Bartolo Proctor

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

Bartolo Proctor rang a brass bell forty times a day on the streetcars of San Antonio, and in thirty years he never once rang it for anything that was not on the route. He was born in 1863 in Seguin, Texas, and lived sixty-nine years, first for a short and unlucky time as a rancher on the Comal and then for most of his life as a streetcar conductor among the ranches, cattle trails and German settlements around San Antonio. He was the younger son of the teamster and vampire slayer Alexander Proctor, The Proud Quill, and of the laundress Carolina Navarro, and the brother of George Proctor. The Ledger records no wife and no children for him. He died in 1932 of old age, aged sixty-nine. He was not a hunter, and he said so himself, often, to anyone who seemed to be hoping otherwise. He belonged to the Proctor bloodline of the White Ledger, which descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, but he bore, by name and by temper, the Navarro side, and the family remembers him as the conductor who carried the lantern. He was born at Seguin in the year after his brother, by the same arrangement and for the same reason. His father drove the Cotton Road with a wagon train for the Confederacy, and when the second child was due, in the spring of 1863, Carolina went again to the stone house by the ford, where her husband's great-aunt kept the room in which three Proctors had already been born. The aunt, who was eighty and deaf, took a long look at the new baby and observed that he was a Navarro. She meant the dark hair and the set of the jaw. She also meant, it was understood, that he was going to be stubborn. He was named Bartolo for his mother's father, the rancher of the Comal, who had guarded the San Antonio missions and who was, at the time, somewhere in the brush with a company of Unionist Tejano militia, and who did not hear that he had a namesake until the autumn. He grew up in the river house, between the tubs and the tailboards, and was a silent, sturdy, watchful boy who was always looking at the horizon. His brother George was the clerk. Bartolo was the Navarro. He spent every summer that he could at his grandfather's ranch on the Comal, on a small, tough pony, and learned from the old man to ride, to rope, to read a cloud and to keep a lantern trimmed, since the Navarro men stood a turn at the mission doors on the dark of the moon, carrying a light along the old road to Espada, as they had done for a century, and asking nobody why. His father's death in 1881 found him eighteen. He said that he would go on with the ranch. His grandfather, who had died the year before in a fall from a horse on that very road, had left him the use of a half-section on the Comal and a herd of scrubby cattle, and he took them up with the heavy, unhurried determination of a man who has decided to be content. It was a hard country. The eighties on the Comal brought a run of dry years, and the great drought of 1886 killed a third of the cattle in southwest Texas. Bartolo lost two-thirds of his. He sold the rest at a loss to a German butcher in New Braunfels, paid what he owed, and stood at the end of the half-section with his hat in his hand, looking at the cracked bed of the spring that had given the town its name. Then he rode into San Antonio, found that the mule-drawn streetcar company on Commerce Street needed a conductor, and took the job. He said that it was the first steady thing that had happened to him. The streetcars of San Antonio in the eighties ran on light rails behind a pair of mules, from the Alamo Plaza out to the river and the German quarter, to the stockyards and the Fair Grounds and the barracks, and the conductor, who sold the tickets, called the stops, kept the fare box and held the lantern on the dark runs, was a person of small importance and great knowledge. Bartolo knew everyone. He knew the ranchers who came in on Saturdays, the trail drivers who came in for the herd sales, the soldiers from the post, the German girls who went out to the breweries, and the people who did not go out in the day. He was a large, quiet man, and he stood on the back platform with his arms folded, and he was not noticed. It was the best cover that the Ledger ever had. The White Ledger's Texas chapter came to depend on the back platform of the Houston Street car. The work was a small one, and he did it exactly. A conductor sees who gets on and where they get off, and whether they pay, and what they carry, and whether they will sit in the light. He made a note in a small book of what he saw, and he passed it, at the end of each week, to his brother George's office by the simple method of leaving it in a lunch pail on the floor of the car. There were a few names in it. He knew a woman who boarded at the same stop on the same nights for six months and never spoke, and who was followed, without her knowledge, by his uncle Alan, to a house on the Westside that turned out to be the thing the book had said. He noticed a man who would never take the seat beside the window, and who got off at once when the car turned west into the setting sun. His uncle took him, in a manner of speaking, to supper. When the electric cars came in 1890, they took the mules out of the traces and made the conductor's job a great deal more exact. Bartolo learned the new fare registers, the trolley poles and the schedules, and was made a senior conductor on the Main Plaza line, with a cap and a silver badge. He wore them with great gravity. He lived in a rented house on the Westside with a garden and a dog, and he kept the lantern of the mission road, in the Navarro fashion, in a cupboard under the stairs, and took it out on the dark of the moon and walked to Espada with it, alone, for forty years, and came back on the last car. He said that it was the only thing in his life that he had done because somebody asked. The Galveston storm of 1900 sent a number of refugees up to San Antonio, and he helped to carry them from the depot to his mother's yard, and his mother's death two years after was a blow from which he did not entirely recover. He stayed on the cars. The Great War, in which the Army camps at San Antonio filled with soldiers and pilots, doubled his fares and made him a great many acquaintances, all of them in a hurry, and in the influenza of 1918 he drove the car that carried the sick to the hospital, for three weeks, without a fare. His brother George died that year, and he buried him next to their mother. After that he was the last of the family on the river. He retired from the cars in 1928, at sixty-five, with a watch and a pension, and went to live on the Comal, in a small house near the old ranch, with a view of the springs, where he sat in a chair and watched the clouds. He died in the summer of 1932, of old age, at sixty-nine, in the chair, at dusk, with the lantern beside him and the wick trimmed. Bartolo Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the conductor of the Main Plaza line, the Navarro in the family who walked the mission road with a light. In the Slayerverse he stands for the watchers of the White Ledger who did not fight, the people of the public places who noted who got on and who got off, and who carried the lantern because somebody had to and nobody had asked.