Adriana Navarro

Spouse of Alexander Proctor Thorne, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from the House of Navarro.

On the Westside of San Antonio, in the first half of the twentieth century, a woman named Adriana Navarro could be found most Sunday evenings at a kitchen table with a pair of scissors, a pot of paste and the previous week's newspapers, cutting out the paragraphs that nobody else would have noticed. She was born in 1891 in San Antonio, on the Westside, Texas, and worked as a seamstress for forty years, in the front room of a house that was always full of other people's dresses. She was the only child of the newspaper compositor Vicente Navarro, and in 1916 she married the telegraph operator Alexander Proctor Thorne, and they had two children, James Proctor Thorne and Norma Proctor Thorne, of whom the younger became a slayer. She died in 1953 of kidney failure, aged sixty-two. She was not a hunter and she did not pretend to be one. She was born into the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions, and she married into the White Ledger of the Proctors, which descends from Isabel Proctor, who married Thomas Faulkner in January 1486, and for the better part of forty years she kept the book of clippings that her father had begun, the nearest thing the missions had to a newspaper of their own. The Westside was the old Mexican quarter of the city, a district of limestone cottages, goat pens, tortilla stalls and small gardens, lying west of the San Pedro Creek, and she grew up in the middle of it, in a narrow house with a gallery, a fig tree and an aunt on each side. Her mother is not named in the family papers. She did not survive the first year, and the child was brought up in a household of women, her father's two sisters and a neighbour, Doña Refugio, a widow of the old ranching stock who kept a pot of beans on the stove from dawn to dusk and held views, on a great many subjects, that she did not trouble to share. They were an energetic, affectionate and argumentative household, and she was the only person in it who was not allowed to be loud. Her father, who was out at the composing room of the Express until midnight, came home to a house of sleeping women and a small girl in a nightdress waiting up at the table with a book. He taught her to read from the headlines at four. It was sewing that claimed her. Doña Refugio, who was an excellent needlewoman and a worse teacher, gave her, at twelve, a bolt of calico and a pattern and told her to make a dress. She made it, ripped it twice and made it again. At sixteen she was taking in work from the Westside, shirts, aprons, christening gowns and the stiff black dresses that the old women wore, and at twenty she had a treadle machine of her own and a steady line of customers, whose daughters she was to dress in turn. She was famous for her buttonholes. The women of the Westside said that a buttonhole by Adriana Navarro would outlast the garment, the husband and the church. The clippings were her father's, and then hers. He had begun them in the late seventies, a ledger of small items, a drover who never came back to camp, a farm abandoned at harvest, a family gone from a mission ranch with the cattle loose, and he had brought it on Sunday evenings to the old men of the Navarros, in the back room of a house on the Westside, to read aloud. She had sat on the floor, in the corner, as a child, and had taken it for a story. When she was fourteen, he told her what it was, and in the course of that year she learned to read it as he did, backwards and sideways, for the pattern. At sixteen she had begun to keep a second copy. At twenty she was cutting, pasting and cross-indexing the whole of the Express and the Light by herself. Her father said that she had the best eye for the small print that he had ever met, and had the grace not to say that it was better than his own. The Mexican Revolution came across the river in the years after 1910, and the Westside filled with refugees, families who had left Coahuila and Nuevo Leon with a trunk and a blanket, and the clippings, which had been a trickle, became a flood. Whole districts were emptied. There were reports of ranches abandoned on both sides of the line, of bodies found without blood, of new hamlets in which the doors were barred at dusk, and Adriana, who read them all, sat down at her father's table, in 1913, and drew a map. It was a big map of south Texas and the borderlands, on butcher's paper, with a pin for each item, and it showed what the Navarros, who had been looking at single trees, had not been able to see, that a certain kind of disappearance was following the railways. She gave it to the old men. They were silent for some time, and then asked her to make a copy. She met her husband in the summer of 1915, at a wedding. Alexander Proctor Thorne, a thin, fair, quiet young man who had been born at Bandera, in the Hill Country, where his drover father happened to be working a herd, and raised in New Orleans, and who had come out to San Antonio to take a post with the telegraph, was a guest of a Navarro cousin, and sat at the end of a long table with a glass of lemonade, listening. He had a way of listening that she noticed at once, with his head slightly tilted, like a man receiving a message. She asked him what he heard. He said, a good many things. She said that she would like to know them. They were married in 1916, in the church on the Westside, with her father in a black suit a size too large and a cake from the Express, and a delegation of her husband's family, Thornes from Kentucky and Louisiana and Proctors by descent, who had come west by train in a body. They set up house in two rooms on the Westside, and she hung her sign in the front window. Alexander, who knew the White Ledger as he knew the alphabet, told her the shape of it on the second night, and she told him the shape of the clippings on the third. They found that they had been working, in different ways, at the same task. He took the telegraph, in the small hours, and she took the newspapers, and between them, on a table in the kitchen, they kept, for thirty years, as full a record of the dark in south Texas as any chapter of the Ledger could have wished. He brought home a wire about a cattle train that had come in with its doors open and nobody on it. She brought out the clipping that explained it. They did not hunt. They said that it was other people's job. But they were the only people in San Antonio who always knew where the hunters ought to go. Their son James Proctor Thorne was born in 1917, a quiet, thoughtful boy who lived until 2000 and was not called to the work. He grew up in a house with a sewing machine in the window and a sounder on the shelf, and he learned both. Norma Proctor Thorne was born in 1921, in the autumn, at Phoenix, in the week that the great flood came down San Pedro Creek, and the news of it reached her mother over her father's wire on the night of the birth. Norma was a small, dark, intent girl, who sat at her mother's knee with the scissors and read the clippings at the age of nine, and who was called, in due time, to be a slayer of the White Ledger. She lived until 1949. Her father died at the stone in the composing room in the spring of 1919, and she took his book, in a flour sack, to the old men of the Navarros, and went on. She sewed through the Depression, when the Westside, which had never had much, had still less, and she made over every coat in the district. She sewed through the war years, when the city filled with soldiers from the camps and fields around it, Fort Sam Houston, Kelly, Randolph, and every girl in the barrio wanted a dress for a dance. She made, by her own count, four thousand dresses. When the news came, in 1949, of Norma's death, she sat for a day in the kitchen with the scissors in her lap, and then she got up, put on her apron and went to the machine. She said that there was a wedding on Saturday. The Korean War brought the wounded back to the hospital at Fort Sam Houston, and she, who was nearly sixty, went with a bundle of nightshirts to the wards, and sewed for them, sitting on the beds, for as long as they would let her stay. Her kidneys had been failing for a year. She did not complain, and she did not stop. She died in the winter of 1953, at sixty-two, in the front room of the house on the Westside, with a half-made dress on the table and a book of clippings, with its last page unpasted, at her elbow. Her son found the last item on the Monday, and finished the entry for her. Adriana Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as the seamstress of the Westside, the daughter of the compositor who cut out the small print and kept the book of what the newspapers would not say. In the Slayerverse she stands for the readers and recorders of the White Ledger, the people with scissors and paste who never took the field and who, by seeing the pattern in a column of trivia, told the hunters where to go.