Darren Proctor

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

Darren Proctor was born in 1995 at San Antonio, Texas, in the King William district, and is living today in San Antonio, where he works as a line cook among the barrios, river walk and military bases of that city. He belongs to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger and descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, and through his mother he carries the blood of the Navarros who guarded the missions, but he is not a hunter, not a vampire slayer, and was never called. He has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of his own. He is the only child of the electrician and slayer Travis Proctor, The Lone Sieve, and of the schoolteacher and slayer Melissa Navarro, The Hard Furrow. He has not married and has no children. The family distinguishes him from his Savannah cousin Darren Wood Proctor by the simple device of calling the one a cook and the other a tester, and it remembers him as the cook of the White Ledger, the man at the back door of a kitchen who saw that nobody coming off a night's hunting went home hungry. The kitchen is a long, low, hot room behind a restaurant on South Alamo Street, a few doors from the old limestone houses of the district, and at ten past two on a weekday morning, when the last tables have gone and the grill has been scraped, it is the best-lit place in King William. There is a stool by the back door. It has been, for nine years, the one place in the building that nobody sits on without being asked, and on a number of nights in every month someone is sitting on it. He is a cousin from the Hill Country with a torn sleeve, or a woman in a county nurse's coat with a thermos, or two silent men from Floresville with mud to the knees, and the line cook, who has not been told what they have been doing and does not wish to be, puts a plate in front of each of them, with beans, rice, a fried egg and two tortillas, and says that the kitchen is closed. He has fed, by his own count, a little over three hundred of them. It is a calling, if one wishes to put it so, of the kind that is never put in a book. He was born in the old hospital downtown on a hot night in July, because his grandmother insisted. Elena Navarro, who had been a laundry supervisor in San Antonio for thirty years and who had a laundry supervisor's way with an arrangement, had been told by her son Travis that his wife Melissa, who taught the fifth grade in Victoria, meant to have the baby there. She said that it was a pity. She reminded her daughter-in-law, over the telephone, with great politeness, that Melissa herself had been born in Victoria because her own grandmother would have it so, and that she had heard, from persons who ought to know, that it had been a most uncomfortable drive. Melissa, who had been bargaining with Navarro grandmothers all her life and knew a settlement when she saw one, packed a bag and came to San Antonio at thirty-six weeks, and the baby was born in the second week of the month, in the old hospital that stands within sight of the river, with Elena in the corridor in her best blue dress. Travis, who had rented two rooms for the summer in a limestone cottage on a quiet King William street, carried his wife home in the truck, and set up the cot in a back room with a ceiling fan and a window that looked on to a fig tree. The baby was fair, round, placid and wide-eyed. His grandmother pronounced that he had been born in the proper place. He grew up between the two towns. In term time he lived in Victoria, with his mother, in a small house near the elementary school on the south side where she taught, and was known to the whole building as the fifth-grade teacher's boy, a status that he said carried more responsibility than any other in the town. In the summers and at weekends he was driven the hundred and twenty miles to San Antonio by his father, who wired houses and commercial buildings across the city and who kept the rooms in King William for the work weeks, and who in the course of the long drives said very little and listened to the ball game. The boy liked baseball and the hum of a school bus. He liked, above all, to be in a kitchen. His grandmother Elena's kitchen on the south side, and his grandfather Carlos's cookouts in the yard at Victoria, gave him the whole of a Texan education in tortillas, caldo and fried chicken, and by nine he could keep three pans going and talk to a grown woman at the same time. His grandfather Carlos, who coached, said that a boy who could manage a stove in a crowded room would be a good point guard. Nobody asked him to be called and he was not. His parents told him the truth at fourteen, on the porch in Victoria, over a plate of tamales, his mother with a straight face and his father with the air of a man who would have preferred to do it by memo. He listened to the end. He asked whether he would be expected to hunt, and his mother said that nobody had ever been expected to, and that the Ledger had been kept by a very large number of persons, many of whom had never gone out after dark in their lives. He said that he would, in that case, like to be one of the ones who fed them. It was the Ledger's own custom to make such a choice without ceremony, and his father, who had been a hunter for a good many years, put a hand on his shoulder and said that it was the most sensible thing that he had ever heard. He cooked his way out of school. He washed dishes at fifteen, peeled onions at sixteen and was put on the line at a family restaurant in Victoria at seventeen, a long, loud, cheerful kitchen in which he learned to do forty covers an hour with a burn on one wrist and a radio over the stove. At eighteen, in 2013, he moved to San Antonio, rented a room in King William over the garage of an old woman who sold pecans, and took a post on the grill of a restaurant that served Tex-Mex dishes with a German accent, a combination that suits the district. He was promoted to the sauté station in two years and to the head of the line in five. A line cook is the most reliable man in a restaurant. He does the same thing a hundred times a night, in the same order, and he does it the way that he did it last night, and it is because of this that a hunter who comes in at two o'clock wanting something to eat knows exactly what he will be given. In October 2015, when the rains came down in a night and the river rose to the foot of the bridges, the restaurant stood in two feet of water, and he spent three days in rubber boots carrying sacks of flour to the upstairs rooms of cousins on the Southside, who had no power, and who ate by candlelight. He has two rules for his stool. The first is that nobody is asked a question. The second is that the plate is never the same twice, since a hunter who has had the same meal on three consecutive nights is a hunter who is being followed, and a cook who has noticed it should say so. It was in this way that he alerted his father, in 2019, to a man in a grey raincoat who had sat in the corner for four evenings running ordering nothing but coffee. Travis, who had been told to expect it, took a night in the corner himself, and the raincoat did not come back. The Ledger asked Darren, in the following spring, whether he would take over the catering for the Navarro feast of San José, a three-day affair at the old mission for four hundred cousins, and he has done it six times. His grandfather Carlos died in the winter of 2019 on the porch step in Victoria, with a cup of coffee, and Darren, who was twenty-three, drove down with a pan of enchiladas in the back seat, because nobody else had thought of it. In the pandemic years the restaurant closed for eleven weeks and he kept a small kitchen going from the cottage in King William, making a hundred meals a day for the hospital staff of the district, and a great many of them, in a van at midnight, for the families of the White Ledger who could not leave their houses. In the great freeze of February 2021, when the power failed over the whole of the state, his mother sat in a cold house in Victoria with a wood stove and a reata and his father in a van with a generator, and he in San Antonio, with a gas range and no electricity, fed a street. He is thirty-one, a stocky, fair, friendly man with burn marks on both forearms and a towel on his shoulder, who lives in the same room over the pecan woman's garage, and who is said to be the only cook in King William who has never once been seen in a hurry. Darren Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the cook of the White Ledger, the man on the line who kept a stool by the back door and a plate for whoever sat on it. In the Slayerverse he stands for the cooks, caterers and kitchen hands of the old houses who were never called, who asked no questions of the hunters who came in at two in the morning, and who showed that the first weapon of any long night's work is a hot meal, put down at the right hour in front of a person who has not had one.