Beatrice Navarro Proctor

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

Beatrice Navarro Proctor was born in 1904 in Bandera, Texas, in the cedar hills of the Medina country, and lived fifty-two years as a boarding-house keeper on the Westside of San Antonio. She was the only child of the newspaper compositor William Adams Proctor of the White Ledger line and of the laundress Ana Navarro of the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions. In 1922 she married the cattle drover Ralph Dow, and they raised two children, William Dow, born in 1925 and dead in 2012, and Helen Dow Proctor, born in 1929 and dead in 1998. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, though she was brought up between a pistol in a cedar box and a stack of newspaper clippings of the dead. She died in 1956 of cancer, aged fifty-two. The Proctors remember her as the keeper of a house in which a tired cousin could always get a bed, a meal and a straight answer, and in which, for thirty years, the White Ledger's Texas chapter had an address. She was born at Bandera because her mother went home to the hills. It was the first week of January of 1904, and Ana Navarro, who was twenty-eight and had been married a year, had been told by her aunt that the Navarro women were born in the cedar-picket house on the Medina, where her own father had been raised, and that a child born anywhere else would never learn to find a well. The aunt had died, but the house stood, with its dirt floor and its good water, and Ana, who was not a woman to argue with a custom, took the stagecoach from San Antonio with a bundle of laundry and her husband's mother's advice. William Adams Proctor, who could not leave the case at the newspaper, was to follow when the child was due. He was on the Saturday night coach and arrived two hours late. The baby, who had waited for no one, had been delivered by an old neighbour, in a hurry, with a goat in the kitchen and a pack of hounds in the yard, and was brought back to San Antonio at six weeks, in a blanket, on the seat of the northbound coach, with her father holding her in both hands as though she were a column of type. She grew up on the Westside, in a small frame house with a laundry in the yard, and she remembered all her life the smell of it, bluing and starch and wood smoke and hot iron. Her mother's laundry was a loud, busy place with a copper, a mangle, two girls and a long line of white sheets, and her father's presence in the house was of the opposite kind, a quiet and orderly figure, who came home at three in the morning with ink on his collar and went straight to the kitchen table with a pair of small scissors and the night's newspaper. He was cutting out the notices of the dead. She sat on his knee at the age of five and watched him read them, and asked what they were for. He said that they were for the family. She asked which family. He said that when she was bigger he would tell her. She said that she was bigger. He gave her the scissors, which were blunted, and a page of the agricultural prices. She was told what the family did on her fourteenth birthday, at the kitchen table, by her mother, with her father at the end of it and a pistol in a cedar box between them. She said that she had known about the box. She said that she had also known that the notices were not all about people who had died, and that her father had a way of cutting out one name twice. She was a short, dark, direct girl with her mother's jaw and her father's patient eyes, and she took the news without surprise and with an immediate wish to know what she could do. Her mother said that she might do what her grandmother's aunts had done, which was to keep a house. Her father, who was no hunter, said that there was no shame in it, and no safety in anything else. The influenza of 1918 was her apprenticeship. She was fourteen, and the Westside was full of the sick. Her mother's laundry boiled sheets for a hundred and forty beds, and Beatrice, who had never had a day's illness, carried the baskets, the bluing and the water, and learned the order of a house in an emergency, which is to feed the well, bury the dead, and write it all down. She was found by a visiting cousin at three in the morning, in the kitchen of a boarding house on Presa Street where she had been sent to help, ladling soup into thirty bowls with a list of names pinned to her apron. She had, the cousin said, the face of a woman of forty. The keeper of the house, who was her mother's cousin, took her on the next week as a girl of all work, and by the time that she was eighteen she was running the dining room. She met Ralph Dow in the summer of 1921, at the back door of that house. He was a drover out of Seguin, twenty-one, long and sunburnt, in a hat that had been through a prairie fire, and he had come in with a packet of letters from a man who had gone ahead on the road. She told him where the soap was. He said that he had no complaint about the soap. She said that she was sorry to hear it, for in her experience drovers always did. He came back, every month, with the herd, and then every week without it. She watched him for a year. She watched how he spoke to the lodgers when they were drunk, how he tied his horse, and what he did when the laundress's little boy dropped a basket of eggs. In the spring of 1922 she told him the plain truth of the Ledger, on the back step, in the evening, in a flat voice, and he said that his grandmother in the Guadalupe valley had nailed a horseshoe over her door and that his father had cut it down every year and she had put it back. She thought that it would do. They were married in the autumn of 1922, at the church of San Fernando, in a ceremony that two Methodist uncles and a Catholic aunt had spent six weeks arranging. Her mother had made the dress, a plain, deep blue, with the starched collar that she had once ironed for an officer's mess, and the Navarro women took charge of the Dow relations at the door and did not give them up until morning. They took two rooms in the house on Presa Street. William Dow was born in 1925, in the winter, in the cedar-picket house at Bandera, where Beatrice had gone home to the hills as her mother had, and was brought back to Presa Street within the month. Her father, who set the announcement himself, in six-point type, with a flourish, died that autumn of the cancer that had been in him for two years, and she held his hand. She was twenty-one. It was in this year that she took over, by a quiet arrangement among the Proctor cousins, the lease of the house. It was a tall, narrow, shabby place on three floors, with a porch, an iron bed in every room and a green-painted kitchen. She ran it for thirty years. It was not a hotel. It had twelve rooms, all let by the week, and the lodgers were mostly drovers, railway men, travelling salesmen, a nurse or two, a retired army sergeant and a changing complement of people with no particular business in town. The cousins of the White Ledger who came through San Antonio on their rounds, on the road to the ranches and the border and the river towns, slept in the end room on the second floor. Beatrice kept two books. One was the register, in which every lodger was written, and the other was a green ledger that lived in the flour bin, in which she wrote down who came, who left, who looked at the window and who ought not to have been on the stairs. She said, in her dry way, that it was a hard house to rob and an easy house to find. Her husband, Ralph, who was a drover and was often away for a week, brought home what he saw on the roads, and she made it into the book. Helen Dow Proctor was born in 1929, and by the custom of the family, in which a name passes through the daughters, carried the Proctor name at the end of her own. The children grew up in the passage between the kitchen and the dining room, learned to carry a tray at six and to lock a door at seven, and were not called. The Depression years were bad. The soldiers who had filled the Westside in the war had gone, the cotton was down, the cattle were worth nothing, and she kept the house open on credit, with a pot of beans on the stove and a chalkboard in the hall on which was written, in her hand, the single word Supper. She never turned a drover away. She wrote off, by her own account, a little more than six hundred dollars, and was repaid in the end by about a third of it, in the form of a saddle, a quilt and forty-one eggs. She lost her mother in 1934. She nursed her through the last week, in the room behind the laundry, and the cedar box with the pistol was given to her, unopened, in the spring. She put it under her own bed, where it stayed. The war years of the forties filled the town with soldiers, airmen and war-workers, and the house was never empty, and she made it do for sixty at a time, with six beds in the dining room. Her son William, who was sixteen when the war began, drove cattle for his father. Her daughter, who was twelve, ran the dining room, and was called a tyrant by the lodgers. The cancer began in 1954, and she hid it for six months. She worked the house to the end of the winter, and in the spring of 1955 she took to her bed in the front room. Ralph, who had given up the long drives, nursed her, and made the coffee, which was dreadful. She died in the autumn of 1956, aged fifty-two, in the room above the porch, with her husband and children beside her, in the years after the Korean War, when the army posts around San Antonio were still full and so was the house. The lodgers, who had heard the news from the foot of the stairs, stood in the hall with their hats off. Somebody noticed that the chalkboard still said Supper. Beatrice Navarro Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the keeper of the house on Presa Street, the Navarro daughter who never raised a pistol and always set a place. In the Slayerverse she stands for the innkeepers and landladies of the hunting houses, who gave the hunters a bed, a meal, a locked door and an honest ledger, and who proved that a house kept properly is as old and as good a defence as any the families ever built.