Effie Bowie

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

Effie Bowie was born in 1868 in Seguin, Texas, on the Guadalupe River, and lived sixty-eight years as a seamstress in the German settlements and ranch country around San Antonio. She married the cattle drover and vampire slayer Frederick Adams Proctor in 1899, raised two daughters with him, Lorraine Proctor and Evelyn Bowie Proctor, both of whom became slayers of the White Ledger, and died in 1936 of cancer, aged sixty-eight. She was not a hunter and was not born into the Proctor line, and the Ledger lists her under no house at all. But for thirty-seven years she was the wife of one of its drovers and the mother of two of its hunters, and what she gave them was the thing that a hunter on a long trail cannot do without and cannot make: clothes that would hold together, pockets that would hold a stake, and a table at the end of the road with a needle and a lamp on it. Seguin in 1868 was a small, brisk town of Germans, Tejanos and Tennesseans on the Guadalupe, sixty miles east of San Antonio, and known for its concrete houses, which were built of a mixture of lime, gravel and sand that the settlers had worked out for themselves. It had a courthouse, a mill, two churches and a great many pecans. The Bowies were not wealthy. They kept a rented cottage near the river, and the family papers record only that her father was a teamster and that her mother took in sewing, which was the whole of what Effie knew about her childhood that she thought worth telling. She was a short, sandy, very quick girl with a pair of hands that seemed to know what they were doing before she did, and she could thread a needle at arm's length in bad light at the age of five. Her mother said that she was born holding one. She learned the trade at a treadle. A German tailor's widow called Frau Kessler, who had come out with the Adelsverein colonists and lived three doors along, took in apprentices, and Effie was put to her at eleven, on the understanding that she would sweep the floor and be permitted to watch. She swept it for a year. Then, one wet afternoon, she was given a seam to finish, and did it so fast and so evenly that Frau Kessler took the work out of her hands, held it up to the window, looked at it for a long time and said, in German, that there was no further use for a broom. By fifteen she was turning out shirts, riding skirts and cattlemen's coats for the ranches between Seguin and Gonzales, and by eighteen she had a pitch on the Seguin square on market days and a reputation, in the district, for a hem that never came down. She was a practical woman, and the trade took her to the ranches. In the 1880s there was more money in riding skirts and trail coats than in anything else that a Texas seamstress could make, and Effie, who had a small wagon, a sewing machine that she had bought on instalments and a strong dislike of being indoors, took to travelling. She went out, in the spring, to the big ranch houses near Cuero, Kenedy and Floresville, and stayed a fortnight at each, in the back bedroom, fitting the wives and the hands. The cattle-trail years were then at their height, and she sewed for the men who went up the Chisholm and the Western trails, from their bed-rolls to their gloves. She sewed into the lining of a great many coats a long narrow pocket, which she had seen on a hunter's coat in the course of her work and could not stop thinking about. She did not then know what it was for. It was the pocket that brought the Proctors to her. In the autumn of 1898, a cattle drover called Frederick Adams Proctor, who was twenty-five and had been coming down from the San Antonio stockyards to Seguin for a year to buy stock, stopped at her pitch on the square with a torn coat. It was a long duster, cut to hold something in the inner seam, and the seam had been slit from outside by something that had not been a knife. She looked at it. She looked at him. She said that she would mend it by Thursday, and that the pocket had been made by a woman who did not understand pockets. He said that he had made it himself. She said that this was plain. She unpicked it, cut it again, and did it over, and told him on the Thursday, while he counted out a dollar, that a man who wore a thing in that position would do better to have it on the left. He came back every week after that. He was a slight, dark, courteous man with a slow Tennessee voice, who did not talk about himself and who took a great deal of interest in her work. On the ninth Sunday he told her, sitting on the step of her wagon, what he was, and what the Proctors did, and what he thought she ought to know before she let him call again. She was a little white about the mouth, and said nothing for some time. Then she said that she had sewn a good many coats and thought she had been sewing that one for some time without being asked. She said that she would not be a hunter, for she had neither the nerve nor the temper for it, but that she would make a coat for every man who was. They were married at Seguin in 1899, at the small church on the square, with Frau Kessler, then seventy-seven, in the front pew in a black silk that she had made herself. She moved to San Antonio, to two rooms above a saddler on Commerce Street that her husband had taken, and set up her treadle in the window. She was a foreigner in the city, in the way that every small-town woman is, and she had, at first, very few customers. It was Emma Adams, the boarding-house keeper on Alamo Street, who put that right. She came round one morning with a pair of sheets that had been mended by six different hands, asked Effie to see what she could do with them, and within a week had recommended her to the whole of her clientele, a mixed and interesting lot. Effie put a long pocket in the lining of a great many coats. She cut the garments of the White Ledger's Texas chapter for thirty years, and never once asked a question, and was, in the opinion of the drovers and hunters of the district, the best seamstress between the Nueces and the Colorado. In September 1900 the great storm struck Galveston, and in the weeks afterward the survivors came to San Antonio on the trains. Effie, who was three months gone with her first child, sat in the parlour of Emma Adams's boarding house for nine days with a pile of secondhand clothing and a pair of scissors, cutting down men's coats for women and children, and for the refugees who had nothing on them but what they had stood up in. She made, in that time, forty-one garments. Emma said that she had never seen a woman work so calmly. Among the refugees there was a man who would not take a coat, and she set the coat on the hall table, with a cold look, and went on cutting. Her husband, who was sitting in the corner with a newspaper, went out after him. Lorraine Proctor was born in 1901 on the Westside and Evelyn Bowie Proctor in 1902 at Birmingham, Alabama, in the course of a cattle trip, and both were brought up in the rooms over the saddler's. Both were called in their turn, and Effie, who had said she would make a coat for every hunter, found that she had said it of her own children. She sewed their first coats herself, in their sixteenth years, from a pattern of her own, with the pocket on the left. Lorraine, who had her father's gift for silence, lived until 1935. Evelyn, who had her mother's hands, lived until 1980. Effie watched them go out, from the window, in the dusk, and said nothing, and then put the kettle on, and counted the hours. She buried a great deal. Emma Adams died in 1906, and she sewed the shroud. Her husband's brother William, the bookkeeper, died in 1925, and Frederick himself in 1928, and she worked on, at the treadle, for a widow's wage, through the influenza winter of 1918 and a long hard decade after it, and cut her daughters' coats, year by year, to fit. She was taken ill in 1935, in the same year that she lost Lorraine, and died in 1936, of cancer, at sixty-eight, in the room over the saddler's that she had had since her wedding, with the treadle under the window and a half-finished coat across her knees. Effie Bowie is remembered in the Proctor family as the seamstress of Commerce Street, the woman who put the pocket on the left. In the Slayerverse she stands for the needlewomen of the White Ledger, the ones who stayed at the treadle while the hunters went out, and who made the long coats that held the silver and kept the cold off a generation of the Ledger's Texas riders.