Frederick Proctor

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

Frederick Proctor was born in 1879 at Castroville, Texas, and lived sixty-four years as a cotton factor in San Antonio, a city in which, for thirty years, a good part of the cotton from the Guadalupe and the Medina was sold, stored and financed across his desk. He was the younger child of the bookkeeper William Kimbrough Proctor and of the shopkeeper Emma Guenther, and the brother of the vampire slayer Emma Proctor, The Plain Furrow. He belonged to the House of Proctor, to the White Ledger, and he was not a hunter. There is no marriage on record for him. He died in 1943 of pneumonia, aged sixty-four, in the second winter of a war that he had wished to see settled over a desk. In the family papers he is the one who inherited the locked book of the Texas branch's accounts, kept it for thirty-four years, and made sure, in years of drought, depression and war, that the money to pay for silver, horses, lodging and burials was always there and could always be shown. He was born at Castroville because his mother's kin were there. Emma Guenther had an aunt, her mother's sister, who had married an Alsatian baker in the little town on the Medina that Henri Castro had settled with colonists from the Rhine in 1844, and in the summer of 1879, when the heat in San Antonio had made the rooms over the Soledad Street shop unbearable, Emma, who was in her last weeks, went out to the aunt's house for the confinement, with her three-year-old daughter and a basket of samples. She was delivered of a son in a bedroom that smelled of yeast, cinnamon and river mud, to the clatter of a night's baking. The aunt, who was very large and very Alsatian, declared that the boy would never want for bread. He was carried back to San Antonio at a month old, in a flour sack, to find that his sister, who was three, had taken a dislike to him and moved her toys to the other side of the room. He was a stout, cheerful, pink-cheeked child with his father's shy smile and his mother's appetite, and he grew up between the counter and the ledger. His sister Emma, who was three years older, was the silent one, who followed the hunters about with her eyes. Frederick was the talker. He sat on the counter at five, handing out buttons. At eight he could give change faster than his mother. At ten he was sent, on Saturday afternoons, to his grandmother Fanny's table, where the old schoolteacher taught him a particular form of arithmetic that she called the cotton sum, in which the price of a bale was worked out from the price of the lint, the seed, the freight, the commission and the interest, and he took to it at once. He said that cotton was the only crop that could be grown, sold and lost on paper in the same season. His father took him in hand at twelve. William Kimbrough Proctor, who kept the books of half of Commerce Street and the locked book of the Ledger's Texas branch in a rented office over a saddler's, did not make the mistake of asking whether the boy wished to be a hunter. He asked, instead, whether he could keep a set of books. Frederick could. He put him to work on Saturdays in the office over the saddler's, where he learned the German method of double checking, in which every entry is verified by a second hand, and the rule that nothing is ever rounded. He learned that a bookkeeper's first duty was to find the point at which a figure lied. He learned, in due course, what the locked book was for. His father, at the desk, with the lamp low, told him in the plainest language that the money for a hunter's silver came from a tin box, and that somebody had to count it. He went into cotton at eighteen, through his father's uncle by marriage, Frederick Bartlett, the chief clerk at the railway depot, who knew every factor on Commerce Street and got him a stool in the office of a firm that bought and sold cotton on commission. A cotton factor in that period was a middleman with a great deal of credit. He advanced money to the farmers against their crop, received the bales at the gin, graded and stored them, sold them to the mills and the compress, and took a commission on each transaction. He stood between the grower, who was always in debt, and the buyer, who was always in a hurry. Frederick, who had a head for figures and a face that farmers trusted, was good at it. He learned to grade a staple by the feel of the lint, to read a weather report for a price and to tell from the way a man asked for a loan whether he would repay it. By twenty-five he was the firm's junior partner. By thirty he had a desk, a safe and a sign of his own. The shop, meanwhile, did not need him. His mother, who was a formidable woman of business and had no intention of retiring, kept it with a clerk and the help of a neighbour's girl, and Frederick, who had once stood behind the counter, came in on Saturday afternoons to do the books. It was his way of keeping the two firms in the family. He was also the only one of the three of them, his father, his sister and himself, who was good in a room full of strangers, and it was he who conducted the Ledger's occasional business with outsiders, the lawyers, the bankers and the men at the land office, in a tone of comfortable respectability that never once betrayed that he was not merely a cotton factor. His sister Emma, the slayer, called him the front door of the family. His father's death in October 1909 put the locked book into his hands. He was thirty. The book had been kept for thirty-five years in a small, upright hand, in ruled columns that agreed to the cent, and the last entry, which William had made on the Friday before he died, was a total. Frederick sat with it for a week in the office over the saddler's. He went through it, line by line, as his mother had done with the household entries, and found that there was nothing to put right. He went on in the same hand. He collected the dues in advance. He paid the widows. He paid, in 1911, for a new set of silver-tipped stakes for the western branch, and found, to his satisfaction, that the price had not risen. It was a duty, he said, that came to him with the desk, like the chair. The great storm at Galveston had come in 1900, when he was twenty-one, and it had taught him what happens to a cotton port. He was then a young clerk, and he remembered the newspapers, the telegrams and the relief trains, and the way in which a city that had been full of cotton and money had been, in a night, full of neither. He took from it a lesson that he applied for the rest of his life, which was that a man should always keep two years of expenses in cash. The Great War made cotton dear and then cheap. He sold in 1917, bought in 1919 and lost, in the fall of 1920, nearly all he had made, when the price broke in a month from thirty-five cents a pound to under ten. He did not fail. He paid his farmers in full, at the loss of the firm's profit, and was known thereafter, on Commerce Street, as a factor whose word was good. He said that there was nothing remarkable in it. A man who has kept the books of a war does not default on a bale. The influenza of 1918 took his secretary and two of the clerks, and he nursed his mother through it. His sister Emma, who was at the base hospital at Camp Travis, came home on the Sunday evenings with a case of dressings and a face that said nothing, and he found, on one of those evenings, that the whole of her shift had been devoted to a single patient, who was not on the list. He did not ask. He wrote a cheque, under the head of Sundries, for a sum that would have surprised the auditor, and put it in the tin box. The Depression years were the worst of it. Cotton fell to five cents in 1932. The farmers of the Guadalupe and the Medina could not pay their notes, and the banks called them in, and Frederick, who had by then a firm of four men and a good name, did what a factor does in such a year, which is to carry. He carried forty-one families for two seasons. He took their cotton in kind, stored it in a warehouse by the river and sold it, in 1934, at a profit that he divided among the families in proportion to the debt. It was the most difficult piece of book-keeping of his life, and he said he had never enjoyed anything more. His mother, who had stood at the counter on Soledad Street for sixty years, died in 1935, suddenly, at the age of seventy-nine, in the middle of a sentence, and he closed the shop, which had by then become a curiosity, and went back to the desk. He kept the book until the end. In the winter of 1942, in the second year of the war, when the new air fields and training camps were filling San Antonio with soldiers, he caught a chill at the warehouse, and it turned, in January, to pneumonia. He was sixty-four. He was taken to the Santa Rosa Infirmary, where the Sisters, who remembered his sister, put him in a room on the second floor with a window on the courtyard, and he spent his last week directing his partners, from the bed, in the details of a sale. He died on a Tuesday. His sister Emma, who was sixty-six, sat with him the last night, with her rulebook. He had, in his coat, a pocket diary, in which was written, for the following Monday, a single entry, that the Ledger's accounts were to be balanced at the year end. They were. Emma, who took the book, made the entry herself, in pencil, and added that the total agreed. Frederick Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the cotton factor who kept the White Ledger's money and never let the books lie. In the Slayerverse he stands for the factors, treasurers and clerks of the Yorkist line, the men of business who paid for the silver, the horses and the widows in years when there was no other way to pay, and who proved that a war is won as much in the counting-house as on the road.