Fanny Kimbrough

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

Fanny Kimbrough was born in 1827 in Gonzales, Texas, a small settlement on the Guadalupe River that was then part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas and had been laid out only a couple of years earlier under the empresario system. She spent her working life as a schoolteacher, and she married into the Proctor family in 1849, becoming the wife of Alan Proctor, a San Antonio carpenter who kept the White Ledger tradition alive in the years when the family's Texas branch was still small and poorly documented. She was never a vampire slayer and never claimed to be. In the ledgers of the Proctors she appears under a different heading altogether, as the person who taught the household to read what it wrote down. Gonzales in her childhood was log houses, a ferry, a few dozen families and a great deal of open prairie. Her earliest clear memory, which she later set down for her pupils, was of the spring of 1836, when she was eight or nine and the town was emptied in the panic of the Runaway Scrape. Gonzales had already given the Texan cause its first shots the previous October, over a small cannon the settlers refused to surrender, and when word came that the Alamo had fallen, Sam Houston's army withdrew and the town was burned behind the fleeing families. The Kimbroughs walked east with a cart and a milk cow, through rain and river mud, and returned months later to blackened chimneys. Fanny grew up in a place that was rebuilt around her, and she drew from it a lasting respect for anything that could be made to stand a second time, whether a house, a school or a reputation. She learned her letters from her mother and from a borrowed Webster speller, and by her late teens she was teaching small children in a rented room, first in Gonzales and then, as the Republic of Texas gave way to statehood in 1845, in a schoolhouse on the edge of San Antonio. The annexation and the war with Mexico that followed it changed the town she settled in. San Antonio de Bexar had been a Tejano and Spanish town for well over a century, and now it filled with American soldiers, quartermasters, freight wagons and merchants. German families began arriving in numbers as well, from New Braunfels, Comfort and Fredericksburg, and Fanny found that her classroom held children who spoke Spanish, English and German at home. She never mastered all three, but she learned enough of each to send a child home with a note a parent could read, and she was known for refusing to let one language be used as a punishment against another. She met Alan Proctor through the town's building trade. He was a carpenter with a shop near the river, a quiet, watchful man of her own age, born in San Antonio in 1831, the son of the teamster Absalom Proctor and the schoolteacher Catherine Oppenheimer. That his mother had also taught school is often noted as the reason Fanny found the family so easy to enter. They were married in 1849. Alan made the furniture for the house himself, including a tall schoolroom desk that Fanny kept for the rest of her life, and the household settled into a rhythm of lessons in the daytime and, on certain nights, of a door left unlatched and a lamp kept burning. It was some years before she understood exactly what the family was, and the Proctors did not hurry her; the custom was to let a spouse notice first and be told second. What she noticed was the ledger. The Proctors kept a White Ledger, a tally of vampires taken by their side, that traced back to Walter Proctor and the year 1455 and the long contest with the Faulkners over a creature called only the Guest. Alan's father Absalom, who had settled in San Antonio before the war for Texas and was known in the trade as the Bexar Watch, kept the book in a hand that had never been schooled. Fanny, who had spent twenty years correcting spelling and ruling straight lines, quietly took over the fair copying. She introduced dated columns, a margin for witnesses and a separate page for names that had been disputed, and she insisted that an entry that could not be supported should be marked as unsupported rather than deleted. The habit is still visible in the White Ledger's Texas pages, where a few claims stand with a small cross beside them and a note in her hand, and it was a discipline the Proctors valued particularly because the Faulkners had never let them forget an overstated tally. Their sons were born within a few years of the wedding. Frederick Kimbrough Proctor came in 1850 and William Kimbrough Proctor in 1853, and Fanny taught both of them at her own table before they ever sat in a public classroom. Frederick took to his father's other calling, and grew into a slayer of the family; William did not, and was steered without ceremony toward figures and correspondence, which suited a family whose practice depended so heavily on records. Fanny treated the two paths as equal, and it was said in the house that she asked William as many questions about a hunt as she asked Frederick, on the principle that the person who had not been there was the one most likely to notice what did not add up. The Civil War tested the household hard. Texas seceded in 1861, and San Antonio, with its German unionists, its Confederate quartermasters and its Tejano families caught between both, became a place where a wrong word in a shop could cost a man his business. Alan was called to his own vocation in 1864, on a market day when a face in the crowd turned out to be the face of someone already buried, and he took the alias the Swift Tally. Fanny kept the schoolroom open through the shortages, taught with slates when paper could not be had, and stitched the lining of his coat with her own hands when he began carrying a revolver and silver-cast shot. She wrote nothing romantic about it. Her entry for that year in the White Ledger says only that the family had a second hunter, that the house was quieter than before, and that supper would be kept warm. Reconstruction and the cattle-trail years brought a different kind of trouble. After 1865 the herds went north from South Texas along the trails to the Kansas railheads, and the towns along the way collected drovers, gamblers and the kind of rumour that a hunter needs to sort. Alan was often away, and when he returned he needed a witness more than a nurse, someone who would listen to the whole account and ask where the lamp had been. Fanny became that person. The Proctors credited much of his success with Witness Reading, his craft of judging what people had truly seen, to those long kitchen debriefings, and even the Faulkner side, which rarely conceded anything to the White Ledger, later allowed that the Texas Proctors kept unusually careful books. Absalom Proctor died in 1868 and Catherine in 1869, and Fanny found herself the senior woman of a family that stretched well beyond its house on the river. She helped raise Alan's youngest siblings, including Lydia, and she kept up her school through the lean years, then through the arrival of the railroad in San Antonio in 1877, which turned the town from a freight depot into a city. When Alan died in 1883, at fifty-two, after a long night on the marsh, she did not stop teaching. She sat the ledger open on his bench for a week, entered the night in full, and then went back to her pupils on the Monday morning. Some of her former students remembered that she wore the same grey dress for a year, and that she never once let them see her without chalk on her hands. Her last twelve years were spent in the house Alan had built, with her sons close by and a shelf of ledgers she treated as a second classroom. Frederick and William were regular visitors, and she was proud that neither had needed to be told which of them was the historian and which the hunter. She died in 1895 of heart failure, at sixty-eight, at her own desk according to the family account. The Proctors remember her chiefly as the reason the White Ledger can be trusted, and in the wider Slayerverse she stands as one of the few figures who shaped the rivalry with the Faulkners not by hunting but by insisting that every claim should be written down honestly, dated and witnessed.