Wilma Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Rough Shuttle. Craft: Seal and Sanction.

Wilma Proctor was seventeen when a patient in a sickroom asked her to close the shutters, and she was a vampire slayer for the next fifty-five years. She was born in 1926 in Birmingham, Alabama, and died in 1998 of a sudden collapse, aged seventy-two. She worked as a seamstress, in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, and by night as a hunter of the White Ledger, known to the family book as The Rough Shuttle. She was a Detective, which in the Proctor sense means a hunter who works by questions, papers and comparison, and her craft was Seal and Sanction, the art of lifting a seal without breaking it and of obtaining the formal leave that lets a hunter through a door. Her gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds, and her mentor was her mother. She was the elder daughter of the cotton factor Earl Hale and the seamstress and slayer Evelyn Bowie Proctor, The Steady Tinder, and the sister of the slayer Lorraine Hale. In 1945 she married the dockworker Wallace Carter, and they had two children, Earl Carter Proctor, born in 1948, and Virginia Carter, born in 1949 and dead in 2016, neither of whom was called. The Proctors remember her as the seamstress with the rasping machine who left every door she opened exactly as she found it. She was born in Birmingham in the spring of 1926, in a rented house on a street of ironworkers and mill hands below the ridge, while her father's firm had him posted to the steel city to broker cotton to the mills. The furnaces glowed all night over the hill. Earl Hale sat on the stair for nine hours with a ledger on his knee, adding the same column of figures, and it was found afterwards that he had come to the same total eleven times. She was given her mother's maiden name, in the old custom of the family, at the request of her grandfather Frederick Adams Proctor, The Lone Reeve, who came from Texas by train and held her for an hour in a corner with an expression of the most profound suspicion. Her sister Lorraine Hale, born four years later, took her father's name instead, and the cousins said that between them they had the family accounted for. She grew up in the cotton towns of Alabama and Mississippi where her father's business took him, in rooms that smelled of lint, bluing and her mother's steam iron, and she learned the railroad cities as other children learned their street, by the depot, the compress and the courthouse. She was a short, quick, brown-haired girl with a sharp chin and a way of asking a question with her whole face. She learned to sew at five, on her mother's old Singer, which had a shuttle that ran with a harsh, dry rasp, and she said that it was the only thing in the world that sounded exactly as she felt. Her mother had told her about the Ledger when she was twelve, giving her the rules first and the work much later, on a day of the child's own choosing. Evelyn taught the daughters to read a document, a bill, a deed or a will, in the order in which a lawyer would, and to look for what had been left out of it. She said that Wilma, if it came to the work, would be a Detective, because she was the sort who read the paper that the creature had signed. The calling came in the summer of 1943, in a sickroom. She was seventeen, and the war had filled Birmingham with steelworkers, soldiers from the camps and families from the hills who had come for the work, and a neighbour's wife, a woman worn out by three shifts at the foundry, had asked the girl from the sewing room to sit up with her husband, a switchman who had been struck down by a fever on the Tuesday. He had been delirious for six days. Wilma, who was good at being still, sat by the bed in the small hours with a lamp turned low and a shirt that she was taking in for the neighbour's boy, and at about three in the morning the fever broke. The man sat up. His skin was cool and dry, and his eyes were quite clear, and he thanked her for her trouble in a voice that was not the one that he had had on the Tuesday. He then asked if she would be so kind as to close the shutters. It was a hot night, and a dark one, with the window open on the street, and there was no light to shut out. Dawn was two hours off. She got up, as she had been brought up to do, and closed them, and as she did so she saw that the glass of the window, in the cold air from the open sash, had taken no breath at all from the man's face, though it had been a foot from her own. She went home, woke her mother and told her, in the order that she had been taught, who had said what and in which words. Evelyn heard her through and said that it was a clear account. She learned from her mother, in the winter that followed, and she did it by paper. A Detective in the White Ledger's sense is a creature of forms. Seal and Sanction, as Wilma practised it, meant that she could go into any room that had a letter in it. She could lift the wax on a note, read what was inside and put it back so that nobody could say it had been touched, and she could, with a letter of her own, ask the one person who owned a door for the formal leave to pass through it, which gave her a standing that no creature could answer. She worked at it for months, at her mother's table, with a warm knife and a candle, on the family's old correspondence. She named her alias herself, in the spring of 1944, after her machine. A rough shuttle is the part of a sewing machine that will catch the thread and tear it if it is not set properly, and she said that she was a hunter who caught on things. The Ledger took it up with relish. It was a plain name for a plain girl, and it was observed that creatures who had been caught by it did not forget. She met Wallace Carter in the winter of 1944, on the Memphis waterfront, on a case that took her up the river from Vicksburg with a sewing bag over her shoulder and a story about buttons. She was eighteen. The box that she had been following had come off a barge at a freight shed on the levee, and she stood in front of a gang of eleven dockworkers and asked an honest question. The one who answered her was a big, slow, quiet man with a cotton hook, who said that the box was in the third bay, that it was heavy and that it had been taken to a warehouse on Front Street the night before, in a dray whose driver did not wish to be looked at. She wrote it down. She asked him what he thought was in it, and he said that he did not know and had thought it better not to find out. It was, she told her mother afterwards, the most reliable testimony that she had ever taken. They were married in the spring of 1945, in a church with a red door, and she took him home to the house on the hill in Birmingham, where her mother, in the kitchen, told him the truth within a week. She said that he took it as a man takes a heavy parcel, by testing its weight and then lifting. They made a home in Memphis, in a small house on the north side that they bought in 1946, with a porch that looked towards the river, and Wilma, who was nineteen, hung a sign in the window advertising alterations. It was the best cover that a hunter ever had. A seamstress sees everyone in the town in a state of undress and in a mood for conversation, and she fitted the wives of the bankers, the daughters of the cotton men and the girls from the river, with pins in her mouth, and learned what they had been told by the hotel clerks, the doctors and the funeral directors. She worked, by the family's count, in thirty-four towns across Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama in the course of fifty years, and in every one of them she took a vampire in the same manner, with the right paper and the right permission, in a room whose owner had asked her in. She never forced a door. She had a theory that a creature that could be made to wait on a porch for a form of words was a creature that had already lost an argument. Earl Carter Proctor was born in 1948, and Virginia Carter in 1949, and the children, who were not called, grew up behind the sewing room among the pins and the pattern books. In the Korean War she took in uniforms, and in the Vietnam years, when the street's sons went to a war that she could do nothing about, she sewed for the families and was asked by a good many mothers to stay on after the fitting for a cup of tea. Her sister Lorraine, who was called in 1963, came to her for a month in the autumn, and the two of them took a creature in Jackson in a manner that the Ledger's Southern chapter described as a model of its kind. She buried her mother in 1980, in Meridian, with her sister beside her, and her father four years later. She said that she had lost the two people who had taught her to say nothing and who had been the only ones who knew what she meant. She worked on, at the same machine. In the autumn of 1998, in her sewing room, in the middle of fitting a bride's mother with a dress of green silk, she said that she was sorry but that she would have to sit down, and sat, and put her pins on the arm of the chair, and was dead before the doctor could be fetched. She was seventy-two. The customer, who was fifty and had never lost her composure, was said to have finished the hem herself. Wallace, who was in the next room with the paper, outlived her by seven years, and for each of them kept the machine oiled. Wilma Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the seamstress with the rasping machine who left every door she opened exactly as she found it, the hunter who caught on things. In the Slayerverse she stands for the detectives of the White Ledger, the ones who went by papers and by leave, who read what the creature had signed, and who proved that the right form of words, said to the right person at the right door, will hold a monster as surely as any chain.