Sarah Proctor

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

Sarah Proctor was born in 1862 in San Antonio, Texas, and lived seventy-four years as a nurse in the city of her birth, through the cattle-trail years, the Great War and the influenza epidemic, and she outlasted almost every doctor who ever tried to give her an order. She was the eldest child of the printer James Milam and of Cordelia Proctor, the boarding-house keeper and bookkeeper of the German quarter, and the sister of the slayers Barnabas Proctor and Martha Proctor. In 1881 she married the druggist Homer Fannin, and they had one child, Cordelia Fannin, born in 1883. She died in 1936 of old age, aged seventy-four. She was not a vampire slayer, although her brother and sister both were, and her mother and her grandfather before them, and she carried the Proctor name, which she took from her mother, in the old custom of the White Ledger line, which descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. She is remembered as the nurse of the Ledger's Texas branch, the one who could be sent for at any hour and who came with her sleeves already rolled. She was born in the darkest year of the war, in the printing house on the edge of Commerce Street, in a room above a press that ran all night on a forbidden job. It was the summer of 1862. San Antonio was under a Confederate censor and half the town was under suspicion, her father was setting the official notices in front and the Ledger's warning sheets in the back, and Cordelia, who was twenty-two and expected nothing less, went through her confinement with the ledger of the boarding house open on her knee. She got the child out, she said, in the same spirit as she had got the quarter's rents in. The baby was red-haired, long-handed and unusually quiet. Her grandmother Catherine Oppenheimer, who had taught half the town, looked at her for a good while, and remarked that she had the look of someone who would be useful in a crisis. She grew up in a noisy house, at the edge of the German quarter, with lodgers, apprentices, cattle-trail cousins, a cat called Gothic and a father who printed at all hours. She was taught to set type before she could write, since everyone in the Milam house was, and she was set to work in the shop at twelve, as a compositor, to her father's quiet pride and her mother's practical satisfaction. She was good at it. She could read a line backward as fast as forward. But she was not interested in the type. What she was interested in, from the age of nine, was the people who came in bleeding. The cattle-trail years filled the town with drovers and gamblers and lawmen, and the boarding house sheltered a great many of them, and a number of the ones who had been in fights had a habit of calling for the landlady's daughter rather than the doctor, because she did not ask how it had happened and she did not faint. At ten she set a drover's broken finger. At thirteen she stitched a long gash in a teamster's arm with a needle and thread from her mother's workbasket, and was told by a passing physician that the work was very good and that it was a pity she was not a boy. She did what she could with that remark, which was to ignore it. In the spring of 1879, at sixteen, she went to the Sisters of Charity at the Santa Rosa Infirmary, at the north edge of the plaza, and asked for a place. The sisters, who were short of hands and who could see what they were looking at, took her as a probationer. She spent two years on the wards among the fever cases, the railway injuries and the gunshot wounds that the cattle town produced in rich variety, learning to scrub, dress, lift and sit up. She learned to sit with the dying without talking. She learned to tell from a patient's colour, at the door, how long he had. The sisters who trained her said that she was the only probationer who had ever gone into a ward and stood still for ten seconds before she touched anyone, and that it was the ten seconds that counted. She met Homer Fannin on a wet evening in the winter of 1880, when she was sent from the infirmary to the druggist on Houston Street for a bottle of silver nitrate. He was twenty-three, thin, fair and tired, with the cough of a man who lived above a shop full of camphor, and he looked at the dose she named and said that it was a little strong. She said that she knew. He asked who had taught her. She told him. He said that he would like to know the answer to a good many other things, and was a fortnight working up to asking, and she went back for a second bottle that she did not need. They were married in 1881, in the church by the river, when she was nineteen, in a wedding at which the printing shop was shut, the drugstore was shut, and the infirmary sent a pair of sisters. She moved into the rooms above the shop, where the smell of camphor came up through the floor. She was a Proctor by blood and a nurse by calling, and she was a good deal more useful to the Ledger than she let on. The hunters of the Texas branch, who came in from the trail with bites and burns that a doctor could not be shown, had a place to go. They went to the rooms above the druggist's shop, to a red-haired nurse who would sit them down, clean them up and say nothing, and to her husband, who would send them out with a bottle of his own tincture and a round of silver shot, cast in the back room and weighed on the brass scales. She was the one who knew what to do with a bite. She washed it with a strong solution, and cauterised it, and, when the wound was of the right kind, sat up with the patient through the nights and made him swallow broth. She lost very few. Her sister and her brother, who both hunted, came to her with their injuries, and she was short with them, since she was a nurse and they were fools. Their daughter Cordelia Fannin was born in 1883, in the bedroom above the shop. She grew up with a high stool and a box of tablets, and she was not called, which was Sarah's own particular wish. She said that she had seen what the work did to the people in it, and that there was a great deal of work in the world that did not require a stake. She made no speech about it. She sent the child to school, and to the infirmary, and to the druggist's counter, and to bed at eight. Homer's cancer came in 1897, and she nursed him for eighteen months, in the same rooms, with the shop open below at his own request. He died in the autumn of 1899, at forty-two, and she sold the stock a year later and went back to the wards. She was thirty-eight. She nursed for another thirty-five years, in the infirmary, in the homes of her neighbours and, in 1898 and again in 1917, in the camps, where the Great War filled the army posts of San Antonio with young men from every state and every one of them seemed to have a cold. She was fifty-six in the influenza of 1918, and worked for six weeks in a converted dance hall, in a mask of her own design, and did not lose a night. Her father had died in 1898, her mother in 1921, and her brother Barnabas in 1919. By the time that she retired she had buried most of the people whom she had nursed, and a good many of the doctors. She died in the spring of 1936, at seventy-four, of old age, in her own bed, in the little house on the Westside where she had lived for thirty years, the same year as her sister Martha. The brass scales stood on her sideboard. Her daughter Cordelia, who was fifty-three, sat with her, and was given, at the end, a short list of instructions that included what to do with the scales, and how long to boil a needle, and what to say to a man who came to the door at night. Sarah Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse of the White Ledger's Texas branch, the eldest of the Milam children, who could set a bone or sit out a fever without asking a question. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers of the Proctor line, the women who were not hunters and who mended the people who were, and who made a wound into an ordinary thing that could be dressed and forgotten.