Catherine Oppenheimer

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

Catherine Oppenheimer was born in 1804 in the Guadalupe River country of Texas, at the place where the town of Seguin would later be laid out, and she worked for most of her life as a schoolteacher in San Antonio de Bexar. She married the teamster and vampire slayer Absalom Proctor in 1830, raised four children with him, buried him in 1868 and followed him a year later, dying in 1869 of a stroke at the age of sixty-five. She was not a hunter and was not born to either of the great families, but she married into the Proctors of the White Ledger in the last years of Mexican Texas, taught the town's children through the siege of the Alamo and the years of the republic, and gave the Ledger's Texas branch what it had most lacked, which was a settled household with a blackboard in it. The place of her birth was not yet a place. In 1804 the Guadalupe ran through a country of live oaks, pecan bottoms and prairie, with a scatter of Spanish ranches to the west and the mission town of San Antonio de Bexar two days' ride away, and the province of Texas was a thinly peopled northern frontier of the Spanish empire, governed from Mexico City and threatened from every side. The Oppenheimers, who were German Jews by descent and had come to the province by way of Louisiana, kept a trading post at a ford, a low adobe-and-cypress building with a corral, where they bought hides and sold cloth, needles, coffee and iron to the ranchers, the Tonkawa and the passing muleteers. The family papers record little more about them, except that they were literate in three languages and kept their accounts in a fourth. Catherine was the eldest child of a household that read aloud in the evening, a rare thing in that country. She grew up among languages. At the trading post she heard Spanish, English, German, Comanche, French and the mixed speech of the frontier, and she learned, without effort, to move from one to another as a rider changes horses. Her father taught her to read in German and arithmetic in English. A priest who stopped at the ford taught her Latin and the Spanish catechism. By twelve she was keeping the post's books, in a clear hand, and translating for customers who had no common tongue. It was, she said later, the best education she could have had, because it taught her that every speaker means something different by the same word. The province changed around her. In 1821 Mexico won its independence from Spain and Texas became part of the new republic, and in the years that followed the Mexican government invited settlers from the United States to take up land, on condition that they accept the Catholic faith and Mexican law. They came in thousands. The trading post did well. Catherine, who had turned seventeen in the year of independence, found herself at the centre of a growing trade, and within a few years she was the person to whom newcomers turned for advice, for a letter written in proper Spanish or for a schoolbook in English. In 1826 she moved to San Antonio de Bexar, the provincial capital, to live with an aunt and to teach. The town was a curious, handsome, dusty place, built around two plazas, with flat-roofed stone houses, a cathedral, an old presidio, five crumbling missions down the river, and a population of some two thousand, most of them Tejano families who had been there for four or five generations. It had no school worth the name. She opened one in a rented room off the Military Plaza, teaching reading, writing, arithmetic and the elements of English and Spanish to the children of ranchers, merchants and soldiers, at a fee that most parents paid in corn, beef and hides. It was popular at once. Within two years she had sixty pupils and an assistant. She met Absalom Proctor in 1828. He was a teamster, a tall, slow, ironical man of twenty, who had come out from Tennessee with a wagon train and had stayed on, freighting goods between the Gulf ports and San Antonio, and the plaza was his regular stopping place. He had a cart and a team of six mules, a revolver in his saddlebag and a streak of gravity that was quite unexpected in so young a man. He came to her school, she said afterwards, to ask the way to the post office, and stayed to hear the children recite. He was a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, though it was some time before she learned it, and he was the first of the Proctor line to settle in Texas. They were married in 1830, in the cathedral of San Fernando, by a priest who had known her since she was a child. It was in the second year of the marriage that he told her. They were sitting on the roof of the house at dusk, watching the swifts go down into the river bottoms, and he said that he had something to show her. He showed her the long gun-case under the bed, the silver shot in its leather bag and the small, worn book in which the Proctors of the White Ledger entered the tallies of their western hunters. She looked at it for a long time, in the failing light. She said that she had always wondered why he never went out before sunset and never once failed to come home by midnight. He said that it was not always easy. She said that she had not supposed it was. She asked to see the book again. She was a capable ally. The Ledger's Texas branch was thinly spread, and a hunter who came to San Antonio needed a place to lodge, a person to trust, and a source of information about a country whose communities, in the 1830s, were in a state of flux. The schoolmistress, who taught the children of half the town and translated for the other half, became the clearing house for all three. Every rumour reached her. Her pupils told her what their parents said, and the parents told her what the ranchers said, and the ranchers told her what they had seen on the road, and out of this mass of talk she learned to pick the few pieces that mattered. A hunter calling at her door in the evening would find a supper on the table and a neat sheet of notes by his plate. Her children were born in the first years of the marriage and the last. Alan Proctor, born in 1831 and dead in 1883, and Alexander Proctor, born in 1843 and dead in 1881, both became vampire slayers of the White Ledger, and both were schooled at her kitchen table. Cordelia Proctor, born in 1840 and dead in 1921, and Lydia Oppenheimer Proctor, born in 1846 and dead in 1923, did not hunt, but both kept up the family's correspondence and taught in their turn. The house on the river was always full of children, books and the smell of coffee. In the spring of 1836, when the Mexican army under Santa Anna came to San Antonio and besieged the garrison of the Alamo, she was thirty-one, with a five-year-old son and a husband who was away on the Gulf road. She kept the school closed during the thirteen days of the siege, and sheltered a dozen families in her house on the river. On the last morning, when the guns had stopped, she walked with her son past the ruins of the mission and saw the bodies laid out in the plaza, and she did not speak of it for many years. She taught again in the autumn. The town, she said, needed the children back in their places. The decades that followed brought the republic, the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845 and the war with Mexico, and a new flood of American settlers, and with them the tide of trouble that followed such movements of people across a frontier. She taught through all of it. She taught English to Tejano children and Spanish to the sons of Americans. She also taught, in a class that met on Sunday afternoons, a half-dozen young women whom she thought would be useful, how to keep a watch on their own neighbourhoods. When the Civil War came, in 1861, she was fifty-seven, with two sons in the field. Texas had seceded, and the Proctor family, who were Tennesseans and Unionists, found themselves in an awkward position. She kept her opinions to herself and her school open. Her husband Absalom, who had spent his working life on the roads, died in 1868, of a failing heart, at sixty. Catherine, who survived him by less than a year, died in the winter of 1869, of a stroke, in the room where she had taught for forty years. Catherine Oppenheimer is remembered in the Proctor family as the schoolmistress of San Antonio de Bexar, the wife who turned a teamster's house into a school. In the Slayerverse she stands for the settlers' wives of the White Ledger, who carried the long war into the Texas country with a primer and a pot of coffee.