spoken to so firmly by a stranger. By the fifth Friday he was asking for her by name. They met in the spring of 1954 at a lunch counter on Second Avenue, and he found a small, quick, brown-eyed young woman with a voice that he recognised, who looked at him for a long moment, said that he was exactly as tall as he sounded, and ordered him a sandwich. They were married the same year, in the house on the hill above the mills, with Earl Hale giving the bride away and Evelyn Bowie Proctor in a coat of her own making, and it was Evelyn who took him aside, after the breakfast, and told him with great gentleness what his wife's family was. He was twenty-three. He said that he had wondered why the mother-in-law had a pistol in her bag. He took it as he took most things, quietly. Lorraine was not called until 1963, and for nine years he knew only that his wife's family was a hunting one and that her sister Wilma, who was married to the dockworker Wallace Carter, could not be asked about Thursday nights. It was no hardship. He had a job, a wife, a house in Bessemer and a pair of sons born in 1956 and 1957, whom he named for the family and for himself, and who were given the name Proctor at the end of theirs in the old custom of the line. He taught them to catch. When Lorraine came home one night in the autumn of 1963, white as flour, with a pad of figures in her hand, and sat down at the kitchen table and told him that a coach with no passengers had followed her for twelve miles, he listened to the end, and put the kettle on, and said that she had better tell him exactly what she was going to need. What she needed was a coach, in the other sense, and he supplied it. A hunter who worked through records and favours and the sisterhood of the telephone exchange needed to be in a great many towns, at odd hours, with a reason that no one would question, and the high school football season, which carried a team and a bus from one cotton town to the next every Friday night through the fall, gave her one. He drove the bus himself. Between the Black Belt and the river towns he took his wife along as the team's volunteer scorekeeper, in a sensible coat, with a clipboard and a thermos, and the boys, who thought her very strict, called her Miss Lorraine. He learned the roads. He learned which gas stations stayed open, which small-town depots had a good telephone and which sheriff could be counted on to ask no questions, and in the winters he turned to basketball and drove the same bus on the same roads to the same towns, a little more slowly, with the heater on. He was a good coach, though not a famous one. His teams were disciplined rather than brilliant, and he was said by the boys to be the only man in Jefferson County who was never angry in a loss. In the Vietnam years, when the Selective Service drew his graduates by the dozen, he wrote to forty of them, in forty clear letters, and he went to three funerals. It was the part of the work he disliked most. He was head coach by 1966 and athletic director by 1975, and on the wall of his office, among the pennants, he kept a framed schedule of games that was, on the back, in pencil, a second schedule, in his wife's hand, of the nights that she had been out. He did what a coach does with a team that is in trouble: he kept it calm. When Lorraine came home bruised and silent he made her a plate of eggs. When she did not come home by the hour that she had named, he sat by the telephone, with his glasses in his hand, and watched the clock, and he did not call a soul. He did this on thirty or forty nights and never said that it was hard. He told Clifford and William the truth when each was fifteen, in the garage, over a bicycle, and neither was frightened. Clifford, who became a machinist, and William, who went into the telephone company, as his mother had, took the news, as his father had, as a fact about the family. His health, which had never been strong, failed in his sixties. He had a long, slow wearing-out of the heart and the lungs, and he died in the spring of 1993, at sixty-two, in the house in Bessemer, with Lorraine at the bedside and a whistle on the nail by the door. The papers called it old age. It had been, as his wife said, a hard-used sixty-two. The boys who had played for him came in uniform, in their forties and fifties, to carry the coffin, and the pallbearers, who had been told to be quiet, stood in the garden and sang the school song. William Alden is remembered in the Proctor family as the coach who drove the bus, the unaffiliated husband of the Wild Kestrel who gave the White Ledger its reason to be on the road. In the Slayerverse he stands for the husbands and wives of the Ledger who stayed on the safe side of the door and kept the engine running, and who proved that a man with a clipboard, a thermos and a sense of the time can bring home as many hunters as any craft.