Henry Brewster

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

Henry Brewster was born in 1847 at Harrisonburg, Virginia, and lived seventy-six years as a printer in the valley towns, the last forty of them in a small shop of his own at Harpers Ferry. He was the younger child of the blacksmith and vampire slayer Samuel Proctor Brewster, The Lone Scythe, and of the laundress Cora Mather, and the brother of the slayer Harriet Brewster, The Hard Drover. He belonged to the House of Proctor and the White Ledger, but he was not a hunter and is not counted among them. He never married and had no children, and he died in 1923 of a stroke, aged seventy-six. For half a century he set, printed and bound the small, exact, unsigned papers that the Ledger's valley cousins depended on, and he outlived his father by fifty-seven years and his sister by fifty-one, which is a long time to go on keeping two people's places. He was born, like his sister, in his mother's aunt's back room at Harrisonburg, in the early spring of 1847, when the roads were mud to the axle and the stage could not get down the valley. Cora, who was twenty-seven and had by then been a mother for two years, did not believe in taking chances and went up to the same bed in which she had borne her daughter. The aunt, a dry, tall Mather with no patience for fuss, delivered him in the small hours with a kettle and a pair of shears. She announced to the household, which was waiting in the passage, that it was a boy, that it was a large boy and that it had, very obviously, a voice. Samuel was sent for. He came up the valley on the canal boat and then on foot, and found the child asleep on the aunt's Bible, which was the biggest book in the house, and had been put to use. He grew up at Harpers Ferry in the rooms above his father's forge, a fair, cheerful, broad-faced boy who took after his mother in build and temper and after nobody in particular in his love of print. His sister Harriet, who was two years older and had their father's dark hair and serious ways, handled the serious things. He handled the noise. He was the child who sat on the forge floor and banged on a bucket, and who was found at three years old in the lean-to, where his mother kept the mangle, with a pot of blacking and the inside of a book. He could read before he could be made to wash. At six he had read every label on every bottle in the store, and at eight he had discovered, in the office of the Harpers Ferry paper, on Shenandoah Street, the thing that he wanted to be. The office was a single room, with a hand press, two cases of type, a stone and a stove, and a printer named Amos Finch, a lean, grey, silent man with inky hands and a bad leg, who put out a four-page weekly and did job printing for the armoury. Henry went in to ask for scrap paper, and was given it. He went back the next day to ask for a little more. He went back for a year. At ten Finch let him sweep, and at twelve he let him distribute type, which is the work of putting the letters back in their boxes, one at a time, reading each one upside down, and is the dullest task in the trade and the best possible schooling. By fourteen he could set a stick of type without a mistake. The Civil War ended the armoury, the newspaper and most of the town. Finch's press was seized, broken and, in the end, taken off in a wagon to be used for the army's forms, and the old man died in the winter of 1863, in a cold room, without having been paid. Henry, who was sixteen, stood at the forge in the last years of the war and held the tongs for his father while the armies changed hands overhead. He was a good striker, and steady. He learned a great deal about iron in those years, and he did not like it. He said it was a fine art, and that he was not in the least suited to it. It was his father's death in October 1866 that put him behind the anvil in earnest. The forge was burned, the shop ruined, and Samuel was killed in the ashes. Henry, who was nineteen, stood beside his mother in the ruins. He could see that there was nobody else to do it. He took a borrowed set of tools, and a hired man, and rebuilt the forge in a shed, and he kept it going through the worst of the years after the war, shoeing horses for the wagon trade, and mending ploughs for farmers who paid him in bacon. He said afterwards that it had been the hardest work he had ever done, and the dullest. He put a scrap of the scythe that had hung above the old door in his pocket, and he kept it there for the rest of his life. The forge he sold in 1870. There was a man in Staunton who wanted it, and there was a press in Winchester that wanted a hand, and he took the money and the press, and never regretted it. His sister was hunting by then, and his mother kept the laundry, and he boarded in the town and worked a ten-hour day at the case of a daily paper, the Winchester Times, setting type for the local news and, in the evenings, doing the small jobs that the paper sent out. He had a good hand and a good eye. He was taken on as a compositor, and then as a pressman, and by twenty-five he could run a cylinder press. The work that his sister needed from him began in 1868. She had found in herself a craft, and she wanted, to put it on record, a small card that she could leave on a door. It was a plain white card, three inches by five, with a few lines of text that said what the terms of the house were, and what the guest had agreed to. Henry printed them. He printed them on the Winchester press, at night, on scrap stock, with a borrowed stick of type, and he asked nothing about them. He asked only whether she wanted the sentences shorter. She told him that she did. She said that the short ones were the ones that held. He set them in the smallest, clearest face in the shop, and she took them away in her sewing basket. He went on printing them, in some form, for fifty years. Harriet's death in January 1872, of exposure in a cold loft above a ford, was a shock to him that he did not get over. He went up from Winchester on the train and helped his mother bury her, and he stayed a week, and he did not talk. When he went back to Winchester, he took the scraps of her work, the cards, the notes, the exercise book in which she had written the whole of her first night, and he set them in type, at his own cost, in the smallest edition that he could, forty copies. He bound them in grey paper. He sent them, without a covering letter, to the valley cousins of the White Ledger, and to the cousins in Kentucky, and to a number of hunters whom she had worked with. It was called, on the title page, Terms of the House. It was used as a textbook for forty years. He came home to Harpers Ferry in 1883, when his mother died, and set up on his own. The shop was a small, low, brick building on the hill street, with a hand press, a treadle jobber and three cases of type, and he printed there every kind of thing that a small town needs: handbills, tickets, billheads, programmes, wedding cards, funeral cards, the notices of the Methodist church and the price lists of the cooper. He printed the Harpers Ferry almanac. He printed, in a separate, locked case of type that nobody but he ever touched, a short sheet each quarter for the White Ledger's valley chapter, which went out to forty families in grey wrappers, without a signature, listing the roads to avoid and the houses that would take a hunter in. He did not know, for the most part, who the sheet was about. He knew only that it was accurate. He was a large, gentle, slow-moving man, with his mother's broad face and a fair beard that turned white at fifty, and he was known in the town as a person who could be trusted with a secret and a wedding invitation in the same hour. He lived over the shop. He had a cat. He did not marry, and when he was asked why, he said that he had had a proposal, in 1875, from a schoolteacher in Winchester, and had declined it, because he had found that he could not love anything as much as a well-set page. It was a joke that he made a great many times, and a great many people did not believe it. He lived long enough to see the town revive, and the railroad bring in tourists, and the old armoury ground become a place for photographs. He watched the Niagara Movement meet on the Storer College campus in 1906, and he printed, for a small fee, some of its handbills. He lived through the cold spells of the eighties and the floods of 1889 and 1896, and kept the type cases on a high shelf each spring. It was a stroke, in the autumn of 1923, at the case, with a stick of type in his hand. He was seventy-six. His foreman found him in the morning, sitting on the stool with the stick still in his fingers, and the last line in it, when it was read, was correct. He was buried beside his sister and his parents in the churchyard above the river, under a stone that he had set himself twenty years before, in the plainest roman type, with only the names and the dates and a small iron scythe. Henry Brewster is remembered in the Proctor family as the printer of Harpers Ferry, the brother who set his sister's words in type and kept the valley's book. In the Slayerverse he stands for the printers of the White Ledger, the people who turned a hunter's scrawl into a clear page and made a dead woman's craft into a rule that the living could use.