Homer Fannin

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

The smell of a Texas drugstore in the 1880s was a particular smell, made of camphor, peppermint, clove oil, leather, licorice and a faint sweet undertone of laudanum, and Homer Fannin could have found his way across the floor of his own shop in the dark by it. He was born in 1857 in Gonzales, Texas, and lived forty-two years as a druggist, first in his home town and then in San Antonio, where he died in 1899 of cancer. In 1881 he married the nurse Sarah Proctor, of the White Ledger line, and they had one child, Cordelia Fannin, born in 1883. He was not a slayer and belonged to no slayer house. The Proctors of San Antonio knew him as the man who sold them their silver, and he is remembered in the family as the druggist who asked no questions and always had what was wanted on the shelf. Gonzales, when he was a boy, was a cattle town on the Guadalupe River, famous for having fired the first shots of the Texas Revolution twenty-two years before he was born, and not at all inclined to let anyone forget it. It had a courthouse square, a newspaper, a ferry, a string of saloons and a great many cows. The Fannins were a small merchant family who kept a dry goods store and a feed barn on the square, and Homer was the youngest son, which in a Texas family meant that he was the one who was sent to school. He was a thin, pale, fair, studious boy with a slight cough and a great capacity for being bored by horses. He read the almanac, the Bible and the labels on the medicine bottles in the window of the town druggist, in that order. His boyhood was the Reconstruction, which in the Guadalupe country was a rough business. The county was split between the men who had fought for the Confederacy and the men who had not, and in the early 1870s it was split again, by the long and bloody quarrel between two families, the Suttons and the Taylors, that became known as the feud. Men were shot in the street and ambushed on the roads out of town, and the doctors could not keep up. The druggist, who was the nearest thing the town had to a surgeon, worked day and night, and the boy, who was fourteen in 1871, was taken on as his helper. He scrubbed the floor, washed the bottles, ground powders in a mortar and learned, from the first week, that a man who had been shot should be kept warm and given a drink of water and that his wife should be given something to do. He learned the trade as it was taught then, by doing it. The druggist of the time was not the clerk behind a counter that a later age imagined. He was a chemist, a compounder and a good deal of a physician, and he made up from raw materials the tinctures, ointments, syrups, pills and powders that the doctors ordered, and a great many that the public asked for by name. Homer learned the weights and measures, the Latin of the prescription, the dangerous doses and the harmless ones. He learned to read a doctor's bad handwriting and to tell a man, without alarming him, that his prescription was wrong. By twenty he was a licensed druggist and was keeping the town's shop, in his master's absence, with an exactness that the master said was a little tiresome. In 1878 he took the stagecoach to San Antonio, which was becoming a real city. The railroad had come the year before. The freight trade, the army posts and the drovers, who came in from the cattle-trail country with their pockets full, had turned the old Mexican town into a boisterous commercial centre, and the German merchants of King William and the Tejano families of the Westside both needed a great deal of medicine. He took a post at a druggist's on Commerce Street, and two years later, with a loan from his brother, opened a small shop of his own on Houston Street, under a painted sign with a mortar and pestle. It was narrow, high and dark, with walnut counters, a glass case of surgical instruments and a wall of blue and amber bottles, and it had a back room in which he compounded. He had a great gift for the ordinary customer. He listened to their symptoms with real attention, gave them the plain remedy and charged them the plain price. It was silver that brought him to the White Ledger. A druggist had the means to refine it, dissolve it, cast it and test it, in a way that no blacksmith or jeweller could, and in the early 1880s a Proctor hunter who could not get his shot cast to a true weight came into the shop on a Saturday evening and put a handful of coin on the counter. Homer looked at the coins and at the man, and said that he supposed it could be done. He did it. He made a mould from a pharmacist's weights, cast the shot in the back room and checked each piece on the scales. After that the Proctors sent him their silver. He was careful about it. He never asked what it was for, and when a hunter told him, he nodded and took down another bottle, and by the end of the decade the White Ledger's Texas pages carried a line that said plainly, in a clerk's hand, that the shop on Houston Street was to be trusted with any weight and any secret. It was also silver, in a way, that gave him his wife. Sarah Proctor was a nurse at the Santa Rosa Infirmary, where the Sisters of Charity took her in after she had trained on the wards, a quiet, red-haired, long-handed, practical young woman of eighteen who came into the shop one wet evening in 1880 to ask for a bottle of silver nitrate. She needed it, she said, for a patient's eyes. He sold it to her, looked at her for a moment and said, because he was a man who did not often say things, that the dose she was thinking of was a little strong. She said she knew. He said, in that case, he would like to know who had taught her. They were married in 1881, in the church on the river, when she was nineteen and he twenty-four, and she moved into the rooms over the shop. She was a Proctor by blood and he was not. It made very little difference to either. Their daughter Cordelia Fannin was born in 1883, in the upstairs bedroom, with the smell of camphor coming up through the floor. She grew up in the shop. She was put on a high stool at four to count tablets, and by ten she could roll a pill, label a bottle and keep her mouth shut about what she saw, which was more than could be said for some of the clerks. She was not called to the hunting, and was not asked to be. Her mother, who had seen what hunting did to its people, had said that there was work enough to do in the world that did not require a stake. Cordelia was a bright, serious girl, like her father, and she read everything on the shelf. He began to lose weight in 1897. He said it was the heat. By the following spring, when he could no longer finish a day in the shop, he consulted two doctors, who were his customers, and who looked at each other in the way doctors had, and he knew before they said it. It was cancer. He bore the eighteen months that followed with the same dry exactness with which he did everything else. He was in pain, and he did not take laudanum, which he thought a coward's remedy and sold by the gallon. He worked behind the counter as long as he could stand, and then from a chair in the back room, where he taught his wife, who had nursed a great many dying men, how to make up his own last prescriptions. He died in the autumn of 1899, at forty-two, in the upstairs bedroom, with his wife and daughter beside him and the shop, at his own request, open below. The Proctors sent a wreath of white roses, and the Texas hunters, who had been supplied by him for eighteen years, stood at the back of the church in their good coats. Sarah sold the stock a year later to a younger druggist, who kept the name on the sign. She went back to nursing, and lived on in San Antonio for thirty-seven years, until 1936, and kept the brass scales on her sideboard as long as she lived. Homer Fannin is remembered in the Proctor family as the druggist of Houston Street, the quiet man behind the counter who cast the White Ledger's silver and kept its confidences in a locked drawer. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen and chemists of the Proctor line, who never carried a stake and who, by the weight of a pellet and the purity of a metal, made the hunters' work exact.