Deborah Proctor Bowen

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

Deborah Proctor Bowen was born in 1789 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the elder daughter of a boatman and a laundress, and she kept a boarding house for river men for most of her life. She married the riverboat pilot Jonathan Brewster in 1814, bore him two children, Samuel and Deborah, and died in 1867 of pneumonia at the age of seventy-eight, having outlived her husband by eighteen years and seen the valley through a civil war. She was not a hunter. Her son Samuel Proctor Brewster was, and the White Ledger records that it was Deborah who taught him to keep a tally, and to keep it honestly. Her father, Samuel Bowen, was born in 1764 and died in 1825. He was a boatman who worked the Shenandoah and the Potomac, poling the long, flat-bottomed gundalows that carried flour and iron to the market at Georgetown, and he was away for weeks at a time. Her mother, Hannah Cutler Proctor, born in 1769 and dead in 1823, was a laundress in the river towns, and it was from her that Deborah took the most formidable of her qualities, an unassailable sense of how things should be done. Her younger sister, Rebecca Bowen Proctor, born in 1792, became a midwife. The two girls grew up in a small house near the river, in a household that smelled of lye soap and wet rope. The valley of her childhood was a long green trough between the mountains, settled mostly by Scots-Irish and German farmers, and its river, the Shenandoah, ran north to meet the Potomac at Harpers Ferry. The river was the road of commerce. Flour from the valley's mills, iron from its furnaces, whiskey from its stills and timber from its hills all went down it to the tidewater on the spring freshets, in boats that were built for one trip and sold for their planks at the end. The men who poled them were a rough, cheerful, rowdy company, and they needed somewhere to sleep. Deborah's first job was in the kitchen of a boarding house at Harpers Ferry, at fourteen, where she learned the trade from a hard-faced widow who fed forty men three times a day and never lost a spoon. She was a fast learner. By sixteen she was running the kitchen, and by eighteen she was doing the marketing. She had her father's build, broad, strong and unflappable, and her mother's sharp eye, and she had the gift of seeming to be in two places at once. A river man who tried to leave without paying found the door locked and Deborah in front of it. She met Jonathan Brewster in 1812, when he came to lodge at the house. He was twenty-two, born in 1790 at Staunton, a pilot of the river boats who had learned the channel of the Shenandoah from a bargeman uncle and who could, it was said, read the water like a newspaper. He was a cool-headed, long-limbed, quiet man with a dry humour and a steady hand on a pole, and he was nothing like the rowdy men who filled her rooms. He asked her, on his third night, whether she would mind if he ate his supper in the kitchen, where it was warm. She said she would mind very much, and then she put a chair for him by the stove. They were married in 1814, in the Presbyterian church at Charles Town, in the middle of the second war with Britain. Their son, Samuel Proctor Brewster, was born in 1815 and lived until 1866. He was called to the work as a young man and became a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. Their daughter, Deborah Proctor Brewster, was born in 1819 and lived until 1862, and did not hunt. Deborah brought them up in the boarding house, among the lodgers, and taught them what she knew. She taught Samuel to read a river, to tell a man's trade from his hands and to keep a record, and she taught the younger Deborah to cook, to manage a household and to hold her tongue. She understood her son's calling before he did. The Proctor family's hunting, which her mother had never mentioned and her father had never discussed, was not a secret to a landlady who noticed everything, and she had seen the signs in her husband's cousins, the odd hours, the long boxes, the shuttered faces. When Samuel told her, at nineteen, that he had been called, she said that she had known since he was twelve, and she gave him a small leather-bound notebook, blank, with a ribbon. She told him that the only thing she asked was that he put down every name and every date, honestly, because a tally that was not honest was worse than no tally at all. He kept that book for thirty years. The house at Harpers Ferry prospered in the 1820s, when the armoury there drew a large workforce and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was being built along the Potomac, and Deborah expanded, taking a second building, hiring a cook and raising her rates. She was known as a hard but fair landlady and a woman who could produce a hot dinner for sixty with an hour's notice. After Jonathan's death in 1849, in an accident on the high ground above the river while looking for a lost boat, she kept the house alone, and in the years of tension before the war she watched with misgiving as the town filled with soldiers, agitators and strangers. She lived through John Brown's raid on the armoury in October 1859 and through the war that followed, in which Harpers Ferry changed hands many times and much of the town was burned, and she died in 1867 in a small house on the hillside, her boarding house having been destroyed. She was buried in the churchyard beside her husband. The boarding house had its rules, and they were famous on the river. Supper was at six, and a lodger who was late found his plate in the oven and his temper tested. No spirits were served at the table, though a man might keep a bottle in his room if he did not bring it down. Boots came off at the door, wet coats hung by the stove and debts were settled on Saturday. Men who had been thrown out of half the houses on the Potomac asked for a bed at Bowen's, because it was clean, because the food was good and because Deborah Bowen, for all her sharpness, had never been known to turn a man out into the snow. A pilot who had stayed there once said that it was the only place on the river where a man could be sure of being forgiven by breakfast. Deborah Proctor Bowen is remembered in the Proctor family as the landlady of Harpers Ferry, the woman who taught a hunter to keep an honest tally. In the Slayerverse she stands for the domestic authority that shaped the White Ledger's habits, in which honesty was the first principle of the record.