Alexander Proctor

Broker slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Proud Quill. Craft: Ledger Recall.

Alexander Proctor was born in 1843 in Seguin, Texas, and lived thirty-eight years as a teamster and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Proud Quill, a name that recalls the pen that the Proctors used for the Ledger and the vanity of the man who could quote it from memory. He was a Broker, a hunter who works by trade, terms and information, and his craft was Ledger Recall, the keeping in the head of every entry, name, date and face in the White Ledger so that a returning quarry could be known at a glance. He was the younger son of the teamster and slayer Absalom Proctor, The Bexar Watch, and of the schoolteacher Catherine Oppenheimer, and he trained under his father. In 1861 he married Carolina Navarro of the House of Navarro, and they had two sons, George Proctor and Bartolo Proctor, neither of whom hunted. He died in 1881 of a sudden collapse, at thirty-eight, on the road to the cattle country. He could recite the Ledger. It was the thing that people remembered first, in the plazas of San Antonio, and it was said that on a Sunday afternoon in the eighteen-seventies, for a bet, he once stood on a wagon tongue on Military Plaza and gave, from memory, in order, the eleven hundred and forty entries of the western pages of the White Ledger, from the first tally of Walter Proctor in the year 1455 to the last entry in his own brother's hand, with the dates, the places, the witnesses and the method, and did not pause for a breath until the church clock struck five. The crowd, which did not know what he was reciting, took it for a sermon or a legal document and dispersed quietly. Two elderly Proctors in the audience wept. He got down, bowed and asked if anyone had a pipe. He was born in a house by a ford. His mother, who had been a schoolteacher in San Antonio for seventeen years and had borne two children already, was a dutiful daughter, and when her time came in the winter of 1843, with her husband on the Gulf road with a wagon-load of sugar, she went back, in a borrowed buggy, to the old trading post on the Guadalupe where she had been born, by then a corner of the young town of Seguin, and was delivered there, by her aunt, in the room in which she had learned to read. Absalom, who came up from the coast to find it all over, said that he had been looking for a son for twelve years and had supposed that he would get one in his own time. The boy was carried home to San Antonio, in a basket, on a mule. He grew up in the house on the river, in a household full of books. His mother, who read aloud at supper, taught him his letters at four and his sums at five. His father, who had a gift for silence, taught him the roads. By ten he could handle a six-mule team on a wet road. By fourteen he was keeping the books for the freight line, and by sixteen, in the year before the war, he had worked out that he could recall, without effort, any figure that he had written down, and a good many that he had only seen. It was a gift that neither of his parents could account for. His mother said that it was the result of the German grammar. His father said that it was a thing that might come in useful, and looked at him for some time with an expression that Alexander did not at first understand. He married at eighteen. It was a thing that surprised the family, for he was young, and Carolina Navarro, the daughter of the old rancher of the Comal, was seventeen, and the two families had never had anything to do with one another beyond a nod at church. But she had been one of his mother's pupils, the quick, dark, practical girl who sat at the front of the class and corrected the arithmetic, and he had met her in the winter of 1860, carrying his mother's books across the plaza. They were married in 1861, in the church of San Fernando, by the priest who had baptised her, and her father, Bartolo Navarro, who had not entirely approved of a teamster's son, gave the groom a long look, the bride a silver bridle and the pair of them his own candle. It was a good match. They set up house in a rented adobe on the river, and by the following spring she was expecting. The war gave him a trade. Texas seceded, and the Proctors, who were Tennesseans, were awkwardly placed, and Alexander, who was eighteen, did what a number of the young men of the German and Unionist families did, which was to drive a wagon for the Cotton Road. The Union blockade had closed the Gulf ports to the Confederacy, and the cotton of Texas and Louisiana, which was the South's chief means of buying anything, went overland across the state in long wagon trains to the Rio Grande, where it was carried over the border to Matamoros and loaded on neutral ships. The return loads were cloth, medicine, machinery and powder. It was dusty, dangerous, well-paid work, and he was good at it. He learned to read a man's goods by the smell of his wagon and his conscience by the price he would not take, and he learned the roads of the brush country from Bexar to Brownsville. He also learned to barter. He was, by twenty, a young man who knew what everything in southern Texas was worth and to whom it should be sold. His calling came in 1867, at twenty-four, on a canal towpath at night. It was in the first year of Reconstruction, and he had gone to New Orleans by steamer from Indianola with a consignment of hides for a factor on the levee, and had been invited by the factor to supper on the far side of the town. He was walking back along the New Basin Canal, in the dark, by the towpath, when a barge drifted into view out of the black water, slowly, without a tow, with its lamps still lit. There was nobody at the tiller. There was nobody on the deck. A table in the cabin was laid, with a white cloth, for a meal. He stood on the path and stared, with an odd, cold feeling, and then, for no reason that he could have given, he recognised the name painted on the stern. It was in the Ledger. He had read it, at fifteen, in his father's copy, in an entry of 1849, in a column of vessels that had been lost with all hands. It had been taken off the list of the living eighteen years before. He did not go aboard. He took note of the lamps, the hour, the set of the cloth, the tide and the faint smear on the gunwale, and he went back to his room and wrote every particular down, in a fair hand, as if for the book. Then, on the next steamer, he went home. His father, who was fifty-nine and had been waiting for it since the day of the boy's birth, read the entry and looked up. He said that there was a long road ahead of him. He said that most hunters learned what a thing was by hunting it, and that he would learn what a thing was by remembering that it had been, and that it would come to the same, in the end. He took his father's place on the road, with a revolver and silver-cast shot, a steel pen and a notebook in a pocket that his wife had sewn into his wagon coat. Absalom Proctor, who was failing, died in 1868 of a failing heart, and Catherine, who had survived him by less than a year, in 1869, and Alexander, who had been mentored for scarcely twelve months, kept on the book and the wagon. He was a Broker by temper as well as by the book. He bought and sold information as he bought and sold hides. He made a point of knowing the names, the ages, the former trades and the causes of death of everyone in the county who had lately been buried, because the thing in the Ledger that he feared was a corpse that had risen under another name, and he had an unnerving knack of saying, at a christening or a wedding, in a very civil tone, that the gentleman in the third pew reminded him of someone who had died in Gonzales in the year 'fifty-four. He was right more often than anyone liked. The cattle-trail years took him on the road. After the war the great herds of Texas longhorns, which had multiplied in the brush during four years of neglect, were driven north to the railheads of Kansas, and the teamsters of San Antonio, with their chuck wagons, supply trains and freight, were in great demand. He hired out as a wagon-master on the trail, in the season, and travelled, three times, up the long trail through Fort Worth and across the Red River to the cow towns. It was a world of drovers, gamblers, lawmen and the camp-followers of a cash trade, and it was, he said, the best place on earth to learn who was who. He took a notebook. He filled it. He died in the spring of 1881, at thirty-eight, of a sudden collapse, on the Goliad road, with a full wagon and a good team, on a day when he had said, to the boy who rode beside him, that he had a headache. He got down from the seat, sat on the wheel and was gone. His wife, who was thirty-seven, brought him home in the wagon, at a walk, and sat by him all night. His elder brother Alan, a carpenter and a slayer of the same book, who came in at dawn, read his notebook from beginning to end and said that there was not one error in it. Alexander Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Proud Quill, the teamster of the Bexar road, the hunter who carried the Ledger in his head. In the Slayerverse he stands for the brokers of the White Ledger, the slayers who fought with memory and trade, and who knew, better than their enemies themselves, who had died and when.