Colleen Green

Spouse of Timothy Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Colleen Green was born in 1970 at Bandera, Texas, and is living today in Bandera, where she has worked for thirty years as a librarian. She is not a hunter and is not a vampire slayer, and she belongs to no house of the Ledger, which lists her as unaffiliated, with no alias, archetype or craft. In 1995 she married the bus driver Timothy Proctor, the son of the slayer Edwin Proctor, The Iron Otter, and of the telephone operator Vera Dawson, and through him she entered the Proctor bloodline, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486. They raised two sons, Gary Proctor, born in 1996, and Michael Green Proctor, born in 1997, neither of whom was called. The family remembers her as the person who treats the Ledger as the library treats a closed collection, to be kept in good order, consulted by arrangement and never, under any circumstances, lent out. Bandera in 1970 called itself the Cowboy Capital of the World, and was a town of eight hundred people on the Medina River, in the Hill Country forty miles north-west of San Antonio, with a limestone courthouse, a feed store, a dance hall and a great many cedar-choppers. It had been settled by Polish families in the 1850s, and German and Mexican ones soon after, and its oldest graves, on the hill above the river, carried names in three languages. Colleen's father kept the books for a ranch supply and ran cattle on forty acres of rock, and her mother was the secretary of the elementary school and the church. She was the second of three, a long-legged, freckled, silent girl with spectacles, and she grew up in a stone house with a tin roof and a porch from which one could watch, at dusk, deer coming down to the creek. She was not a cowboy's daughter in any sense that the tourists would have understood. She was a girl who read. The library was the old Bandera County Library, a one-storey limestone building on a side street with a green door, a rocking horse in the children's corner and a librarian named Mrs Hendricks who had known every child in the county by the age of four. Colleen walked there every afternoon from the age of six, with a tin of her mother's biscuits for the librarian, and by ten she had read the shelf of children's books and begun on the local history. She liked it best. It was the sort of history that one finds in small places, in bound volumes of the parish paper, in the handwritten register of the county clerk and in a wooden drawer full of photographs of people standing in front of houses that no longer existed. She spent a summer, at thirteen, copying the names from the cemetery on the hill into a spiral notebook, and she was able, at seventeen, to tell a visitor from Chicago exactly who the great-great-grandfather in the third row had been. The oil bust of the middle eighties reached the Hill Country slowly, and then all at once. The ranch supply laid off two clerks and then closed, and her father, who was fifty-two, went to work in the oil patch near Pearsall for two years on a rig crew, driving home on Fridays with a sunburnt neck and nothing to say. Her mother took in sewing. Colleen, who was sixteen, took a Saturday job at the library and stayed on, and when she graduated from the county school she went, on a scholarship that Mrs Hendricks had quietly arranged, to the university in San Antonio, where she took a degree in English and a master's in library science, and rode the city bus to class in the dark every morning in a quilted coat. It was on the bus that she met him. He drove the number thirty-six, a long, rattling, early route that ran from the Southside through the old barrios to the university, and she took it at ten to six, and for six months, as she said, they exchanged a single sentence. She said good morning. He said good morning. Then one February morning, when the heater failed and the bus was cold and half-empty and the rain was coming sideways, he turned round at a red light, looked at the book that she was holding and asked whether it was any good. It was a history of the Texas Rangers. She said that it was dull. He said that he preferred a good timetable. She laughed so loudly that the one other passenger woke up. Timothy Proctor was twenty-one, a tall, round-shouldered, patient man with a quiet voice, a clean-shaven jaw and a way of turning a wheel as if it might break. He had grown up on the Southside, in a house with a garage lathe and a telephone in every room, the elder son of a machinist and a telephone operator, and he had taken the job at the transit authority at eighteen because he liked the work. A bus driver, he said, is a person who gets people where they are going, and who sees who is on the street. He drove the same routes for years and knew every stop, every regular and every house that had been empty for a month. He was not a hunter. He had said so, to himself, at fourteen, and to his father at sixteen, and had been told that the Ledger, as it happened, had a good many uses for a man who liked the quiet. His younger brother Terrence, who was called, was said to have been relieved. They were married in 1995, in the spring, at the church in Bandera, with her brother as best man, his parents in the front pew, and a good many bus drivers and four of the county's librarians at the back. Edwin took her aside on the eve of the wedding, in the churchyard, with his hands behind his back, and told her in a few plain sentences what his family did. She heard him out. She asked whether it was written down, and he said that it was. She asked whether it was accessible, and he said that it was not. Then she said that she would be glad to look after it, that she would treat it as a closed collection, that it would not be lent out or copied or discussed on the telephone, and that she would not need to know the contents unless she was asked. Edwin, who had been prepared for a number of reactions, said afterwards to his wife Vera that he had never seen anyone take the news so well, and Vera, who was a telephone operator, said that she had never seen a woman so well suited to a switchboard. She took a post as the assistant librarian at the Bandera County library in 1996, and was the head librarian by 2003. Gary was born in the autumn of 1996 in a stone house on the edge of town with a cedar fence, a pecan tree and a rain barrel. Michael was born in the winter of 1997 at a hospital on the Westside of San Antonio, where she had gone to stay with her mother-in-law. She brought up both boys in the library, in the back office, among the date stamps and the card trays, and taught them to read before they could walk, nearly, and to keep quiet, which she held to be the more useful of the two. They were not called. Gary, who was solid and cheerful, grew up to love the outdoors, and Michael, who was thoughtful and quick with a joke, followed his father in liking a timetable. Both are grown, and she sees them on Sundays. In the matter of the Ledger she has done precisely what she promised. She does not read it. She is the person to whom the Hill Country cousins, who are the Proctor and Navarro families of Bandera, Boerne, Kerrville and Medina, send their copies of old deeds, parish books and newspaper clippings for safe keeping, and she keeps them in a locked cabinet in the back room of the library, under a plain label that reads Local History, Restricted. She catalogues them without reading them, which she says is possible if one has a good eye and a poor curiosity. She is trusted entirely. A hunter who needs a record sends a note, with a date and a name, and on the following day a photocopy comes back in a brown envelope, with nothing written on it. On the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 she was in the library, with eleven children in the story circle, and she finished the story. In the oil bust, and the later busts that followed it, she has seen the county fill and empty and fill again, and she has kept a shelf, near the door, of the free paperbacks that the unemployed are welcome to take home. In the pandemic years the library closed its doors, and she stood on the porch with a table and a mask, handing out books in paper bags, and Timothy, who had been driving an empty bus through the winter, came out each Friday to help carry. She is fifty-six, a tall, slim, silver-haired woman with the same spectacles and a long, level, amused way of looking at a person, and she still walks to work. Timothy, who has driven the same route for thirty-five years, takes the long way home. Colleen Green is remembered in the Proctor family as the Bandera librarian who kept the cousins' papers in a locked cabinet and never once read them, the hill-country daughter-in-law of The Iron Otter. In the Slayerverse she stands for the kin of the White Ledger who were never called, the archivists and keepers of confidences, who held the records safe in plain rooms and proved that a closed door, a good label and a discreet silence can guard a secret as well as any gun.