James Milam

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

James Milam was born in 1836 in Victoria, Texas, and lived sixty-two years as a printer in San Antonio, where he set type for forty years in a narrow shop off Commerce Street. He married Cordelia Proctor, the boarding-house keeper and bookkeeper of the German quarter and the daughter of the teamster and vampire slayer Absalom Proctor and the schoolteacher Catherine Oppenheimer, in 1859, and raised three children with her, Sarah Proctor, Barnabas Proctor and Martha Proctor, the last two of whom became slayers of the White Ledger. He died in 1898 of old age, aged sixty-two, which was the family's kind way of saying that he had simply run down. He was not a hunter and was not born to the Proctor line, and he was no relation, whatever the town supposed, to the famous Ben Milam of the siege of Bexar. But for nearly four decades he printed, without ever once being asked twice, the route sheets, tally cards and warnings that the Ledger's Texas branch sent along the cattle roads, and the Proctors remember him as the printer who made the White Ledger legible. He was born in January 1836, in a frame house on the Guadalupe, at the very moment that the country around him began coming apart. Texas was in revolt. In March the Alamo fell, and in the weeks that followed, as Santa Anna's columns moved east, the settlers of the coast took what they could carry and fled in what history calls the Runaway Scrape. His father, a saddler who had come out from Tennessee with nothing, put his wife and the two-month-old child into a cart behind a borrowed ox and walked them for six weeks through mud and rain as far as the Sabine, with the river rising behind and a great many other wagons in front. The child was sick with a cough. His mother, who did not hold with ill omens, said that he had already seen more of Texas than most grown men. They came back to Victoria in the autumn, after San Jacinto, to find the house standing and the saddle shop burned, and his father began again. Victoria in the years of the Republic was a small, hot, cheerful town of cattle and cotton, with a courthouse square, a Baptist preacher and a newspaper, and the boy grew up to the smell of hides and ink. At twelve he was put out as a printer's devil to the newspaper on the square, and he took to it as some children take to horses. The work was hard. He washed the forms and inked the type, fetched the water and swept the shop, and was called on to fold four hundred copies of the weekly by candlelight every Wednesday. By sixteen he could set a stick of type in a quarter of an hour, and he was the only hand in the office who could read the editor's writing. He was a small, sandy, patient young man with stained fingers and pale eyes, and he had, from the start, an exact mind. He did not like a typographical error any more than other men dislike a lie. He came to San Antonio in 1855, at nineteen, on a freight wagon, with a composing stick in his bag and a recommendation from his employer. It was a city of roughly ten thousand, a third of them German by then, since the Forty-Eighters and the Adelsverein colonists had poured into the hills, and it had a lively press in three languages. He found a place in a German-and-English jobbing shop on the edge of Commerce Street, where the owner, a Saxon named Brandt, needed a man who could set both and who would not mind learning a third. Milam learned to set Gothic type by looking at it. He learned the umlauts and the long s and the odd German habit of capitalising every noun, and within a year he could set a German column faster than the Saxon. He said that it was the only language he ever learned in which a comma could be wrong on purpose. He met Cordelia Proctor in the autumn of 1858, at the school of her mother, Catherine Oppenheimer, who had been teaching the children of San Antonio for thirty years and who had commissioned a bilingual primer from the shop. He brought the proofs. Cordelia, who was eighteen, a tall, dark, rather stern young woman with a pencil behind her ear and a great gift for arithmetic, was helping with the lessons that afternoon, and she read through the proofs with him, standing at the blackboard, and found three errors that he had missed. He said that he had not missed them. He had left them in to see whether anyone was paying attention. She said that she had been. They were married in 1859, in the cathedral of San Fernando, in a wedding that the printing shop closed for, and the bride's brothers, Alan and Alexander, stood at the back with a great air of a company on parade. He was told what the family did a few weeks after the wedding, on a Sunday, in the kitchen of his mother-in-law's house on the river, by his father-in-law Absalom Proctor, who came in from the road at dusk, sat down across from him, looked at his hands and said that a printer was a man who could keep his mouth shut in three languages. Milam said that this was the first compliment he had ever received from a Proctor. Absalom put a small flat case on the table, took out a leather-bound pocket ledger with a white cover, and explained the White Ledger in five minutes. The Proctors had been at war with the creatures of the night since 1455, and the western hunters needed, among other things, a printer. Milam said that he supposed they would need it done in a small, plain type. Absalom said that he hoped so. The young man accepted a cup of coffee, and the matter was closed. It was work that suited him. From the small shop on Commerce Street, and later from a larger one of his own that he opened in 1866 on the edge of the German quarter, he printed the things that the Ledger's Texas branch could not write by hand. He printed route cards for the hunters who followed the cattle trails north, with the water holes, the ranch houses that could be trusted and the crossings on the Guadalupe and the Nueces. He printed tally sheets, warning notices and forms for reporting a sighting, and he printed, for the children of the family, a small illustrated primer on what to do if something came to the door. None of it had a title page. All of it was done in an unremarkable brevier, and none of it was ever found by the wrong people, since the shop's ordinary customers would never have thought to look. He was also, in the Civil War, a man in an awkward position. The Proctors were Tennesseans and Unionists, the German settlers of the hills were largely Unionist too, and the state had seceded. He was of an age for the draft, but the printing trade was in some measure exempt, and the Saxon's paper carried on through the war under the careful eye of a Confederate censor. He printed the official notices in the front of the shop. In the back, at night, he printed what the Ledger wanted, including a number of small, folded sheets that warned the German families of the hill country when it was safe to travel. He never spoke of the war afterward. His wife said that he had aged ten years in four, and gone quite grey at twenty-eight, and had never, all the same, let a line go out that he had not read twice. Their daughter Sarah Proctor was born in 1862, in the darkest year of the war, and lived until 1936. She became a compositor in her father's shop and later kept its books, and was not called to the work. Their son Barnabas Proctor was born in 1871 and lived until 1919, and their youngest, Martha Proctor, was born in 1874 and lived until 1936. Both of the younger children became slayers of the White Ledger, which was, he said, in the nature of the family. The three of them bore their mother's name, not his, since the Proctors kept the name on the Ledger and he, asked about it, had no objection at all. He taught all three to set type before they could write. He said that a child who could read a line backwards was a child who could not be fooled by a forged note. Cordelia, meanwhile, kept a large boarding house on the edge of the German quarter and did the books for half the merchants on the street, and the two of them lived over the shop in a long, loud, cheerful household, with lodgers, apprentices, cousins passing through on the trail, and a cat called Gothic. The cattle-trail years changed the town. The herds went north every spring, the trail drivers came in with their pay and their appetites, and the Ledger's routes had to be reprinted twice a season. He did not mind. He got on with things. By the 1880s he was a steady, grey, respectable man in an inky apron, known to the whole street, who could be trusted to keep any secret except the price of his coffee. He died in the spring of 1898, at sixty-two, of old age, in his chair in the back room, with a half-finished stick of type in his hand. The last job in the forme was a route card for the summer. His wife, who lived another twenty-three years, finished the proof and sent it out under his name. The cat is said to have refused its food for a week. James Milam is remembered in the Proctor family as the printer of San Antonio, the husband who printed the White Ledger. In the Slayerverse he stands for the craftsmen of the Proctor line, the men and women who married into the hunting houses and gave them, in plain type and in good order, the thing they needed most, which was the word, set down correctly, and sent on.