William Kimbrough Proctor

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

William Kimbrough Proctor was born in 1853 at Seguin, Texas, and lived fifty-six years as a bookkeeper in San Antonio, a man of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger who was never a hunter and never minded. He was the younger son of the carpenter and vampire slayer Alan Proctor, The Swift Tally, and of the schoolteacher Fanny Kimbrough, and the brother of the slayer Frederick Kimbrough Proctor. He married the shopkeeper Emma Guenther in 1874, raised two children, Emma Proctor and Frederick Proctor, and died in 1909 of kidney failure, aged fifty-six, in the same year as his brother. His daughter became a slayer. He became, in the quiet way of the family's paperwork, the man who made certain that the Texas branch of the White Ledger could afford to go on existing, and that every dollar it spent could be shown to a cousin who asked. He was born at Seguin because his mother's people were there. The Kimbroughs, who had come to Gonzales as settlers in the twenties and walked east in the Runaway Scrape, had moved upriver after the war for Texas and taken a small farm a mile outside Seguin, and in the early spring of 1853 Fanny, who was teaching in San Antonio and expecting her second child, took the stage to her mother's house. Her first child had been born in a half-built house, and this one was born in her mother's best bed, under a patchwork quilt, in a room that smelled of lamp oil and dried apples. She said that she had learned from experience that the second was the easier. The child arrived late, in the night, in a spring thunderstorm, and was so quiet that the midwife slapped him twice to make sure. He opened his eyes and looked at her, and Fanny's mother said that he seemed to be adding something up. He grew up on the river in San Antonio, in the carpenter's house, three years behind his brother. Frederick was the tall one, the talker, the boy who was into everything. William was small, round and careful, with his mother's dark eyes and a habit of putting things back in the place where he had found them. He was fascinated by lists. At six he had made a catalogue of his father's chisels, in order of size, with a drawing of each, and at eight he drew up for his mother, without being asked, a chart of the school's attendance, in which three pupils who were consistently late had been coloured in red. She studied it for some time and said that it was very good, and that she would not be taking it any further. It was his mother who saw what he was for. Fanny, who had taught two generations of the town's children, knew the difference between a child who was slow and a child who was exact. She taught him double entry at twelve, on her kitchen table, with a set of household accounts, and he took to it like a cat to milk. There was something in the form that pleased him. A column of debits, a column of credits, a line at the bottom in which the two sides met and agreed: it seemed to him an arrangement of extraordinary beauty, in a world that was otherwise untidy. His father, who was a hunter of the White Ledger and often out at night, noticed that the boy did not ask about the gun-case. He asked, instead, who paid for the silver. It was a serious question, and it got a serious answer. The Ledger's Texas branch ran on small sums, a few dollars from a cousin here, a fee from a town there, a debt paid in corn or in lodging, and nobody had ever added them up. Alan, at the kitchen table, one night in 1868, with the lamp low, put the tin box on the table in front of his younger son, and told him what was in it. William, who was fifteen, counted it. He asked for a pencil. By midnight he had drawn up, on the back of a school copybook, a statement of the branch's income and expenditure for the previous year, in which it could be seen that it had spent a great deal of money on a thing that it called, in the notes, bullets, and that the cost of the silver had gone up by a third since the war. His father read it through, twice. He said that it was the first time he had seen it written down. He was in his first post at sixteen, as a clerk in the office of a German merchant on Commerce Street, who traded in hides and wool and who had a bookkeeper who drank. By eighteen William had replaced him. The merchant, a stout, bald, honest Swabian named Kraus, taught him the German way of keeping accounts, in which every entry is checked by a second hand and nothing is ever rounded up, and the boy, who had already learned his mother's method, was delighted to discover that there were two. He learned to keep books in English, Spanish and German. He learned to draft a bill, to reconcile a statement and to spot at a glance the place where a clerk had been tempted. He said, afterwards, that the business of a bookkeeper was to find the point at which a figure lied, and that in his experience it was a good deal more often an error than a crime. He met Emma Guenther in the course of his work. She was the daughter of a family from the German settlements, who had come to Texas from the Hunsruck in the forties and taken land at New Braunfels, and she kept, at eighteen, with the help of a sister, a small shop on Market Street in San Antonio that sold cloth, buttons, thread, sausage, coffee and sweets, and that her father had set up for her when she refused to marry a dairy farmer. Kraus, who bought his wife's ribbons there, sent his junior clerk round with an unpaid bill. William stood in the shop with the statement in his hand, and she told him, in English and then in German, that the bill was incorrect. She produced her own books. He examined them. They were beautifully kept, in a round, upright hand, in columns that added, and the bill was, indeed, incorrect. He wrote to Kraus that evening that the error was on the firm's side, and went to see her again on the Saturday to explain. She said that he might as well have a cup of coffee. He stayed for three hours. They were married in 1874. He was twenty-one and she was eighteen, and the wedding was held at her father's church in New Braunfels, in the afternoon, with a great deal of beer and a Lutheran minister and a band of four, and the Proctor side, which was Methodist and rather outnumbered, sat in a row in the front and looked on with serious faces. Fanny said that she had not known that there was so much in the way of sausage. Alan, who was forty-three and had not danced since his own wedding, danced with his new daughter-in-law's mother. It was the best party that the family had for twenty years. They lived over the shop. Emma kept the stock, he kept the books, and the two firms, for so they were by the end of the decade, were kept by the same lamp at the same table. She was a large, red-cheeked, blunt, energetic woman, who could lift a bolt of cloth in each hand, and she ran the shop with a good-humoured ferocity that the trade admired. He was quiet. Their daughter Emma Proctor was born in 1876 and lived until 1950, and was called, in her turn, to be a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, to her father's considerable alarm, which he concealed under a glass of schnapps. Their son Frederick Proctor was born in 1879 and lived until 1943, and did not hunt. He went into the shop. William kept the accounts of the Ledger's Texas branch for thirty-five years. He did it in a locked book, in an office that he rented over a saddler's, and he never put in it a name or a place. He put in the sums. He recorded what had come in and what had gone out, what had been spent on silver, on horses, on lodging, on burials, and on the widows of the men who had been buried, and he made it balance. He persuaded the cousins to pay their dues in advance. He found, in 1881, when his uncle Alexander died, that the branch had been carrying a debt of eleven hundred dollars for seven years to a gunsmith in Austin, and he went to see the gunsmith, and paid it off in eleven instalments, with interest at one per cent. He said that it was the most dangerous hunt he ever went on. His father's death in 1883 took him by surprise, and his brother Frederick's taking up of the work in the same year took him by another. He did not resent it. He said that somebody had to count the cost, and that he was glad that it was not himself who was counted. His mother, who had by then retired from the schoolroom, taught his children their letters at her own table, and brought them to the shop on Saturdays. She died in 1895, and he wrote her entry in the ledger, in a steady hand. He survived the cattle-trail years and Reconstruction, and the great storm at Galveston in 1900, when his aunt's husband came home grey from the relief trains and his own shop sold every blanket that it had. He had a good head for a crisis. He said that the first thing to do in a disaster was to write down what you had. He was taken ill in 1908, with a pain in his back that did not go away, and was told, in the spring of the following year, that his kidneys were failing. He went on with the books. He worked in the office above the saddler's until the week of his death, and he closed the last account of the Ledger's Texas year on a Friday in October, in a clear hand, with a total that agreed to the cent. He died two days later, at fifty-six, in the room above the shop, with his wife and daughter beside him. He had buried his brother in the spring, and it was said that he had never been the same afterwards. William Kimbrough Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the bookkeeper who made the Ledger balance, the quiet son of a hunter and a teacher. In the Slayerverse he stands for the treasurers and clerks of the White Ledger, the people who counted the cost of the long war, in silver, in horses and in widows, and who never once let the sum come out wrong.