Bartolo Navarro

Member of House of Navarro, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Bartolo Navarro was born in 1808 in the springs country of central Texas, where the town of New Braunfels would later be laid out, and lived seventy-two years as a militiaman, a rancher and a guardian of the San Antonio missions in the House of Navarro. He belonged to the Tejano ranching families who had held the river crossings and mission lands of the province for five generations, and he stood, as a young man, with the Tejano companies in the year of the siege and fall of the Alamo. He had one recorded child, Carolina Navarro, born in 1844 and dead in 1902, who in 1861 married the vampire slayer Alexander Proctor and so carried the Navarro name into the White Ledger. He died in 1880 of a fall, at seventy-two, having outlived the Spanish province, the Mexican province, the Texan republic and the Confederacy, and having guarded the same stretch of river under all five. The House of Navarro was not a family of slayers in the sense that the Faulkners and the Proctors were. It was a house of ranchers, vaqueros, militiamen and lay guardians who had taken on, in the eighteenth century, a duty that the old Franciscan fathers had left behind when the missions were secularised: the watching of the San Antonio mission lands at night. The five missions along the river south of the town, Concepcion, San Jose, San Juan, Espada and the ruins of the first Alamo, had been built by the friars with Indian labour in the 1720s and 1730s, and by the time of Bartolo's birth they were half empty, their walls pocked, their granaries sagging, their irrigation ditches, the acequias, silted and overgrown. The families who had been given the lands, the Navarros, the Seguins, the Arocha, the Ruiz, kept the ranches going, ran cattle on the old mission pastures, and kept up, as a point of family honour, a tradition that the missions were not to be left unwatched. Nobody could have said exactly why. The old women said that the friars had asked it, and that the friars had been right. Bartolo was born on a ranch on the Comal, a short, swift river that rises from great springs in the limestone hills some thirty miles north-east of San Antonio and runs, in its whole course, for less than three miles. The country was open, dry and beautiful, with live oaks, prickly pear and low hills, and the clear blue water of the springs, which never ran low in the worst drought, made it a natural place for a ranch. His father, whose name the family papers do not give, ran cattle and horses there, and had done so since before the boy's birth. His mother, equally unrecorded, was a woman of the old school, who rode a horse astride at sixty and kept a small silver crucifix on the door of the corral. The boy was raised in a house of adobe and limestone, with a flat roof, a thick door and a deep well. He learned the range. By six he was on a horse. By ten he could rope a calf, read a brand, find water in the dry season and follow a trail by the turned edge of a stone. By fourteen he was working the cattle with the vaqueros, and he knew the country from the Guadalupe to the Medina and the mission ruins at the end of it. He learned to shoot, which everyone did, and to carry a lance, which was the old weapon of the province. He learned Spanish, which was his own speech, and a good deal of the Comanche and Lipan that was spoken at the edges of the country, and he learned, as a matter of course, the stories that every Tejano child was told at the fire: that there were things in the old mission chapels, at night, that did not like the light, that the friars had buried certain men in the floors with their hands folded the wrong way, and that one did not walk through the old granary after dark without carrying a blessed candle. The stories were not stories. He found that out at fifteen, when his uncle took him to the mission of San Jose on the night of the Feast of Saint Joseph, and gave him a lantern, a lance and a rosary, and told him to stand at the west door and to say nothing. He stood there until dawn. Something came up the acequia in the dark, and stopped, and went away again, because a boy with a lance and a candle was not worth the trouble. His uncle, who had been standing in the shadow of the arch with a rifle, came out and embraced him. He said that the boy had done what was asked. It was the whole of the duty. One stood in the door, in the light, and was seen. In the years that followed, Bartolo took his turn on the watch with the other men of the house. They did not hunt. They were ranchers and militiamen, and most of them had never fired at anything they could not name. They stood at the old doors, in rotation, on the feast days and the dark nights of the moon, and they carried a lantern, a blessed candle and a lance, and they let the things that came up out of the river and the ruins see them, and know that the missions were watched. It was a simple and, according to the family's own testimony, surprisingly effective method. Nothing that has been seen by a man who is not afraid has much heart to approach him. He enlisted in the local militia at twenty, in the Tejano company of the San Antonio district, which was charged with riding the roads, guarding the river crossings and keeping the peace against raiders. It was a period of growing tension. The Mexican government had opened the province to American settlers, and the newcomers, who had their own ideas about land, slavery and law, were restless under Mexican rule. In 1835 the quarrel broke into open war, and in the winter of that year the Texan volunteers took San Antonio and garrisoned the old mission of the Alamo. Bartolo, who was twenty-seven, rode with the Tejano cavalry that scouted for the Texan army. He did not join out of hatred for Mexico, for he was a Mexican citizen and had been brought up to be one. He joined, he said later, because the Texans were his neighbours, because the central government had sent an army of eight thousand to put them down, and because the Alamo was a mission, and one of his own. He was not inside the walls when it fell. In the last week of February 1836 he was out on the road to the east, carrying a message to the men at Goliad, and on the morning of the sixth of March, when the Mexican army stormed the old chapel at dawn, he was nearly a day's ride away. He came back through the smoke three days later, and stood for a long time at the wall, looking at the burnt ground. He said afterward that it was the only time in his life when he wished that the mission had been left unwatched, because it would have been easier than to have watched it and lost it. He buried what he could. He stood the night watch at the ruin for forty nights thereafter, alone, with a candle. The republic that followed was a turbulent one. The Tejanos, who had fought for Texas, found themselves regarded with suspicion by the Americans who had won it, and many lost their lands. Bartolo held on. He kept his ranch on the Comal, and in 1845, when the German settlers arrived in great numbers and laid out a town by the springs, he sold them, at a fair price, the land they needed for it, and kept the rest. He got on well with the Germans. He liked their beer and their singing, and he taught them, politely, where to put their wells. He married late, and the family papers do not say whom. The marriage produced one child, Carolina Navarro, born in 1844, a dark-eyed, quick, practical girl who was brought up on the ranch and educated in town, at the school of the schoolmistress Catherine Oppenheimer, who taught the children of the old families and the new. It was there that she met Catherine's son Alexander Proctor, a young vampire slayer of the White Ledger, who came to the school in the winter of 1860 to carry his mother's books. They were married in 1861, in the church of San Fernando. Bartolo gave the bride a good horse, a silver bridle, and his own candle. The Civil War was a trial for the Navarros as for everyone. Texas seceded, the Tejano families were divided, and Bartolo, who was fifty-three, was called up for the state militia and put to guarding the Gulf road. He served for three years, without enthusiasm. He used to say that he had been a citizen of four countries without once moving house. In the postwar years, under Reconstruction, he went back to the ranch, rebuilt the fences and took up his turn at the mission doors as though he had never been away. He died in the spring of 1880, at seventy-two, of a fall from a horse on the mission road, within sight of Espada. His daughter Carolina buried him in the churchyard there. The watch that he had kept for fifty years was taken up by his son-in-law's family, who found, when they came to look, that there were a good many nights when the old doors were already lit. Bartolo Navarro is remembered in the House of Navarro as the militiaman of the Comal, the guardian of the mission doors. In the Slayerverse he stands for the lay watchers of the old Spanish missions, the ranchers who held a lantern in the dark and were, for that reason alone, left unharmed.