Martha Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Patient Fowler. Craft: Record Tracing.

Martha Proctor was born in 1874 at New Braunfels, Texas, and lived sixty-two years as a typist and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, the youngest of three children of a printer's shop and a boarding house. The family book knows her as The Patient Fowler, a name that recalls the man who sits in a hide for a day without moving, and it classes her as a Spy, a hunter who goes into a place in ordinary dress, under ordinary cover, and comes out with what the place knew. Her craft was Record Tracing, the following of a creature through the paper that any living household leaves behind it, and her gear was a pistol, silver-tipped stakes and a sealed ledger. She was the daughter of the printer James Milam and of the boarding-house keeper and bookkeeper Cordelia Proctor, and took her mother's name, as the children of that house did. In 1892 she married the carpenter Homer Koehler. They had no children. She died in 1936 of what the family book calls old age, aged sixty-two, nine years after her husband and in the same year as her elder sister Sarah. She was born at New Braunfels because her mother was working there. In the winter of 1874 Cordelia Proctor, who kept the books for half the German quarter of San Antonio, had taken a commission from a brewer's family in the old Comal Springs town to put in order the accounts of an inn, a mill and a brewery that had been left to a widow and three sons who did not agree. She went up by stage with a trunk of ledgers, three weeks before her time, on the ground that a woman who can add a column can add a child. Martha arrived in the innkeeper's back bedroom in the second week of January, in a snowstorm, among the brewery's barrels, and her mother closed the ledgers that evening with the last entry balanced. The widow, who was Lutheran and severe, said that it was the first time in thirty years that anyone had solved her family's money in the same week that she had acquired a godchild. She grew up at San Antonio in the printer's house on the edge of the German quarter, among lodgers, apprentices and the smell of lead and ink, with two elders in the house who were already grown. Sarah, who was twelve years older, had gone into the shop at her father's side and was a compositor by the time Martha could walk. Barnabas, who was three years older than she, was already at the school at the end of the lane and would become a slayer in his turn. Martha was the small one, the quiet one, the child who had been taught to set type before she could write and who could read a line backwards. Her father James Milam, a patient and exact man, put her at the bench at seven, to distribute type, and at twelve she could set a stick of German Gothic faster than the apprentices. She liked paper. She liked its habits. She liked that a piece of it had a date, a place and a hand, and that the three together were nearly impossible to forge. It was her mother who taught her that paper was evidence. Cordelia Proctor kept books and kept a second register, in the White Ledger's manner, of the lodgers, tradesmen and strangers who had given her pause, and she taught her youngest to cross-reference them, at the kitchen table, on long winter evenings. A man who signed the register at the boarding house as a Mr Hartmann, she would say, was the same man who had signed the church book at Seguin as a Mr Hartman the winter before, and it was worth asking why he had dropped a letter. Martha, who was nine, found three such men in a month. Her mother looked at the list and said that it was a great pity the child would never be able to use the gift in a respectable profession. Martha said she intended to be a typist, which was the most respectable profession she could think of. The typewriter had reached San Antonio that year, and she was the first girl in the quarter to learn it. She was a typist at seventeen, in the office of a land title company on Main Plaza, and it was there that she learned the secret that tracing depends on, which is that almost every event in the life of a town leaves a line in a book. Births, deeds, burials, liens, probate, tax rolls, cattle brands, freight bills and church registers: there are a hundred books in a county, and she learned where each of them was kept and which clerk kept it. She typed copies, filed them and read, in the evenings, what she had filed. She married in 1892, at eighteen, the carpenter Homer Koehler, a large, gentle Bandera man who had built her father's type cases, and they set up house near the river, where she typed the Ledger's copies on the kitchen table and he built the cabinet in which she locked them. She said that he had proposed in the only language that she trusted, which was a neatly made box. The calling came in 1895, during a funeral. She was twenty-one. An old German brewer who had lived on the edge of the town had died of a fever, and the funeral was held at his house, with a good many of the German neighbourhood in attendance and the coffin open in the parlour. Homer had built the coffin. When the mourners filed past for the last time, and the undertaker came forward to lower the lid, the coffin was found to be empty. The man had been laid out, dressed and sat with through the night by two daughters, and no one could say when or how he had gone. The mourners looked at one another. A few said that the undertaker must have had a mishap. A few said nothing at all. Martha, who was sitting in the third row in a black hat, got up, looked at her husband, who stood in the door with his hat in his hands, and said quietly that she would like a copy of the death certificate. It was the certificate that did it. She sat for a week in the county clerk's office and the parish records, tracing the dead man backwards through the books. The physician who had signed it had signed, in the previous four years, seven others, all in the German quarter and all after a fever. All seven burials had been attended by the same undertaker's assistant, who had no entry in any directory. She found him, by means of a coal bill, in a rented room three streets away, and by means of a church register learned that he had been a pauper's burial in Fredericksburg in 1871. She took the paper to her father. James Milam, who had been printing the Ledger's warnings for thirty-six years, looked at her stacked pages for a long time and said that it was the tidiest piece of hunting he had seen, and that he hoped he would not be asked to print it. Her brother Barnabas, who was twenty-four, and already at the work, went with her to the room. What happened there is in the Ledger. She did not speak of it afterward, except to say that she had brought the ledger, which was sealed, and that she had not needed to open it. She became the Patient Fowler in the years that followed. The alias came from her manner. She never pursued a creature. She sat, sometimes for months, in the courthouse, the recorder's office or the clerk's back room, typing whatever she was handed and waiting for the pattern to arrive, and when it arrived she was there before it. She carried a small typewriter in a leather case, and a sealed copy of the White Ledger's Texas pages in the bottom of the same case, under a layer of carbon paper. She took about twenty of the things in thirty-five years, and in each case she had the paper long before the stake. Her father died in 1898 in his chair with a stick of type in his hand, and her mother lived until 1921. The Ledger, she said, was the only book that did not ask her to rule a margin. The great storm that struck Galveston in September 1900 sent four hundred survivors to San Antonio, and she spent the week in the relief office typing lists of names, and found among them two that had been dead, according to the church register, in 1888. The Great War brought the army's own paper, and a great many clerks who did not know where anything was kept, and she was hired by the county to put the records of the draft board in order, which gave her the run of the courthouse. The influenza of 1918 filled the registers. She typed the death returns for a hundred and seven days, and noticed, in December, a cluster of deaths that had not been fever. By the Depression years she was a records clerk in the Bexar County courthouse, in a back office with a green lamp, and, in the lean season when the county cut salaries and the clerks were let go, she was the last one kept on, because nobody else knew where the books were. Homer died in 1927 of a sudden collapse at his bench, and she kept his workshop for nine years. She died in the spring of 1936, at sixty-two, at her desk, with the courthouse lamp on, in the same year as her sister Sarah, and it was said that she had been tired for some time. The family book gives the cause as old age. Her typewriter, which had been to more hunts than most of the men of the family, was found to have a half-typed page in the carriage. It was a schedule of the county's tax rolls for the next year, and in the margin, in pencil, in her upright hand, was a note that one name on it had no history. Martha Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the typist of the White Ledger, the Patient Fowler who could find a creature in a column of deeds. In the Slayerverse she stands for the trackers of paper, the hunters who sat in records offices and church vestries while the others rode the roads, and who proved that the dark cannot live in a town without leaving a signature somewhere.