Frederick Bartlett

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

Frederick Bartlett was born in 1850 at Seguin, Texas, and lived sixty-six years as a railway clerk, for most of them at the San Antonio depot of the line that connected the town to the Gulf. He married the shopkeeper Lydia Oppenheimer Proctor in 1876, raised one daughter with her, Florence Proctor Bartlett, and died in 1916 of a fall, aged sixty-six. He was not born into the White Ledger and was not a hunter, and the family papers list him under the heading that the Proctors keep for people who came in by marriage and stayed. He belonged to no house. He was the man who knew the trains. In forty years at a desk above a platform he made sure that a great many parcels, and a number of people, arrived at the right place on the right day, and that nobody asked why. The Bartletts had come to Seguin from Alabama in the late forties, with a wagon, four children and a cousin who had already staked a claim on the Guadalupe. The father, Thomas Bartlett, set up as a storekeeper in the new town, in a frame building on the square that had been put up the previous winter by a San Antonio carpenter named Alan Proctor. It was the first connection that the family had with the Proctors, and it was the sort of connection that nobody noticed. Frederick was born in the room above the store, in the same winter that the carpenter's own first son was born in a half-finished house a few doors along, and the two mothers, who met over the fence, compared notes. The boys were not friends, since the carpenter's family went home to San Antonio in the spring, but each of them, forty years later, remembered the other's mother. He grew up at Seguin in the fifties, a thin, pale, serious boy with a neat head and a love of arithmetic, in a place that was still half a frontier. The town sat on the Guadalupe, among live oaks, pecans and fields of cotton and corn, at the crossing of the road from San Antonio to the coast, and it was full of German farmers, Anglo cotton planters and freighters on their way to somewhere else. His father's store sold everything that a settler needed, and the boy, from the age of nine, was put behind the counter to weigh flour. He had a gift for it. He could hold a figure in his head for an afternoon, and he could tell, by the way a customer put down a coin, whether it was going to be enough. He liked order. He liked a shelf that was tidy and a column that added, and he was puzzled, in the ordinary way, by anybody who did not. The war took his father into a Confederate supply company, and his mother and sisters into the back of the store, and left him, at eleven, with the cash box. Cotton was the only crop that mattered, and it could not be shipped, because of the blockade, and so in the last years of the war the store was kept alive by a long and complicated system of barter, in which the boy kept the tally. He kept it in a school copybook, in columns, in pencil. It was his first ledger. He recorded the price of a sack of corn, a yard of homespun, a dozen eggs, a pair of boots, in terms of three different currencies and a pound of salt, and he discovered, at fourteen, that nobody else in the town could reconcile the figures, and that they trusted him because he could. He went down to San Antonio in 1867, at seventeen, with a carpet bag, a letter of reference and two dollars, and took a clerk's stool in a cotton factor's office on Commerce Street. It was the time of the cattle trails. Reconstruction had put Texas under military government, the herds were going north by the hundred thousand, and every commercial house in the town was trying to find clerks who could read a bill of lading. He was quick. He learned the forms of freight, the rates of carriage, the tallying of hides and the keeping of a waybill, and he learned, above all, the clerk's particular creed, which is that nothing has been sent until it has been signed for. By twenty he was head clerk. By twenty-three he was the man in the town who could tell a cattleman what a herd of two thousand longhorns would cost to ship, and who would be there to receive it. The railroad was the great event of his youth. The Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio line, which had been building westward from the coast for a decade, was pushing through the last of the prairie in 1876, and its agent in the town, a brisk, bald Yankee named Hollis, wanted clerks who could work a timetable. Frederick was hired that spring. He was twenty-six. He sat at a high desk in a temporary freight shed on the edge of town, with a lamp and an inkwell and a Seth Thomas clock, and he wrote out the waybills for the first carloads that left for Houston. It was the best job that he ever had, and the only one that he ever wanted. He said that a railway was an arrangement for making the future arrive on time. He went into a shop on Commerce Street that same spring to buy a dozen pens. It was the shop of Lydia Oppenheimer Proctor, who was thirty, a small, sharp, brown-eyed woman in steel spectacles, and the youngest daughter of a house whose name he recognised. He asked for a discount on a dozen. She said that she did not give one. He said that in that case he would have to come back. He did, every Saturday, for a year, and bought something each time, a stick of sealing wax, a packet of envelopes, a bottle of ink, until the day she told him that he had enough stationery to start a post office. They married in 1876, in the spring, at the German Methodist church. He sent a note to his parents at Seguin, who were by then in a larger house, and they sent a cheque, which he did not cash, and a bolt of homespun, which he did. He learned what the Proctors were in the way that the Proctors let people learn, in the course of time. At the wedding there had been two hard-faced men at the back in buttoned coats. In the first year there had been a good many midnight suppers, a great many visitors who did not give their names, and a long gun-case in the wardrobe that his wife dusted with the rest of the furniture. He was a clerk, and he noticed. It was Lydia who told him, in the end, in the room above the shop, in the third month, with a lamp between them and her spectacles in her hand. He listened to the whole of it without a word, and at the end said that he had supposed it was something of that sort, and asked whether the hunters paid their freight bills. She said that they did not, as a rule. He said that in that case he would arrange a more flexible system. He did. For forty years he was the Proctors' railway. A parcel that needed to reach Houston in a day went in a mail sack with a particular stamp. A crate that required a locked car was found to have been booked on a locked car. A man who wanted to travel to Del Rio without being noticed was put in the caboose of a cattle train with a number of drovers, and was not noticed. Nobody ever told him why. He had, in a drawer of his desk, a small notebook in which he noted the trains that had carried what, and the days on which an unusual number of people had asked for the night express, and in the evening he gave it to his wife. He was careful never to put a name in it. He said that a waybill was a wonderful thing, because it told you everything except what mattered. Their daughter Florence Proctor Bartlett was born in 1877 in the rooms above the shop and lived until 1921. He 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, and at fifteen she was working in the shop, at her mother's counter, in an apron. He was a devoted father. He had no other family to speak of, for his brothers had gone to Waco and to California, and he made up for it, in the evenings, with a good deal of Dickens, read aloud. The great storm that struck Galveston in September 1900 sent him down the line on the relief train, at fifty, with a lantern and a list. The city had been flattened by a tidal surge, with some six thousand dead, and the railway bridge to the mainland was gone. He spent nine days in the wreck of the freight yards, tallying what came in and what went out. He did not say afterwards what he had seen, except that the tally had been the only thing that kept him sane. He came home grey and silent, and for a month he did not open his book. It was Lydia who found him sitting, at midnight, on the stairs of the shop, with the copybook of his boyhood in his hands. He worked on. The line was taken over by the Southern Pacific, and his title changed and his desk did not. He was made chief clerk in 1905, and kept the books of the San Antonio depot until he was past sixty-five. He fell, in the autumn of 1916, from the loading platform of the freight shed, in the dark, while checking a car of hides that had been mis-sealed. He broke his neck, and died the next morning at the depot hospital, at sixty-six, with his wife holding his hand. The station-master, who had known him for thirty years, stopped the night express for a full minute, at the platform, in his honour. It was the only late train that Frederick Bartlett ever caused. Frederick Bartlett is remembered in the Proctor family as the railway clerk who married into the Ledger, the son-in-law who made the trains run for people who could not say why. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet officials of the old world, the clerks and agents who signed for what they were given, sent it on and kept faith.