Carolina Navarro

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

Carolina Navarro was born in 1844 in New Braunfels, Texas, at the springs on the Comal where her father kept his ranch, and lived fifty-eight years as a laundress on the river at San Antonio. She was the daughter of the rancher and militiaman Bartolo Navarro, of the Tejano House of Navarro, who guarded the San Antonio missions, and she married the teamster and vampire slayer Alexander Proctor, The Proud Quill, in 1861. She raised two sons with him, George Proctor and Bartolo Proctor, neither of whom hunted, and she buried her husband in 1881, when she was thirty-seven. She was not a slayer and did not pretend to be one, but she carried the Navarro name and its old duty of the lantern into the White Ledger, and for forty years she washed, starched and repaired the coats of the hunters of Bexar County without once being asked what was on them. She died in 1902 of a fall, at fifty-eight, on the old mission road that her father had walked every dark of the moon. A Monday at her laundry began at four in the morning, and it was a great deal more exact than it looked. She took her place at the stone wash-tubs on the bank of the San Antonio River, under a live oak, below the Navarro Street bridge, with six women, three copper boilers, a great stack of sheets and a paddle, and by the time the light came they had been at work for an hour. She washed the linen of two boarding houses, a military hospital, a Catholic school and a great many private customers, in whom the German families of King William Street were prominent. She sorted the loads into whites, colours and the things that were not to be sorted by anyone but herself. Those were kept in a separate basket, marked with a knot in the handle. They were the coats. She knew a good deal about the coats. A coat that has been worn by a vampire slayer is an archive, and she learned to read it, in the way that her husband's family read the Ledger. There is a particular way in which a hem wears when a man has been kneeling in wet grass, waiting. There is a stain that comes of a silver salt and a stain that comes of ordinary blood, and a third that is neither, which does not wash out and which she did not name. There is a burn, at the wrist, from a silver-cast bullet fired in too much haste, and a smell of old stone that clings to the lining of a coat that has been in a mission crypt. She did not ask. She took each in, washed it as it required, stitched what was torn, and entered, in a small book in the lid of the basket, the date and the nature of the damage. The hunters of the White Ledger said that she was the only woman in Texas who could tell them, from the state of a sleeve, how their week had gone. She was born at the ranch on the Comal, in the year before the town was laid out, in a low house of adobe and limestone with a thick door and a deep well. The German settlers, who had come by the thousand to the Republic of Texas, were already on the road, and in the spring after her birth, in 1845, Prince Solms and his company marched up the San Antonio road, laid out a town on the Comal springs, named it for a castle in Germany and bought from her father, at a fair price, the land they needed. Her father, who had never had much to do with Germans, found that he liked them, their beer and their singing. The child grew up in a house that was, within a year, in the middle of a German town, and she learned a little German, which was useful, and a little of the Comanche and Lipan that her father spoke, which was less so. Her mother, whose name the family papers do not give, taught her to sew. The duty of the House of Navarro was a simple one. The five old missions along the San Antonio River, the Concepcion, San Jose, San Juan, Espada and the ruined Alamo, had been built by the Franciscans and were half empty, and the ranching families who had the mission lands took it upon themselves, from father to son, to see that they were not left unwatched at night. A man stood at the old doors with a candle and a lantern and let the things that came up the ditches see him. Carolina, who was a girl, was not at first allowed to do it. She did, however, carry the candle. From the age of six, on the dark of the moon, she went with her father on the ranch cart to the mission of San Jose, sat on the tail-board with a blanket round her, held the wick steady and said nothing. It was, she said afterward, the best education she ever had. Her father sent her to town to school at twelve, to the schoolmistress Catherine Oppenheimer, who taught the children of the old families and the new, and she lived with an aunt, a widow who took in sewing, at a house on Soledad Street. She was a quick, dark, small, practical girl, with very straight eyebrows, who sat at the front of the class and corrected the sums, and Catherine, who was a judge of pupils, said that she was the best she had taught. She was also, for a number of years, the object of a quiet, unspoken regard on the part of the schoolmistress's younger son, who came in winter to carry his mother's books across the plaza. He was a fair, thin, dark-eyed boy of seventeen, who did not say very much. She said a great deal. They were married in 1861, in the church of San Fernando, in a grey dress that her aunt had sewn, with a silver bridle from her father and, from her mother, a wedding candle in a tin. The war began in the spring. Alexander, who was eighteen, went to the Cotton Road as a teamster, and she, who was seventeen and expecting, took in washing. It was her aunt's suggestion. A woman with a baby could not do a day's work at a shop, but she could do it at the river, and she began with three tubs and a neighbour's boiler. Within a year she had a dozen regular customers. Within three she had the contract for the washing of the Confederate hospital on Commerce Street, at fifteen cents a dozen, and had to employ four women. She learned her trade, and she learned to bargain. She said, in her sixties, that it was the war that had taught her that a day's work has a price, and that a woman who does not name it will never be paid. Her sons were born in the first years of the war. George Proctor was born in 1862 and lived until 1918, and Bartolo Proctor was born in 1863 and lived until 1932, and neither was a hunter. They were raised at the river, between tubs and tailboards, and learned, before they learned to read, to tell a clean sheet from a dirty one at twenty paces. George, who was like his father, went into a counting-house and became a clerk, and Bartolo, who was named for his grandfather and was the Navarro of the two, went out to the Comal and took a ranch, and stood his turn at the mission doors. She kept the duty of her house. She had not been taught to hunt, and her husband did not ask it of her, but on the dark of the moon, after the children were in bed, she went out, with her father's candle in its tin and a lantern, and stood at the door of the mission of San Jose for an hour, and then walked home. Her husband, who was a hunter and a realist, took the view that it could do no harm. Her father, who had been worried about the thing ending with him, took it as a great gift. She did it for thirty years. Alexander died in 1881, on the Goliad road, and she sat up with him all night. She was not a woman for display. She washed his coat herself, folded it and put it in the chest at the foot of the bed, and said to her brother-in-law Alan, who had come in from a hunt to see her, that the coat had been the cleanest thing he ever owned. She took in more work. By the year eighty-five she had thirty regular customers, and in the nineties she kept thirty women and two steam boilers and had the largest laundry on the river. She also did, at cost, the washing of the two boarding houses that the Proctors used, the larger of which belonged to Emma Adams, who was married to her husband's nephew. Her father died in 1880, in a fall from a horse, on the mission road, and she buried him in the churchyard at Espada. In September 1900, when the great storm struck Galveston and the survivors came to San Antonio by train, she washed, without payment, the clothes of nearly two hundred of them, in a single week, hanging the wet garments on every line in the town. It was the largest wash of her life. She said that it was the only one in which she had never had to ask what was on the linen. She was fifty-eight when she died. It was a night in the autumn of 1902, on the dark of the moon, and she had gone out, as always, with her candle and her lantern, on the old mission road to San Jose. There had been rain, and the bank of the acequia was slippery, and she missed her footing on a stone bridge and fell eleven feet into the dry bed of the ditch. She was found in the morning by a boy who was driving cattle. The lantern was beside her, unbroken. The candle, in its tin, was still alight. Carolina Navarro is remembered in the House of Navarro as the washerwoman of the San Antonio River, the daughter who carried the candle. In the Slayerverse she stands for the lay watchers of the Tejano missions and the laundresses of the White Ledger, the women who were never on any tally and who read, in the hem of a coat, the whole story of a hunt.