Lydia Oppenheimer Proctor was born in 1846 in San Antonio, Texas, and lived seventy-seven years as a shopkeeper in the old town on the river, the youngest daughter of a house that kept the White Ledger. She was the child of the teamster and vampire slayer Absalom Proctor, called The Bexar Watch, and of the schoolteacher Catherine Oppenheimer, and the sister of the slayers Alan Proctor and Alexander Proctor and of Cordelia Proctor. She married the railway clerk Frederick Bartlett in 1876, raised one daughter, Florence Proctor Bartlett, and died in 1923 of old age, at seventy-seven. She was not a hunter. She sold cloth, coffee and thread across a counter for fifty years, and in the course of it kept the best map of the Texas country that the Proctors ever had, which was the map in her head of who owed what to whom.
She was the last child, and arrived when her mother was forty-two and her father was thirty-eight, a good fifteen years after the eldest, in a house that had already seen a war, a republic and a great deal of schoolwork. The house stood by the river in San Antonio de Bexar, in the quarter that the Americans were beginning to call the Alamo district, with a flat roof from which her father could watch the swifts go down and her mother could see the children of the town coming down the lane. It was a house of four rooms, a yard and a cistern, and it smelled, in Lydia's first years, of coffee, chalk and mule. Her mother said that she had been born at dusk, between a lesson and a supper, and had been, from the first, the sort of child who wanted to know what time it was.
The town she grew up in was changing with extraordinary speed. San Antonio in 1846 had been a Tejano town for more than a century, with its two plazas, its cathedral and its irrigation ditches, and within a year it had been annexed by the United States, filled with soldiers and quartermasters and merchants, and made into the supply depot for a war with Mexico. The freight wagons rolled in from the Gulf in columns. The German families who had settled at New Braunfels and Fredericksburg came down to market with butter, sausage and beer. Lydia, who was four, sat on the step of her mother's schoolroom and watched them all go by. She learned to count in Spanish from a cake-seller, to haggle in German from a butcher's wife and to swear in English from her brother Alexander, who had been told not to.
Her family taught her, in their various ways, a good deal. Her mother taught her to read and to keep accounts, in the clear, neat hand she had learned at the trading post on the Guadalupe. Her father, who was often away on the Gulf road, taught her to tell the time by the sun and to recognise the sound of a particular team of mules at a quarter of a mile. Her sister Cordelia, six years older and kindly, taught her to sew. And her brothers taught her, unintentionally, what not to ask. Alan was a quiet, watchful carpenter of fifteen, who would leave the house at dusk and return at midnight with his boots wet. Alexander, three years older than she, was a clever, dark-haired boy who boasted and was told off. She noticed that her father, when he came home, sat for a long time at the table and did not eat. She noticed that the long gun-case under the bed was put back at the wrong angle. She said nothing. She had been taught, by the age of seven, that in a family of this kind, a child's silence was a form of help.
She was told, in the end, at fourteen, by her mother, in the schoolroom, after the last child had gone home. Catherine said that she had waited because Lydia was the sort of girl who would want to be told in a sensible way, and that she thought the time had come. She explained the ledger, the Guest and the long quarrel with the Faulkners, in the same tone in which she would have explained the dates of a treaty. Lydia listened, asked three questions, and then said that she would be quite happy to go on minding the shop.
There was no shop yet. That came with the war. Texas seceded in February 1861, and San Antonio, which was a town of unionists, Confederates and people who wanted to be left alone, sank into shortage. Her father, who was fifty-three and a Tennessean, kept his opinions to himself and his wagons on the road. Alan, whose wife Fanny had half raised Lydia since the wedding of 1849, was called to the work in 1864 and took to the night roads. Alexander, who was eighteen, went to war, and came back at the end of it a good deal quieter. Lydia, who was nineteen in 1865, took in the last scraps of the family's money, and with the help of a German widow of the neighbourhood who had a rented shopfront on Commerce Street, and no stock, she started to sell.
She sold what people wanted. She sold cloth by the yard, thread by the spool, coffee by the pound and needles by the paper, to the wives of ranchers and the wives of soldiers, to German farmwomen who came in with eggs, and to Tejano families who had been shopping in that quarter for four generations. She spoke three languages at the counter and thought in a fourth, which was arithmetic. She gave credit to drovers' wives, which was bold, and collected it, which was boldest. She had a high stool behind a mahogany counter, a pair of steel spectacles and a ledger of her own, and within five years she was the best-informed woman in the town. A shopkeeper knows what sells. She knew who was buying black crape, who was buying lace, who had suddenly started to pay cash and who had been forced to ask for a little more time. She listened to everything, wrote nothing down and passed it all, in the evenings, to her brothers.
The cattle-trail years were good for trade. After the war the herds of longhorns went north from the brush country, past San Antonio, along the trails to the Kansas railheads, and the drovers who came through town for supplies, in the spring, in their hundreds, were the best customers she ever had. They bought coffee, tobacco, boots and ribbon for the girls at the other end. They also carried, from one end of the trail to the other, every kind of news. A drover who has seen a dead steer with a wound that no knife had made is a drover who talks at a shop counter, and she was a woman who asked, in the mildest way, where it had been. It was from her stool that the White Ledger's Texas cousins heard, more than once, what was moving on the trails a month before the hunters had to be there.
She married Frederick Bartlett in 1876. He was a young railway clerk, born at Seguin in 1850, a slim, fair, exact man in a stiff collar who worked in the office of the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio line, and he came into the shop to buy a dozen pens and stayed to see whether she would give him a discount. She said that she would not. He said that in that case he would have to come back. He did, every Saturday, for a year. The wedding was in the spring, at the German Methodist church, with her mother's friends in the front pew and, at the back, two Proctor brothers in clean collars, who had been told to keep their coats buttoned over what they carried. The following February the railway arrived in San Antonio, and the town which had lived for a century on the wagon road was put on a line to the sea.
Their daughter Florence Proctor Bartlett was born in 1877, in the upstairs rooms of the shop, and lived until 1921. Lydia taught her to read at the counter, between customers, and to keep a ledger, and to recognise a bad debt by the way it came in at the door. The shop grew. By the eighties it had a second room and a clerk, and by the nineties a sign in three languages, and she ran it from her stool with her spectacles on her forehead and the ledger under her elbow. Her brothers died young, Alexander in 1881, Alan in 1883, and she buried them both and went back to the counter the next morning. She said that customers did not stop coming because a person had a sorrow.
The great storm that struck Galveston in September 1900 sent a stream of refugees inland by rail, and the shop took in a good many of them, with blankets and bread, for a month. Frederick, who was fifty and still a clerk, was sent down to the coast with the relief train, and came back grey and quiet and did not say what he had seen. He died in 1916 of a fall on the depot platform, at sixty-six. Lydia put on black and opened the shop at the usual hour.
She went on working until she was seventy. Her daughter's death, in 1921, was the heaviest blow of her life, and she did not recover from it. She retired to the room above the shop, and sat at the window, and watched the wagons go by, and then the motor cars. She died in the winter of 1923, of old age, at seventy-seven, with the ledger on her lap, open at the page for the last day of the year, and every column added.
Lydia Oppenheimer Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the shopkeeper of Commerce Street, the youngest daughter who turned a counter into a listening post. In the Slayerverse she stands for the quiet traders of the White Ledger, who heard what the road was saying and kept their accounts so honestly that the hunters could plan by them.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
