Frederick Kimbrough Proctor was born in 1850 at Seguin, Texas, and lived fifty-nine years as a newspaper compositor and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Fallow Seal, a name that recalls the plain, dull wax seal that he pressed on every statement he took and the ploughed ground on which he found his first quarry, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by questions and records. His craft was Witness Reading, the art of hearing what a frightened person has not said, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was the elder son of the carpenter and slayer Alan Proctor, The Swift Tally, who was also his mentor, and of the schoolteacher Fanny Kimbrough. He married the boarding-house keeper Emma Adams in 1871, raised two sons, Frederick Adams Proctor and William Adams Proctor, and died in 1909 of a long illness, aged fifty-nine, in the same year as his brother.
He was born at Seguin because his father was working there. In the winter of 1850 Alan Proctor had taken a contract to frame a row of houses on the Guadalupe for the German and Anglo families who were filling up the new town, and Fanny, who was teaching at San Antonio and was eight months gone, refused to be left behind. She went up in the wagon with the tools, the stove and a box of primers. The baby came early, in a half-finished house with no front door, on a bed made of sawhorses and a door that Alan had taken off its hinges, while a hired carpenter went for the midwife and a pair of carpenters' helpers held up blankets against the wind. Fanny said that it was a thoroughly unsuitable place for a schoolteacher to have a child, and that she had still managed to correct the midwife's grammar. They brought him home to San Antonio in the spring.
He grew up on the river in the carpenter's house, among chips, sawdust and the smell of cedar, and in his mother's schoolroom, among slates and the smell of chalk. Both places shaped him. From his father he learned to measure twice, and from his mother to read twice, and from both he learned a patience with small things. At six he could recite the Declaration of Independence and the sums of a joiner's bill. At ten he was set to copy the White Ledger's Texas pages, in a neat round hand, by his mother, who had introduced the dated columns and the margin for witnesses, and he learned, without being told, that a record is only as good as the person who told it, and that the person who told it could be wrong. He said afterwards that he had been taught to be suspicious by an expert.
He went into the printing trade at fourteen, in the war, because it was the only trade in San Antonio that was both respectable and hungry for boys. The shop was the office of a weekly paper on Main Plaza, with a hand press, eight cases of type and a proprietor of extreme opinions, who changed the politics of the paper three times during the war and never his spelling. He learned to set by hand. He learned to read type upside down and backwards, to justify a line, to lock a forme and to pull a proof. He learned the compositor's hardest discipline, which is to set exactly what is on the copy, and not what he thinks ought to be there, and he applied it all his life to people. By nineteen he was the fastest compositor in the office and the only one who could read the proprietor's handwriting. He stayed in the trade for forty years, at the case of the San Antonio papers, setting up the news of the cattle market and the railway, the prices of hides, the marriages, the deaths and the fires.
He met Emma Adams in 1870, at a boarding house. She was twenty-six and he was twenty, and she kept a house on Soledad Street for clerks, teamsters and commercial travellers, twelve beds and a dining room with one long table. She had been a widow's daughter from Arkansas and had come to Texas with a cousin, and she ran the place with a cash box, a ladle and an eye. She looked at the young compositor who came in with ink on his collar to ask for a room, and said that she did not take printers, because they came in at four in the morning and woke the house. He said that he would take his boots off in the yard. She said that she did not believe him. He took the room. She married him the next year, in the spring of 1871, at the Methodist church, over the objections of his aunt and the apparent delight of everyone else, and moved her boarders with her into a bigger house on the same street.
Their sons were born in the first years of the marriage. Frederick Adams Proctor was born in 1873 and lived until 1928, and became a vampire slayer of the White Ledger in his turn. William Adams Proctor was born in 1877 and lived until 1925, and did not hunt. Emma ran the boarding house through the cattle-trail years, when it filled in the spring with trail bosses and drovers, and through Reconstruction, and through a number of fevers and floods, and it was in the long dining room, at the foot of the table, that she first heard the talk that he did not know he was carrying. She knew by then what he was. She never said it aloud. She said only that a man who could listen to a stranger for two hours without once interrupting was a man who had been born to sit at a table.
The calling came late, at thirty-three, in the fields after a hunt. It was a Saturday in March 1883, a bright, cold, windy day, and he had gone out to the prairie east of San Antonio with a party of German farmers who ran a pack of hounds for coyotes and the occasional wolf. He was not a hunting man. He went for the company. The party split on the ridge, in the afternoon, and the hounds went away across the ploughed ground after something, baying, and he sat his horse on the headland and watched them out of sight. They came back at dusk, all fourteen of them, one after another, with their tails down and their ears flat and their flanks trembling. They came back without the huntsman.
It was a fallow field, he said afterwards. That was the thing he remembered. It was bare, ploughed, freshly harrowed, and it had the marks of the hounds' feet going out and the marks of the hounds' feet coming home, and nothing else. He went to look. He walked the furrows for an hour with a lantern, and by the light of it he saw that the huntsman's horse had stopped and turned, and that the tracks of the man who had got down from it were not the tracks of a man who had been dragged. They were the tracks of a man who had walked a little way, politely, beside someone. There was a place at the end of the furrow where the tracks ended and the ground was as smooth as if it had been sealed.
He asked the other riders what each of them had seen, one at a time, that evening, at the farmhouse, with a pencil, and by midnight he had got from them the thing that nobody had said. Every man had described the hounds. Not one had described the light. Each of them had mentioned the colour of the sky, and none of them had said where the sun had been. He put it together at a kitchen table. He had been trained since childhood by a man who could do it, and he found, to his surprise, that he could do it too.
His father, who was fifty-two, and who had been hunting for nineteen years, came out to the farm in the small hours, and looked at the furrow, and looked at his son, and said that he had been wondering when it would be. Alan took him on. He taught him, through the spring, in the workshop and on the river road and at the kitchen table in the boarding house, the thing that he had taught himself out of a dead man's notebooks: Witness Reading. He taught him to listen for the gap. He taught him to keep, in every interview, a silence that the witness would be glad to fill. He gave him a pistol and a bundle of silver-tipped stakes that had been made in the shop, at night, out of cedar. He gave him a blank book with a ribbon. He said that he would be an examiner, not a chaser, and that it was a good deal safer.
It was a short apprenticeship, because Alan died in the autumn. He had gone out after a night on the marsh and did not come back, and Frederick, who was thirty-three, took up the work where it had been left. He kept his day job. He set type by day and sat with witnesses by night, in the back room of the boarding house, with a pipe and a pencil, and he pressed a small, plain, round seal of wax on every statement that he took, to show that it had been given freely and heard in full. It became his mark. The Ledger gave him the alias of the Fallow Seal. He took, in twenty-six years, some thirty vampires, and he did not hunt any of them himself without first having the account of someone who had seen it.
He died in the spring of 1909, after a long illness, at fifty-nine. His brother William, who was the closest man he knew, died in the same year, in the autumn, and the family was hard put to it to bury two sons of Fanny Kimbrough in six months. He was laid in the San Antonio cemetery with his father and mother, and the seal of wax, which his son Frederick had found in his coat, was set on the stone.
Frederick Kimbrough Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the compositor who read people the way he read copy, a line at a time, for what was there. In the Slayerverse he stands for the examiners of the White Ledger, the slayers who took the dullest tool in the world, a question, and used it to show where the dark had stood.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
