Cordelia Fannin

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

In the files of the San Antonio nurses' registry, between a Cordelia Fairchild and a Cordelia Fuentes, there is a card for Cordelia Fannin, with a photograph of a tall, thin, pale woman in a starched cap, and on it, in the registrar's hand, the single remark that she could not be hurried and did not need to be. She was born in 1883 at Bandera, Texas, and lived sixty-three years as a nurse in San Antonio, where she died in 1946 of a fall, aged sixty-three. She was the only child of the druggist Homer Fannin and the nurse Sarah Proctor, of the White Ledger line, and she never married. She was not a slayer, and her mother, who had seen what hunting did to people, had seen to it that she was not asked to be one. But she belonged to the Proctor family of the White Ledger through her mother, and the Proctors of San Antonio remember her as the nurse who sat with their wounded and never told a soul what she had seen on the ward. Her birth at Bandera was an accident of the calendar. Her mother, who was twenty-one and in the last weeks of her confinement, had gone up to the Medina River in the autumn of 1883 to visit a Proctor cousin who kept a ranch house in the cypress country, and was delivered there, three weeks early, in a storm that washed out the ford, in a bedroom with a view of a pecan tree. Homer, who had stayed behind to mind the shop on Houston Street, received the news by a telegram that said only, Girl, both well, come when the river lets you. He arrived the third day, on a borrowed mule, with a bottle of camphorated oil and a great deal of advice. The child was baptised in the little church at Bandera, and carried back to San Antonio in a basket, on a wagon, in the first week of November, asleep through every mile of it. She grew up in a shop. The apartment over the druggist's on Houston Street smelled of camphor, peppermint and clove, and she took the smell into her own skin, and for the rest of her life, it was said, a hospital ward that lacked it seemed to her to be only half a place. She was put on a high stool at the counter at four to count tablets, and by ten she could roll a pill, label a bottle and keep her mouth shut about what she had seen in the back room. She was a quiet, thoughtful, rather stern child, with her father's pale eyes and her mother's long hands, and she read whatever was on the shelf. At eleven she had read the Dispensatory, and could tell the dose of any common drug from memory. It was not entirely a blessing. She was frequently found giving advice. Her father died in the autumn of 1899, of cancer, in the upstairs bedroom, with the shop open below at his own request. She was sixteen. She had sat with him for a good part of his last eighteen months, and had watched her mother, who had nursed a great many dying men, do what she could for the one person that she could not help. It was in that room that Cordelia decided. She said so to her mother a week after the funeral, on the back stairs, in the same even voice that she used for a prescription. She wanted to nurse. Her mother, who had been waiting to hear it, said that she had better learn to do it properly. She did not say, then or ever, that she was proud. She trained at the Santa Rosa Infirmary, where the Sisters of Charity ran a hospital that had been taking in the poor of the city since the 1860s and where her mother had trained before her. It was a three-year course, and a hard one. The probationers rose at five, went to Mass, scrubbed the wards, carried the trays, emptied the basins and learned to make a bed so that a dying man would not notice the sheet. They learned to take a pulse, read a thermometer and dress a wound, and to do it all without speaking unless spoken to. She was the best in her year. The Sisters, who did not hand out praise, wrote in her record that she had a steady hand, a clear head and an unusual ability to sit with a person who was afraid. She graduated in 1903 with a medal and a cap. She went into private duty, then into the wards, and stayed at Santa Rosa for eleven years. It was there, in the charity wards, that she met the other side of her family. The Proctors of the White Ledger, who had used the infirmary for fifty years for the men who came home from hunts, had an arrangement with the Sisters that nobody spoke of, and Cordelia, who was a Proctor on her mother's side, was one of the few nurses trusted to be in the room. She learned to treat the wounds that no ordinary doctor would have recognised, the bites that did not close, the burns that came from silver and the odd dry fevers that came afterward. She never asked what they were. She dressed them, charted them and locked the chart in a drawer, and in the morning she was a nurse in a clean cap, taking a pulse. Her mother, who had the same training and the same discretion, said that between them they had nursed two generations of hunters and had not yet been thanked, and that she would not know what to say if they were. The Great War took her from the ward. In 1917, when the army built its training camps on the edge of the city and Fort Sam Houston swelled to tens of thousands of men, the Red Cross called for nurses, and she was one of the first to go. She served at the base hospital at the post, in a long wooden ward of sixty beds, for the duration. The work was unending. The soldiers came in with measles, pneumonia, meningitis and mumps, and in the autumn of 1918 with the influenza, which killed, in the space of six weeks, more men in the camp than the army lost in any battle of the war. She nursed three hundred of them. She slept, in those weeks, four hours a night, and ate standing up, and took, on the worst day, forty-one temperatures between one round and the next. She was not once ill. The Army gave her, in 1919, a certificate, and the men on her ward, who had been told that she was very strict, gave her a small silver watch. She wore it on her apron until she died. She came back to the city and took a place at the Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital, which served the poor of the Westside and the barrios, and stayed there for twenty-five years. The Depression years were the worst of it. The wards were full of people who had not eaten and who came in with things that ought to have been treated months before, and she tended them with the same exactness that she had used on the soldiers. She took her pay in cash when she could and in tamales and pecans when she could not. Her mother, who lived in a small house on the river until 1936, was the one person she talked to, and the two of them sat on the porch, in the evenings, in identical positions, with their hands folded, and exchanged, in a few sentences, the news of the day. The death of Sarah Proctor in 1936 left her with the brass scales from the druggist's shop, which she took home and kept on her own sideboard, and with a silence that took her a year to get used to. She retired in 1943, at sixty, and lived on in a rented house on the Westside with a cat, a garden and a cousin who came in to cook. She read. She kept up with the ward sisters, who came to see her on Sundays with gossip. She taught, at the cousin's request, a short course in first aid to a group of young Proctors, who were learning their own trade, and who found her, by their own account, alarming. In the winter of 1946, at sixty-three, she slipped on the wet back steps of the house, carrying a basin, and struck her head on the stone. She was found by the cousin. The basin, it was noted, had not spilled. Cordelia Fannin is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse who sat with the White Ledger's wounded, the daughter of the druggist who cast its silver and of the nurse who dressed its wounds, and the woman who took up both trades at once. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers of the Proctor line, who carried no stake and who, by a steady hand and a locked drawer, brought a good many hunters back to the work, and sent a good many others home.