Emma Guenther

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

Emma Guenther was a shopkeeper in San Antonio, Texas, for more than fifty years, and most of what the city knew about her it learned across a counter. She was born in 1856 in the King William district of San Antonio, the daughter of German settlers, and she died in 1935 of a sudden collapse, aged seventy-nine, behind the same counter she had stood at since her twenties. In 1874 she married the bookkeeper William Kimbrough Proctor, a son of the White Ledger line, and they had two children, Emma Proctor, born in 1876, who became a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, and Frederick Proctor, born in 1879, who did not. Emma herself was not a hunter. She belonged to no slayer house, and she came to the Proctor family by marriage. The Proctors remember her as the woman who turned a dry goods store into the best listening post on Commerce Street, and who heard a great deal more than she ever said. King William in 1856 was a new street on the east bank of the San Antonio River, being laid out by German merchants and craftsmen who had come to Texas in the great emigration of the 1840s and who had done well out of the freight trade. The district took its name, in the years that followed, from the king of Prussia. Emma's family had a stone house there with a deep porch, a garden of roses and a cistern, and a business in imported goods that supplied the ranches and the army posts. She was the fourth child of a large, loud, music-loving household in which German was spoken at table and English on the street and in which the Sunday dinner lasted from noon until the dishes were done. She was a small, red-cheeked, brisk girl who was given a cash book at twelve and said later that it was the best present she ever had. By fourteen she was minding the counter, in the shop on Commerce Street, on Saturdays, when the drovers came in. The cattle-trail years were good for trade, and they made her. The herds came up from the Rio Grande country in the spring, bound for Abilene and Dodge, and the outfits stopped at San Antonio to buy everything a man might need for four months on the road, from coffee and bacon to boots, bolts of calico for the wives at home and the little luxuries that a cowhand remembers to buy on the last night. Emma learned to read a customer in a glance. She could tell a trail boss with ready money from a hand who had been paid a day ahead, and she sold the first a whole outfit and the second a tin of tobacco and a pair of socks, and she was right, nine times in ten. She spoke English, German and a serviceable kitchen Spanish, and she was the only clerk on the street who would give a Mexican vaquero the same change as a Texan. She met William Kimbrough Proctor in the shop, when she was seventeen, and he was a clerk in the counting room of a neighbouring firm, who came in every week for a particular kind of pen. It took her a month to realise that he did not write a great deal. He was a tall, thin, shy young man of twenty, the son of the San Antonio carpenter Alan Proctor and of the schoolteacher Fanny Kimbrough, with his mother's steady hand and a good head for figures, who had been taught at his mother's table and had, she thought, never in his life said a rude word. They were married in 1874, in the Lutheran church on the river, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one. The German families were a little dubious, since the Proctors were not German, nor Lutheran, nor rich, but they came. The Proctors came too, and Fanny Kimbrough, who had been her husband's first schoolmistress, stood at the back with a shawl over her arm and cried. It was Fanny who told her about the White Ledger. She did it in the plainest way, at the kitchen table of the house on the river, in the week after the wedding, between one cup of coffee and the next. The Proctors, Fanny said, had been keeping a tally for four hundred years of the things they called vampires, and the men of the family, or some of them, went out at night to take them. Emma listened, and asked whether William was one of them, and was told no, William kept the books. She said that she had supposed as much. She had seen how he looked at a column of figures, and she said that she was glad there was somebody in the family who counted. Fanny laughed, for the first time that day. They were friends after that, for the twenty years that remained to her. The shop, at that time, was a small one, in a rented room on Soledad Street, which she had bought from her father with her dowry and a loan from her husband. She stocked it in her own way, with dry goods, thread, buttons, a rack of ready-made shirts and, at the back, a locked case of household silver and plate, which her German customers liked to buy on an instalment plan. She knew her customers by name, and by family, and by what they bought. It was the slayers who noticed it first. A hunter who is about to be away for a week will lay in a particular list of supplies. A woman whose husband has been badly frightened will come in for a holy medal and a box of salt. A man who is carrying silver in his pocket will ask, in a low voice, for a twist of cloth. Emma, who was both quick and discreet, learned to give them what they wanted and to say, afterward, to no one, who had asked. Her children were born into the shop. Emma Proctor was born in 1876, in the year before the railroad reached the city, a fair, long-legged, silent child who followed the hunters about with her eyes and was called, at the proper time, to their work. Frederick Proctor was born in 1879, a stout, cheerful boy with his father's shy smile, who helped at the counter and later took over the books. Emma raised them both in the upstairs rooms, and she watched, with mixed feelings, as her daughter took the path that her husband's brother Frederick Kimbrough Proctor had taken. She did not try to stop it. She packed her a lunch. It was a great deal of the work of a mother of a hunter, she said, to see that the girl ate, and to keep the knife drawer tidy. William's death in 1909 was the great blow of her life. He died at fifty-six, of a long illness, in the front room of the house, and she sat beside him for a week with the shop shut and a sign on the door. She opened again on the Monday. She had the books brought down, and she went through them, line by line, in his hand, and found that he had kept the White Ledger's Texas accounts in the same ruled columns, in the same small, upright figures, to the end. She took over the ledger's household entries without a word. It was the best memorial she could think of. The Great War brought her trouble of a different kind. She was sixty-one when the country went to war with Germany, and the King William district, with its German churches and German newspapers, came under a hard and suspicious eye. Street names were painted over. Sermons were preached in English. A stranger threw a brick through her shop window one night in 1918, and she went out the next morning and swept up the glass herself, and put up a notice, in English and in her best copperplate, that the store was open for the soldiers of Camp Travis and Kelly Field. They came in numbers. She sold them postcards, handkerchiefs and sewing kits, and she sold them, for nothing, a cup of coffee on Sunday afternoons. The brick stayed on the shelf behind the counter, as a paperweight, for seventeen years. She died in the spring of 1935, at seventy-nine, in the middle of the morning, with the shop open and a customer in front of her. She finished the sentence she was saying, handed over the change, and sat down on the stool. It was a sudden collapse, and she was gone before the doctor came. Emma Guenther is remembered in the Proctor family as the shopkeeper of Soledad Street, the German girl who married into the White Ledger and kept its secrets behind a counter. In the Slayerverse she stands for the tradespeople who served the Proctors without carrying a gun, and whose quiet attention, small kindnesses and sound book-keeping kept the great rivalry in good order.