Derek Proctor Kalteyer

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

Derek Proctor Kalteyer was born in 1960 at San Antonio, Texas, and died there in 2026 of a fall, aged sixty-six, after forty-one years as a high school coach in the barrios, river-side neighbourhoods and military suburbs of that city. He belonged to the House of Proctor and the White Ledger, the Yorkist line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, and he was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, though his brother was. He was the younger son of the diner cook Lloyd Kalteyer and of the hospital cook Mary Proctor Navarro, and the brother of Harold Kalteyer Proctor, born in 1957, the slayer known to the family book as The Quiet Weir. In 1978 he married the hospital cook Mildred Costa, born in 1956 and living today, and it was a childless marriage of forty-eight years. He had no alias, craft or gear of his own, apart from a whistle, a stopwatch and a clipboard, and he served the Ledger in the one way open to a man who could be trusted with other people's sons, by providing the cousins' children with a safe place to be on the nights when the grown-ups were out. The Proctors remember him as the coach who said that someone had better be at home, and who never once was not. He was born in the house on the south side, a few streets from the diner on Commerce Street, in the dust of a hot July, with his father on the grill and his mother two hospitals away. The family had a fig tree, a back porch and a house that smelled of bacon, coffee and cornbread, and the child who had grown up in it with his brother three years older found that the two of them had been put, by a kind of understanding, into different occupations. Harold, from the age of eight, watched his uncle Raymond at the table and said nothing. Derek, from the age of six, went out to the yard with a rubber ball and a broom handle and organised the neighbourhood. He was a stout, freckled, sunburnt, noisy child of immense good nature, and he could settle a quarrel on a corner in less time than it took to start it. His mother, who had run a hospital kitchen for ten years, said that he had the same gift for keeping forty people moving in the right direction. His father, who put him on a stool at the pass-through on Saturdays to turn the tortillas, said that it was a gift that was wasted in a kitchen. His brother's calling made the difference. Derek was eleven when Harold, at fourteen, was handed the old notebook, and he grew up with the knowledge, as plain as the weather, that his brother was to be the one who went out. He did not mind. He said, when asked, that the family had enough people at the door and not enough at the table. It was a remark which the cousins found mild and which, in later years, they began to repeat. At the diner, where he worked after school from the age of thirteen, he took the grill on slow nights and the accounts on slack ones, and he learned from his father what the back table was for. But he did not, after all, take up the trade. At the high school on the Westside he had played every sport in the book and was good at none, and a coach called Garza, a gruff Korean War veteran with a limp, said that he was the best captain the school had ever had and the worst quarter-back. Derek, who took the remark as a compliment, decided on the spot to be a coach. He married young. In the summer of 1978, a week after graduation, he married Mildred Costa, a hospital cook of twenty-two whom he had met at the Santa Rosa kitchen when he went to bring his mother a pan of rice that she had forgotten. Mildred was a calm, short, strong-armed woman of Portuguese Tejano descent who ran a diet kitchen on the third floor and who said, when he told her he meant to be a coach on a teacher's salary, that she had never expected to marry for money. They were married in the church by the river, in a small ceremony with his mother in a pink hat, his father cooking the breakfast and Harold, who had been called that spring and was not yet saying why, as best man. Derek took night classes at a college in the north of the city for five years, working the diner's grill in the days, and he took his degree in physical education in 1983 and a post, in the autumn of that year, as assistant coach at a high school near the Kelly Air Force base, a school of airmen's children, plumbers' sons and boys from the barrio, in a district where half the fathers were away at any one time. He coached at three schools. The first was the school near Kelly, and the second, from 1991, a larger one on the Westside, and the third, for the last nineteen years of his career, a high school in the river-side neighbourhoods south of downtown, within sound of the mission bells. He coached the junior varsity football team, the baseball team, the girls' softball and, when the principal was short of a man, cross-country and, on one occasion, the debating society. His records were not remarkable. His teams were reliably, cheerfully mediocre, and a boy on the bench was as welcome as one on the field. What was remarkable was the number of them who came back. He knew every boy's father's name, his mother's shift and the number of the bus that he took, and in the nineteen-eighties, when the oil bust of 1986 emptied a third of the city's houses and a third of his team's fathers lost their jobs, he ran a free lunch out of the field house, with a crock pot and a sack of tortillas that his wife brought on Fridays. The boys called it the Third Meal. He said that it was not charity but a team meeting. Mildred, who had gone from the hospital to the school cafeteria in 1990, ran the Third Meal herself, and the cousins of the White Ledger, who had always known that a Proctor kitchen was open at any hour, found that a Proctor gym was open too. A hunter coming off a bad night could sleep on the mats in the equipment room, under a team blanket, with the heating on, and be gone before the janitor was in. Derek never asked. He had put up, in the first years, a small notice in the office to the effect that the field house was a place of quiet, and what the notice meant was understood. The Ledger's children, whose parents were away at night, were brought by cousins to the gym on Thursdays and given a ball, a drink and a game to play, and the coach, a tall, round man with a whistle, kept them in view till the headlights came back. Harold, who drove down from Birmingham twice a year, said that it was the best-kept secret of the Ledger in Texas. Derek said that it was a gym. In the attacks of September 2001 he was in the field house at seven in the morning, running a weight class, and kept the boys there, in a circle, with the doors shut and the radio off, for an hour, so that no one would hear it first from a corridor. Lackland, a few miles to the south-west and a place of sixteen thousand recruits, stood at its gates that afternoon with a roadblock, and a number of his old players, in uniform, rang the school's office to ask whether the coach was all right. His father had died in 1989, of a fall in the diner storeroom, and his mother in 2007, in her kitchen, with a wooden spoon, and he carried both coffins, on the left side, as he had been taught. In the pandemic years the school was shut for a year, and he coached by video and by telephone, and was found most mornings in the empty field house, alone, with the lights on, setting out cones for no one. He retired in 2024 and was asked to stay on as a volunteer, and stayed. He died in the spring of 2026. It was a fall, the plainest of accidents, and the family did not speak of it for some days. He had gone down to the field before six, as he did every day, to walk the baseball diamond and set out the bases for the Saturday game, and in the dugout he put his foot on a concrete step that had been hosed down the evening before and had grown a skin of green in the damp, as the dugout steps always did. He went down on his side, and he struck his head on the edge of the bench. He was found at seven by the groundsman, a former player, who said that he had been lying with his eyes open and the stopwatch in his hand, still running. Mildred, who was living then and is living today at seventy, sat with him in the corridor of the hospital where she had once been a cook. Harold, who was sixty-nine, came from Birmingham the same night. The funeral was held on the baseball field, in the sun, with three hundred men in their forties and fifties in the stands, in clean shirts, and a bugler who was a former pitcher. At the end a woman of the parish, who had been a girl on his softball team, was heard to say that he had never lost a game that mattered. Derek Proctor Kalteyer is remembered in the Proctor family as the coach who stayed home, the younger brother of The Quiet Weir who kept the gym open for the hunters' children and the third meal on the table. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people of the White Ledger who were never called and never minded, who kept the lights on at the field house, and who showed that someone ought to be at home, and that the someone is not a lesser kind of hunter.