William Adams Proctor

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

The deaths column of a San Antonio newspaper in the 1910s was set by hand, line by line, by a man who had to read it upside down, and for fifteen years a good part of it was set by William Adams Proctor. He was born in 1877 at Seguin, Texas, the younger son of the newspaper compositor and vampire slayer Frederick Kimbrough Proctor, The Fallow Seal, and of the boarding-house keeper Emma Adams, and he worked all his life as a newspaper compositor at the case of the San Antonio papers. In 1903 he married the laundress Ana Navarro of the House of Navarro, and they had one daughter, Beatrice Navarro Proctor, born in 1904 and dead in 1956. He died in 1925 of cancer, aged forty-eight, three years before his elder brother Frederick Adams Proctor. He was never a hunter and never pretended to be one. He belonged to the White Ledger by blood and served it by typography, which is to say by reading very carefully what other people had written and noticing what was wrong with it. He was born at Seguin because his mother went up to her husband's cousins for the confinement. It was the early spring of 1877, the boarding house on Alamo Street was full, and the railway, which had arrived in San Antonio in the last week of February, had filled the town with contractors, surveyors and gamblers, every one of whom wanted a bed. Emma Adams, at thirty-three, with a two-storey stone house and a four-year-old son, declared that she would not be delivered in a room that she had let to a railway engineer. She went up to the Kimbrough farm on the Guadalupe by wagon, with Fanny Kimbrough beside her correcting the driver's grammar, and the baby was born in the same farmhouse where his uncle William had been born twenty-four years before. He was round, pink, cheerful and silent, and he was brought home to San Antonio at a fortnight in a hatbox, which Fanny said was the only container in the county that would keep him from the draught. He was a child of the case. His father set type all day at the newspaper and came home with his fingers stained, and the boy, who had been taught to read at his grandmother's table, crawled under the boarding-house tables after the lodgers' dropped spectacles and sorted them by size. At six he was allowed to distribute type, which is the job of putting back into their compartments the letters that a forme has used, and he did it with a particular content. He said afterwards that a box of type was the only thing in the world that was completely honest. Every letter had a place, every place a letter, and if you put the wrong one in you found out at once. His elder brother Frederick, who was four years older, was the one who asked questions. William was the one who checked the answers. He went into the trade at fourteen, in 1891, at the case beside his father's, in the office of a weekly on Main Plaza, and he learned what his father had learned, which was to set exactly what was on the copy and not what he thought ought to be there. He worked the night shift for most of his life, six until two, among the smell of hot lead, damp paper and strong coffee. He set the market reports, the railway timetables, the cattle prices, the sermons, the weddings and the court news. He acquired a large vocabulary of obscure words and an instinct for the misprint that made him, in his later years, a minor celebrity among the proofreaders of the town. He could see an upside-down transposition at twenty feet. He was said to be the only compositor in San Antonio who had never made a literal in a banner headline, and he did not like to be reminded of the day on which he had. His parents were the Ledger's own, and he learned it in the way that the children of the family did, at the table, by means of the silence. His mother, in the boarding house on Alamo Street, kept a green register of the people who had slept in her rooms and were noticed by her, and his father, at night, took statements in the back room and sealed them with wax. He was not a hunter. He said that he had no talent for it, in a tone that did not invite discussion. He could not hear the gap in a witness's story, which was his father's gift, and he could not keep a cool head in the dark. What he could do was read. The day that his father noticed it, at the case, in the spring of 1895, was the day that William found his place in the work, for his father looked at him across the forme and said that there was work for a man who could read a column. The work was the deaths. A Ledger man in a newspaper office has a particular use, because every notice of a death, a disappearance, an illness or an unusual burial comes across the compositor's case before it comes across the public's breakfast table. William, who set them, read them. He read them in the ordinary way, for accuracy. He noticed, in the course of a year, that there were certain notices that came in a certain form. A death, reported in the morning by a person of a particular name, at an address that turned out, when it was looked for, to be a vacant lot. A funeral, advertised for a church that had no record of it. A line in a column of dead soldiers, the next week, that repeated a name that had appeared two years before in another town. He did not know what they meant. He cut them out, with a pair of small scissors, and gave them to his father in an envelope, and his father, who did know what they meant, took them to the back room. It was a service that the family had not known that it needed, and it lasted thirty years. He met Ana Navarro in 1899. His mother, who was a keen judge of a good washing, had asked him to find a laundress who would take on a large and difficult commission of the boarding house's sheets, and he went to the Westside, to a little room off the street with a copper and a mangle, in a black apron with a sack over his shoulder. The proprietor, a strong, dark young woman with her sleeves to the elbow, examined the sheets, sniffed them, and told him that they had been boiled in the wrong water. He said that his mother would be glad to learn it. They talked in the yard for an hour. He went back every week, and then without the sheets. In the winter of that year he asked her father Ramon, at the kitchen table, for leave to marry her, and Ramon, who had a reputation, received him with a courtesy that astonished the street and gave him a glass of something strong. Ramon died in the spring. The wedding was put off three years, for the mourning, and took place in 1903 at the church of San Fernando. They lived on the Westside, in a small frame house with a yard for Ana's lines, and their daughter Beatrice Navarro Proctor was born in 1904, in the winter, at her mother's family house at Bandera, and brought home to the Westside at six weeks. William was a doting father. He taught her her letters off a font of type, which she learned to read backwards, and he brought home the spoiled proofs of the Sunday comic supplement for her to colour. He was not a man who was easily excited, but he was known to hold up the last edition of a newspaper for a quarter of an hour, in 1904, because his daughter had been born in the night and he had to tell someone. The foreman, who had four children of his own, sent up a bottle. The house had losses, in the next ten years. His mother died in 1906, at her desk, with her register open, and his father in the spring of 1909, after a long illness. The deaths column of that year, which he set himself, ran to forty-one lines, and he never complained of the work. The Great War came in 1917, and he set the casualty lists from the camps, in columns of nine-point, for eighteen months, and learned, as he said, that a name in a newspaper was the most solemn arrangement of lead in the world. The influenza of 1918 filled his case for three months. He set the deaths in relays, in a shop with half the hands sick, and noticed, in the second week of October, a notice for a burial that could not have taken place. He cut it out. It went, as they all did, into the envelope. He was taken ill in the winter of 1924, with a pain that would not go, and was told in the spring that it was cancer. He went on working at the case until the last month, when he could no longer stand. He died at home, on the Westside, in the autumn of 1925, at forty-eight, with his wife at his bedside and his daughter, who was twenty-one, holding his hand. His brother Frederick, who had been out on the roads, came in from a ranch near Pearsall in the night and sat with him till dawn. The foreman of the composing room set William's obituary himself, without being asked, and read it upside down, and found no error. William Adams Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the compositor who read the deaths, the quiet brother of the Lone Reeve who set the news of the dark without ever touching it. In the Slayerverse he stands for the printers and proofreaders of the White Ledger, the men who kept the record straight and who proved that an error, caught in time and carefully cut out, is as good as a witness.