Homer Koehler

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

Homer Koehler was born in 1873 at Bandera, Texas, and lived fifty-four years as a carpenter, in the German country west of San Antonio and later in the city itself. He belonged to no slayer house. In 1892 he married the typist and vampire slayer Martha Proctor of the White Ledger, and the two had no children. He died in 1927 of a sudden collapse, aged fifty-four, with a plane in his hand. He was not a hunter and never claimed to be one, and the family papers, which give his own parents no entry, list him under the plain heading that the Proctors keep for the people who married into the work and were useful in it. What he did was build. He built the cabinets in which the Ledger kept its paper, the benches on which it was copied and the cedar stakes on which, for thirty-five years, a good deal of the family's work depended, and he built all of it without once being told why it was wanted. His wife's hunting is told in her own biography. This is the account of the man who built the furniture. Bandera in 1873 was a cypress-cutting town on the Medina River, a few years old and still half frontier, with a shingle mill, a store, a church and a great many Germans, Poles and Alsatians who had come to the hills to cut timber and to farm. The Koehlers were woodworkers, in the sense that the Germans of the hill country were all woodworkers, and Homer was put to the bench at nine. He learned to cut a mortise, to set a dovetail and to sharpen a plane, which he said was the only skill that a carpenter could not pass on by watching. He was a big, slow-moving, sandy boy with a bad ear from a fever, who talked little and listened with his whole face. The fever had left him, as it often does, with a patience that other men took for slowness. He said it was only that he did not start until he knew where the board ended. He was in San Antonio by eighteen, working for a builder who framed the new houses in the German quarter and made furniture in the winters, and in the summer of 1891 he was sent with a wagon of timber to the shop of the printer James Milam, off Commerce Street. The printer had an order for new type cases, the long shallow drawers, divided into compartments, in which a compositor keeps his letters, and the old ones had warped. Homer built them in the yard. He built eight, in pine with a cedar frame, each compartment the right size for the letter it was to hold, and he did it so exactly that the printer, who was difficult about such things, walked up and down the row three times and pronounced that a man who could measure an e could measure anything. The printer's youngest daughter, Martha, who was seventeen and had been taught to keep the shop's accounts, stood in the door with a pencil behind her ear and watched him sand the last drawer. She asked him what a carpenter thought about while he worked. He said, after some time, that he thought about the next cut. They were married in 1892, in the spring, in the church of the German Methodists, with the carpenter's own bench set up in the churchyard as a table and a great deal of sausage. She was eighteen. He was nineteen. Her mother, Cordelia Proctor, who kept the books for half the German quarter and had opinions about young men with no capital, looked him over and said that he had good hands. It was the highest praise in the house. The young couple took a small frame house near the river, where he built a workshop in the yard and she set up her typewriter on the kitchen table, and it was in that house, within a few weeks of the wedding, that Martha told him what the Proctors were. He listened to the end. He said that he had supposed there was something, since she counted the knots in the boards. He asked what she needed made. What she needed made, over the following years, was a good deal. He built a cabinet for the White Ledger's copies, a tall piece of cedar with shallow drawers and a double lock, made to look like a clerk's wardrobe. He built a desk with a false back. He built, in 1896, a pair of coffins for the family plot at the cemetery in which a slayer's gear could be laid beside a slayer, and he built, at intervals, in batches of a dozen, the cedar stakes that the hunters of the western branch carried, cut with the grain, with a point that had been hardened in the fire and a collar of silver wire that a German silversmith on Commerce Street supplied. He never handled a stake in the field. He said that a carpenter did not make tools for the pleasure of seeing them used, but for the pleasure of knowing that they would hold. He charged the family for the timber and nothing for the work, and when his father-in-law protested he said that a man did not bill his own kin for doing what he would have done anyway. The carpentry of the coffin led, indirectly, to his wife's calling. In 1895 he was asked to build a plain pine coffin for an old German brewer at the edge of the town, a man who had died of a fever, and he noticed, when the coffin was carried down the stairs, that it weighed wrong. He said nothing at the time. He was a man who said nothing at most times. But at the funeral, when the lid was lifted to be closed for the last time, it was found that the coffin was empty, and the mourners looked at one another and could not say why. Martha, who was sitting in the third row in a black hat, got up, walked to the coffin, looked in, and turned to her husband. He said quietly that he had made the box and that it had gone out of the house as it came in, and that there had been nothing in it to begin with. She went home and began to write. The rest of the story, which is hers, is told in her own biography. His part in it was the measurement. He was a good husband in the plain sense. He mended what broke, he kept the house warm, and he made a dinner on the nights when she was out late, which, after 1895, were a good many. He learned to stay awake without asking where she was, and to be at the kitchen table when she came in. He built a bench in the hall where she could sit to take off her boots. He said that a marriage was mostly a matter of putting things where the other person could find them. They had no children, which they did not discuss with strangers and discussed very little with each other, and the house was filled instead with the apprentices, nieces and cousins who came for a winter to learn the trade, among whom he was known as Uncle Homer and was easily the best-liked adult in the street. The Great War was a hard time for a man with a German name. The Koehlers had been in Bandera since before the railways, and Homer, who had been born on American soil, who could not speak German without an accent and who had been making coffins for American soldiers since the spring of 1917, was nonetheless the object of a number of remarks in the shops. A paint-daubing crowd visited the house one night in 1918 and painted a word on the fence. He scraped it off the next morning with a plane, sanded the boards, and repainted the fence himself, in the same green. The influenza came that autumn. The city ran short of coffins, and he built them in the yard, in relays, with two apprentices, for six weeks, eleven a day at the worst of it, and took no money for the ones that went to the poor. The Depression he did not see, since he died before it, but he said, in 1926, that a man should always keep a few boards in the yard dry. He died in the spring of 1927, at the bench, of a sudden collapse, in the middle of planing the edge of a door. He was fifty-four. Martha found him in the afternoon, when she came in from the courthouse, sitting against the bench with the plane still in his hand and a long curl of pine on his knee. The apprentices built his coffin, and said that it was the only job that they had ever done without his correcting it. She lived nine years more, and never had the workshop cleared. Homer Koehler is remembered in the Proctor family as the carpenter who built the furniture of the White Ledger and made the box that was found empty. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen of the hunting houses, the men who made the cabinets, the benches and the stakes that the work could not do without, and who asked nothing more than that the joint should hold.