George Proctor

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

Nobody who knew George Proctor in San Antonio would have guessed that he was the best-informed man in Bexar County on the subject of who had died, and of what. He was born in 1862 in Seguin, Texas, and lived fifty-six years as a cotton factor, a buyer and seller of other men's crops on commission, in the ranch country, cattle-trail towns and German settlements around San Antonio. He was the elder son of the teamster and vampire slayer Alexander Proctor, The Proud Quill, and of the laundress Carolina Navarro, and the brother of Bartolo Proctor. He never married, and he left no children. He died in 1918 of a stroke, aged fifty-six, in the autumn of the great influenza. He was not a hunter. He belonged to the Proctor bloodline of the White Ledger, which descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and he served it in the way that his father's memory would have admired and his father's temper would not have permitted, which was with a pen, a column of figures and a great deal of patience. He was born at Seguin because his father's trade had put his mother out of reach of her own house. Alexander Proctor drove freight over the Cotton Road in the war, and in the spring of 1862, with the wagons on the road to the Rio Grande and his wife expecting, he took Carolina to the old Proctor connection on the Guadalupe, where his mother's aunt lived in a stone house by the ford at Seguin. The baby was delivered there in a thunderstorm by the aunt, who had delivered his father, and who said that he had the same forehead. Alexander, who was three hundred miles away at Brownsville with a consignment of cotton, received the news on a scrap of paper weeks later and wrote on the back of it, before he answered, the number of pounds of cotton that the wagon train had carried that day. It was, his wife said, the one piece of arithmetic in which he had ever forgotten to be exact. George was carried home to the river at San Antonio at six weeks, in a basket, on the seat of a mail wagon. He grew up among the tubs. His mother's laundry on the river took in the coats of half the town, and he and his brother learned before they could read to tell a clean sheet from a dirty one at twenty paces. But George was the one who looked at the bills. By eight he had taken over the ledger that his mother kept in a cigar box, because her sums were wrong and he could not stand it. By twelve he was carrying the accounts of two German merchants on the Commerce Street, who said that a boy who could add in two languages was worth his keep in sausage, and by sixteen he had a stool in a counting-house on Alamo Plaza. He resembled his father, everyone said, in the exactness, although not in the flourish. He never recited anything. He simply remembered, and when a figure did not agree with another, he went quiet. His father died in 1881, on the Goliad road, of a sudden collapse, when George was nineteen. It was the great event of his youth. He went out with his uncle Alan Proctor in the wagon to bring him home, and sat beside the body for the twelve hours of the drive, and went through the dead man's notebook, line by line, by the light of a lantern, looking for an error. There was not one. He said afterwards that it was the moment that he understood what his father had been, which was a man who had left behind him a set of books in which nothing had been allowed to go wrong, and that he had no idea how to be a hunter but that he knew what to do with a book. Alan, who was a slayer and a carpenter, put a hand on his shoulder and said that a book was as good a place to begin as any. He became a cotton factor in 1886. The cotton of the blackland prairies, which had begun coming down by rail to San Antonio in the wake of the railroad, needed a man to grade it, to sell it to the compress and the Galveston buyers, and to hold the planter's credit between the crop and the price, and George, who did not drink, did not gamble and did not lie about the weight of a bale, prospered on commission. He had a narrow office on Houston Street with a high desk, a set of sample bales and a window onto the plaza. He was a thin, stooping, grey-eyed man with a clerk's cough, and he wore his father's watch on a steel chain. The planters trusted him. The merchants of the German quarter, who did not trust anyone, said that Proctor's figures were as good as a Lutheran's. It was the books that he gave the Ledger. The White Ledger's Texas pages, which his father had kept in his head, had to be kept on paper after 1881, and George, who had the memory without the gift, made himself the clerk of the western book. He copied, cross-indexed and checked. He kept the register of names, dates and places of the cattle-trail country in a locked drawer of his desk, in a clerk's clean hand, and he compared it, line by line, every New Year's Eve, with the death notices of every newspaper in the state, because the thing that his father had feared was a corpse that had risen under another name. He found three. He informed his uncle, and the matter was dealt with. He never saw any of it. He said that he preferred it that way. The great storm of September 1900 was the nearest that he came to the field. He was in Galveston on the Strand that week for his firm, in a cotton warehouse with a high roof, when the water came up in the streets, and he spent the night on the third floor with thirty other people and a great quantity of wet cotton, doing the only thing he could think of, which was counting heads. He counted the living in the morning and the dead in the afternoon. He wrote the names of the dead in his pocket ledger as a stranger told them to him, in the rain, in the wreckage of the wharves, for three days. He came back to San Antonio by the relief train with a fever, a bad cough and a book of six hundred names, and found his mother, who was fifty-six, in the yard with her tubs washing the clothes of the survivors who had come in on the same train. He sat down at the end of the line and helped her. It was the last time that he was ever seen to do anything without a pen. He lost his mother in 1902 to a fall on the mission road, and buried her beside his father, and his brother Bartolo, who was the Navarro of the two, took the lantern duty at the mission doors. George stayed in his office. He lived all his life in two rooms above a German bakery, in the same house, with a landlady who brought him his dinner and who said that he was the only lodger she had ever had who paid in advance and apologised for the stairs. He was by then the most useful man in the Texas chapter and the least known. The Great War made him old. The cotton trade lurched, the price fell and then soared, the young men of the German quarter went to a war that their grandfathers had left, and in the autumn of 1918 the influenza came up the railroad from the camps and closed the plaza. He worked on through it. He kept the White Ledger's register, which was longer that autumn than in any year since the eighteen-sixties, and he entered in it, in his clean hand, more than two hundred names that had to be checked against the graves. He had a stroke at his desk on a wet Thursday in November. The landlady's boy found him at noon, with the pen still in his hand and the page half-filled, and the last name on it was his own. George Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the cotton factor of Houston Street, the son who could not hunt and who kept the book that his father had kept in his head. In the Slayerverse he stands for the clerks and recorders of the White Ledger, the quiet men of the counting-house whose figures never failed and who, by writing everything down, made sure that the dead stayed dead.