Florence Proctor Bartlett

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

Florence Proctor Bartlett was born in 1877 at Victoria, Texas, and lived forty-four years as a seamstress in San Antonio, where she made shirts, riding skirts and wedding dresses in the back room of her mother's shop on Commerce Street and, after her marriage, in a room of her own on the south side. She was the only child of the railway clerk Frederick Bartlett and the shopkeeper Lydia Oppenheimer Proctor, a daughter of the Proctor house by her mother's line, and she was not a hunter. In 1898 she married the cattle drover Joseph Trevino, and they had one son, William Trevino, born in 1899 and dead in 1977. She died in 1921, of what the family book calls old age, although she was forty-four, in the spring, at home. The Proctors remember her as the seamstress who mended the hunters' coats without a question, who kept the threads of the family together in a literal sense, and whose needle was as quick and as exact as any pistol in Texas. She was born at Victoria because her father had been sent there on the railway's business. In the early autumn of 1877 the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio line, which had reached San Antonio that February, was settling its accounts with the coast connections, and Frederick Bartlett, who was the only clerk in the office who could reconcile a waybill from three roads, was sent down to the old cattle town on the Guadalupe for a fortnight, to sit with the agent and go through the books. Lydia, who was thirty-one and seven months gone, was told by her husband that she would stay in San Antonio, and she got into the railway carriage with her carpet bag, on the ground that the shop could be kept by a clerk and the child could not be kept by anyone. The child was born early, on the third night, in the agent's spare room, to the sound of a locomotive being shunted under the window, and her father, who had never before been in a room with a birth, looked at his new daughter for some time, and then took out his watch and wrote the time in his notebook. She was brought home on the first train, in a basket, in the care of a conductor who had been asked to see that nobody sat on it. Her aunt Cordelia Proctor, who kept the books of the German quarter, examined her at the door and said that she had the long hands of a woman who would be good with her fingers. It was so. Lydia put her on a stool behind the counter at four and gave her a box of scraps, and at six she was sewing buttons on the cards for the shop. By eight she could hem. By ten she could cut from a pattern, and at twelve she was trusted with the good scissors and a bolt of lawn. She was a small, dark, rather pale, serious child with a needle-pricked forefinger and an air of listening, and she had, from the first, her father's eye for a straight line and her mother's ear for a customer. Her father adored her. He took her at four to the depot and let her ring the bell, and at ten she could read a timetable better than the agent. In the evenings he read her Dickens, at the kitchen table, in the rooms above the shop, while she sewed, and she learned, by the age of twelve, to hold a needle in one hand and a cup of cocoa in the other and to make neither of them shake. She was educated by the Sisters for four years and by her grandmother for one, and then put, at fifteen, into the shop, where she was a seamstress in fact and in practice. Lydia, who was a hard woman of business and a good mother, looked at the girl's neat stitches and said that she had no objection to her daughter making a living as long as she did not make it in a dress shop on the wrong side of the river. The trade was good to her. In the nineties, before the ready-made shirt overtook the town, the drovers and the railway clerks and the German farmers all had their shirts made up by a seamstress, and Florence was the best in Commerce Street. She cut a trail shirt in an hour, put a gusset under each arm and worked the buttonholes by hand, and a drover who wore one of hers for a season said that it was the only garment that had survived a stampede. She made riding skirts for the ranch wives. She made christening gowns for the German churches, and a long, slow wedding dress, in ivory lawn, for a banker's daughter that took forty days and paid forty dollars. She had a steady hand, a sharp eye and the useful capacity to be absolutely silent while somebody talked. Her customers, who were women, told her a great deal. She did not forget it. It was as a seamstress that she served the Ledger. A hunter's coat gets torn. A pocket is ripped out by a night on the brush, a cuff is scorched, a lining slit to carry a sealed paper, a shoulder reinforced to take the weight of a long gun. They were brought, in a parcel, to her mother's shop, with no more than a nod, and Florence, from the age of sixteen, mended them. She sewed in the things that were wanted. She made a coat with a long pocket down the inside, for stakes, and a waistcoat that would carry a flask, and a canvas belt with a row of loops. She asked nothing. She did it, she said, exactly as she would have mended a church vestment, with attention and without comment. The hunters of the Texas branch, who did not know her name, called her the lady of the needle. She met Joseph Trevino in the spring of 1897, at the freight office of the depot. She was twenty. She had gone in to help her father, who was short of a clerk, and was at the desk when a tall, dark, lean young drover with a long stride and a dusty hat came in to book a string of stock cars. She looked over his booking, found that he had miscounted by eleven steers, and corrected it by sticking a needle through the page. He said that he had not been so neatly outdone since he was nine. She said that she hoped he would book the cars again. He did, every week. Her mother asked him three questions about his people and one about his horse, and was satisfied with the horse. They were married in 1898, in the spring, at the German Methodist church, with her father giving her away in a borrowed coat, and she made her own dress, in ivory lawn, in a week, in the intervals of a rush order for a bank. She told him what the Proctors were on the second night, in a hotel in New Braunfels. She did it in an even voice, in the plain language of the family, and he said, when she had done, that his grandmother on the south side had kept a bowl of salt at the door for seventy years. They laughed a great deal, and after that there was no secret between them. Their son William Trevino was born in 1899, in the spring, at Victoria, where she had gone with her husband's herd, as her own mother had gone with her, and lived until 1977. He did not hunt. He was a cheerful, sturdy, bookish boy who learned to ride from his father and to sew a button from his mother, and who, when he was six, was found in the workroom with a needle in one hand and a hunter's coat in the other, explaining to the coat what was wrong with it. The great storm that struck Galveston in September 1900, when her son was a year old, sent the first trains of refugees to San Antonio, and Florence, at twenty-three, sat for four days in the back room of the shop with two other women and a great pile of unbleached cotton, cutting and stitching nightshirts. They made seventy-two. She did not stop to eat. Her father, who had gone down on the relief train, came home grey and silent, and did not open his book for a month, and it was Florence who found him one night on the stairs of the shop and put a shawl over his shoulders and sat down with him till dawn. He died in 1916, in a fall at the depot. She sewed his shroud. The Great War took her husband into the army's beef contracts and the influenza of 1918 took most of her strength. She nursed the family through it, her husband, her son and her mother, and never fully recovered her health, though she went on sewing, in the long back room, with a shawl over her knees. She grew thin and quiet. The winters bothered her, and she was often cold. She died in the spring of 1921, at forty-four, at home, in the afternoon, with her husband beside her and her son, who was twenty-two, in the doorway. The family book records the cause as old age, the gentle formula that the Proctors had used for the people who simply wore out. Her mother Lydia, who survived her by two years, said that the heaviest blow of her life had been the loss of the only child who had known how to thread a needle in the dark. Florence Proctor Bartlett is remembered in the Proctor family as the seamstress of Commerce Street, the lady of the needle who mended the coats of the White Ledger and never once asked how they had been torn. In the Slayerverse she stands for the needleworkers of the hunting houses, the women who kept a hunter's kit whole, sewed the pockets that carried the silver and held the family together, stitch by stitch, in the back rooms of the world.