Emma Adams

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

Emma Adams was born in 1844 in San Antonio, Texas, in the farming country at Alamo Heights on the north side of the town, and lived sixty-two years as a boarding-house keeper. She married the newspaper compositor and vampire slayer Frederick Kimbrough Proctor in 1871, and raised two sons with him, Frederick Adams Proctor and William Adams Proctor, the elder of whom became a slayer of the White Ledger like his father. She was not a hunter and was not born into the Proctor line, and the family papers give her own parents only as the Adamses of Olmos Creek. She died in 1906 of a stroke, at sixty-two, three years before her husband. In the Proctor memory she is the woman who kept a table, a register and a good lamp on the corner of a busy street, and whose house was, for more than thirty years, the safest roof in San Antonio for a hunter who had nowhere else to go. Her register survives. It is a thick, tall book, bound in green cloth, in which she entered, in a square, upright hand, the name, the date, the room and the price of every person who slept in her house from the autumn of 1866 to the week of her death, some twenty-one thousand names in all, and it is for that reason, if for no other, that the Proctors call her the Quiet Clerk of Alamo Street. Most of the entries are what one would expect. They are drovers and cotton factors, German farmers in for a market day, commercial travellers with sample cases, a circus rider, three schoolmasters, forty-one priests and a long succession of young men from Tennessee who said that they were in search of land. Some of them are marked in the margin with a small pencil cross. Those are the ones that she had looked at twice. She was born in a house on a farm on Olmos Creek, in the springs country a few miles north of the plazas, where the land rises toward the hills and the live oaks stand apart. The place was called Alamo Heights only later, when the street cars reached it. Her father was a Tennessee-born farmer who had come to Texas in the eighteen-thirties, a small, dry, plain-spoken man who grew corn and kept a dairy, and her mother was a woman of the old settlements who could spin, quilt, plant and doctor a cow. They had six children, of whom Emma was the fourth. She grew up in a kitchen. By eight she was churning, by ten she was milking and by twelve she was carrying the butter and eggs down to the market on Main Plaza on a mule, which she sold, she said, to whoever made the first reasonable offer and was unable to be talked out of it. The war did not spare the country. Texas seceded in February 1861, and the Adamses, who were Unionists of the quiet sort, kept their views to themselves and their son, her elder brother, out of the army as long as they could. In 1862 the German Unionists of the hill country were hunted down and killed on the Nueces, and San Antonio, which was full of Confederate recruiting parties, became a town where a wrong word could cost a man his farm. She was seventeen. She learned to keep a civil face and a close tongue, and to say nothing in company about anyone's politics, which was a training that she was to use for forty years. She also learned what a stranger at the gate could mean. She did it by watching her mother, who had taken a cold, deliberate pleasure in asking every new visitor to the farm what his business was and where he had last slept. In the autumn of 1866 she took a lease, at twenty-two, on a two-storey stone house on the corner of Alamo Street, a few blocks from the river, and opened a boarding house. She had no capital but her savings, a cow and a great deal of quiet determination, and she began with four beds. By the following spring she had eleven. The cattle-trail years were beginning, and San Antonio, which stood at the gateway between the brush country and the north, was filling with drovers, cowhands, horse traders and the merchants who lived off them, and all of them needed a bed and a meal. She gave them both, at a fair price, with clean sheets, hot water and a rule that no man should come to the table with his hat on. She had, in her own phrase, a house in which one could sleep. The Proctors found her in 1870, through a newspaper. Frederick Kimbrough Proctor, then twenty, was a compositor on a San Antonio daily, a slight, dark, long-fingered young man who had been taught by his mother, the schoolteacher Fanny Kimbrough, to set a line without a mistake, and who was looking for a room near the office. He came in on a wet night in November, with a small valise, and was put in the room over the kitchen. He said little. He was out at night, on the late shift, and back in the small hours, and he was quiet enough on the stair that she did not hear him. On the fourth night she got up to see who it was, and found him sitting at the top of the stair, in the dark, with a revolver in his lap and his eyes on the front door. She looked at him. He looked at her. He said, in a very low voice, that he hoped he had not woken the house. She did not scream. She said, after a moment, that she had supposed it was something of the kind. She said that she had been watching the door herself, and had wondered who would get there first. They sat on the stair until four in the morning, and he told her, in the plain manner of his family, what the Proctors were. She took it, she said afterward, very much as she would have taken news of a rise in the price of flour. It was disagreeable, it was probably going to be a lasting nuisance, and it explained a number of things. She asked whether the White Ledger kept a record of the lodgers that it considered suspect. He said that it did. She said that she would be glad to see the book, because she thought that she might be able to supply some of the entries. They were married in 1871, in the church of San Fernando, where his grandmother had been married forty-one years before. He was twenty-one, and she was twenty-seven, six years his elder, and the family made a good deal of a difference that neither of them ever mentioned. His mother, Fanny Kimbrough, who had reshaped the White Ledger with dated columns and a margin for witnesses, took to her at once, and taught her, in a long series of Sunday afternoons, how to keep a second register, in a different hand, of the persons who had passed through the house and given her pause. It was, in a way, the White Ledger's first outpost in a boarding house. It was an immediate success. She kept the house for thirty-five years, and it was the best-run establishment in San Antonio. She rose at five and went to bed at eleven. She dealt with drunks, with bedbugs and with a cattle king who wanted to smoke in the parlour. She also dealt, from the first, with a stream of Proctors and their friends, who came through on the way to a hunt, arrived after one or waited for news of another. A hunter who came in at two in the morning with a torn coat and a pale face would find the kitchen lamp lit, a pot of coffee on the stove and a clean towel on the back of a chair. Their sons came in the first decade of the marriage. Frederick Adams Proctor was born in 1873 and lived until 1928. He grew up among lodgers, and was called, in his turn, to be a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, like his father, and his mother watched him go with a face as still as a plate. William Adams Proctor was born in 1877 and lived until 1925, and he did not hunt. He was a round, pleasant boy, who was good with figures, and he helped her with the books. The railway had come to San Antonio in the year of his birth, and the town, which had been a cattle depot, was becoming a city, and the boarding house, which was close to the new depot, was busier than ever. In September 1900 the great storm struck Galveston, and in the days that followed the trains brought the survivors to San Antonio, hundreds of them, in wet clothes, with no luggage and no money. She took in nineteen, in the dining room and the parlour, and fed them for three weeks, and did not send a bill. Among them, according to her register, there was a young man who did not eat, and who would not come in by the front door, and whom she met in the passage with a lamp and a large kitchen knife and a very civil word, and who left before breakfast. The Ledger's cousin, who had been sitting in the parlour with a newspaper, took it up at the depot. She had the stroke in the spring of 1906, at her desk, with the register open in front of her, and died that week, at sixty-two, in the front room, with her sons on either side of her. Her husband, who had been at work at the newspaper, set the obituary himself. The register was kept by her elder son, and the last entry, in her hand, was a line in pencil, which read, Room four, a gentleman from Gonzales, two dollars, paid, and a small cross in the margin, which was found to be, in fact, unnecessary. Emma Adams is remembered in the Proctor family as the Quiet Clerk of Alamo Street, the keeper of the green register. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of the boarding houses of the White Ledger, the women who held the lamp, counted the lodgers and gave every hunter a hot cup of coffee and a second look at the door.