William Kincaid Proctor

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

William Kincaid Proctor lived forty years and was buried, by the reckoning of those who knew him, as an old man. The parish note gives the cause of his death in 1782 as old age, a phrase that puzzled the clerk and has puzzled family historians since, for he was born in 1742 in Bristol, Pennsylvania, and had barely passed his fortieth birthday. Those who sat with him at the end said that something had used him up, that the winters on picket and the nights on the river had worn him down until he had the frame and the stillness of a man of ninety. He was not a slayer, though both of his parents and his elder brother were, and he spent most of his life as a militiaman standing at the edge of a family that hunted. Bristol lay on the Delaware, upriver from Philadelphia, a small trading town of brick houses, a ferry landing across to Burlington, and a market street that flooded when the river rose. It was Quaker country, and the Quaker inheritance shaped everything around him: plain dress, plain speech, a distrust of oaths and of soldiering, and a strong belief in the value of honest work. The farms behind the town grew wheat, flax and orchards, and the river landings shipped flour and lumber down to the city. It was a peaceful province, so peaceful that the assembly had long refused to raise a militia. The Proctor descendants who settled in Pennsylvania kept the house name, and William carried it as a surname in the family's older, daughter-inherited way even though his parents were a Kincaid and a Lister, having taken the Proctor name from his mother's line. He was the second son. His father was William Kincaid, born in 1711, a wheelwright, and the household was built around the wheelwright's yard. Iron tyres were shrunk onto oak wheels in a ring of fire, spokes were shaped and trued by eye, and the yard smelled of hot metal, seasoned ash and elm. Kincaid was a broad, silent man whose skill was to be found in his hands rather than his speech, and the Proctor ledger knew him as a slayer called The Still Bridle, a hunter who worked by holding a creature in place until the killing could be done cleanly. William's mother was Mary Lister, born in 1717, a dairywoman who kept a herd of cows on the common pasture and sold butter and cheese at the Bristol market. She too was a slayer, called The Still Scythe, and the story in the family was that she cut down her quarry as she cut hay, in long even strokes, without haste. He grew up in a house where the stillness was a matter of principle. His parents disliked noise and showiness, and the boys were taught to move quietly, to watch before acting and to speak only when they had something to say. His elder brother Isaac Kincaid Proctor, born in 1738, took to the family work almost at once and became a slayer in his own right. William was a different sort of boy. He was slighter, more given to ill health, and inclined to worry. When his mother died in 1750, at thirty-three, he was eight, and the loss fell on him hard. He remembered her as a warm presence in the dairy, and the silence of the house after her death was one he never wholly shook off. His father raised the two boys in the wheelwright's yard, and William learned the trade well enough to keep the wheel-shop running when his father was away on the family's business. Whether William was ever called was a question the family asked and answered in the negative. By the time he reached his twenties it was clear that the calling had passed him by, and he accepted the fact with less bitterness than might have been expected. He found his place instead in the affairs of the province. The French and Indian War had ended the old Quaker peace on the frontier, and in the decades that followed the province's men organised themselves into volunteer companies, called Associators, and later a regular militia. William joined one of these companies and served in it for most of his adult life. He drilled on the green, stood watch on the river landings, and marched with his neighbours when the Revolution came and the state needed men to guard the crossings of the Delaware. He did not marry. There were some who thought it a pity, and the family records mention no attachment, though the cousins remembered that he had been fond of a neighbour's daughter and had never found the courage to say so. He lived in his father's house and kept the household running, cooked for the men, mended the wagon gear, and looked after the account books. In the militia he was known as a steady and dependable soldier who never complained and was never late. His captain once remarked that if all his men were like William Proctor, he would never have needed a sergeant. His fellow militiamen did not know what his family did in its off hours, and William never told them. His usefulness to the family's work was of the quiet, supporting kind. As a militiaman, he was able to go where slayers could not, and to turn up at a farm or a landing with an official reason for his presence. When Isaac was on a hunt along the Delaware, it was often William who arranged for the road to be watched, for a boat to be waiting, or for an awkward question from a constable to be smoothed over. He had a talent for making unusual events appear ordinary. The Yorkist ledger seldom mentioned him by name, but Isaac wrote in a private letter that he had never once gone into the field without his brother knowing where he was. The war took its toll. The winters of the Revolution in Pennsylvania were bitter, and the militia's duty was often to stand for hours in the cold at a river crossing or on a road, with poor food and worse clothing. William came home from each tour a little thinner. By the winter of 1781 he was coughing and could not shake it, and he no longer climbed to the loft of the wheel-shop. He died in 1782, and his father, William Kincaid, followed him that same year, worn down by grief and years, so that father and son were buried within months of each other in the Bristol burying ground. The brother Isaac remained to carry on the line. William Kincaid Proctor left no children and no estate beyond a set of wheelwright's tools and a militia musket. Yet the Proctors have never counted him a lesser figure. The White Ledger's marginal notes call him the man who held the door, and family tradition holds that many a Proctor kill was made possible by an unsung brother on the riverbank. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the militiaman of Bristol, who was never called and served all the same.