Evelyn Proctor

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

Evelyn Proctor nursed the wounded of San Antonio for thirty-five years, and a good many of them were people who could not go to a hospital and say what had happened to them. She was born in 1923 in Alamo Heights, San Antonio, Texas, and died in 1980 of a long illness, aged fifty-seven. She was a nurse by trade, a member of the House of Proctor in the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and she was not a vampire slayer, though her mother was one of the best. She was the elder child of the railway clerk Warren Kalteyer and of the seamstress and slayer Elizabeth Proctor, The Winter Yoke, and the sister of Warren Proctor Kalteyer. She never married and had no children. She worked in the barrios, on the river walk side of the city and in the wards of the military bases, and she served the Ledger in the way that a nurse can, by treating its injured and by keeping a record of the cases that came to the wards and that no doctor could explain. The Proctors remember her as the nurse who asked what had bitten you and wrote the answer down. She was born in Alamo Heights because her mother's cousin kept a lying-in house there. It stood on the hill above the city, a roomy white frame place with a deep porch, run by a widow who had been a midwife and who took in four or five expectant mothers at a time from the Westside and the railway streets, on the principle that a baby ought to be born in a house where the water was clean. Elizabeth Proctor, who had settled on a doctor but who feared the hospital, went up the hill in the last week of January 1923, with a hat box, a notebook and a pistol that she was asked to leave downstairs. Warren Kalteyer, who could not leave the freight office, took the streetcar to the end of the line and walked the last mile. The child was born on the second floor on a cold afternoon, with a norther rattling the windows, and was handed to her father in a flannel shirt. She had a good deal of dark hair, a very firm grip and her mother's way, noted by the widow, of looking at the room as if she suspected it of being untruthful. She was taken home to the little house by the Southern Pacific yards in a week. She said that she had been born on the hill and brought up in the cinders, and that the combination had made her sensible. She grew up in a house of timetables and hat boxes. Her father taught her the stations of the Sunset Route at five and her mother taught her to take a statement at eight, and between the two of them they gave her a way of listening that she carried into every ward that she ever entered. Her younger brother Warren was born in Indianapolis in 1925, in a winter when Warren Kalteyer was lent to a railway auditor for four months, and the family, for a time, followed the work north, which was the first and last occasion on which Evelyn lived east of the Mississippi. She remembered it as snow, a boarding-house stair and a great many strange voices. She minded her small brother in the evenings with a firmness that her mother described as the best thing in the household. At ten she bandaged a neighbour's dog. At twelve she set the broken arm of a boy from the alley, with a ruler and a strip of a flour sack, and at fourteen she had read the whole of her mother's first-aid book, which her mother kept for a reason that was not explained. Her mother had decided, early, that she should be left alone. Elizabeth Proctor had been called at seventeen, in a sickroom, with nobody having asked her, and she was determined that her own daughter should be asked, and should be allowed to say no. She told Evelyn, at sixteen, what the Ledger was, and told her at the same sitting that she was not required to take any part in it. Evelyn said that she understood. She then asked whether she might at least be taught what to do for a person who had been hurt. Her mother, who had expected a refusal, laughed, and it was one of the few times that Evelyn had seen her do so. Her father died in the autumn of 1941, at his stool, over a waybill, and Evelyn, who was eighteen, took a place as a stenographer in the same freight office, for a year, in order to learn what the room was like. She did not stay at the typewriter. The war years drew every capable girl in San Antonio into something, and in the summer of 1943 she entered the cadet nurse corps at the Robert B. Green Hospital, a county hospital of the Westside with long open wards, a dispensary and a smell of carbolic. It was a hard training, in a hard city. She learned to bathe a patient, to turn a bed, to take a pulse and a temperature and to read a chart, and she learned, from an Irish ward sister, that a nurse was a witness. She was told to write down what she saw, plainly, in her own words, and not what the doctor would like to read. She took it to heart. She qualified in 1946, and in 1948 she took a post at the hospital at Fort Sam Houston, the great army medical centre on the north side of the city, where the Korean War, in the early fifties, filled the wards with burned and wounded men flown in from the Pacific. It was in the wards of the military bases that she first understood what her mother had been talking about. In the winter of 1951 a young soldier was brought in, who had been found in the brush near a Hill Country camp, with the marks of a bite on his neck and the colour of a candle, who could not say what had done it and who would not look at the window. The doctors thought that it was a dog. Evelyn, who had the dressings, looked at the wound, and saw that it was not the shape of a dog's mouth. She did not say so on the ward. She wrote it down in the nurse's notes, in her small clear hand, and that night, off duty, she took the train to the Westside and showed it to her mother. Elizabeth, who looked at the page for a long time, said that it was a fine record, and that she would see to the matter. In the years that followed she saw to a good many. From that winter Evelyn kept, in the lining of her nurse's bag, a second notebook, in which she put the cases that did not agree with their explanations: the bitten, the drained, the sleepless, the patient who came in from a barrio clinic with a fever that no thermometer would show. She did not hunt. She said so, and her mother said it for her. She nursed. A hunter, who had been hurt in a night's work and who dared not go into a ward, was brought to her flat on the Westside by a cousin in a car, in the small hours, and she cleaned the wound and set the stitch and gave the dose, and said nothing at all, while her mother stood in the doorway and said nothing too. She treated, by her own count, thirty-three of them in thirty years. She was never once heard to ask a question that she did not need the answer to. She said that the only vow she had ever taken was the nurse's, and that she had found it sufficient. The city changed round her. In the sixties she transferred to a civilian hospital, and then to the Santa Rosa, and was a charge nurse on a surgical floor at forty. She was there in the Vietnam years, when the military wards of the city were full of young men and the families of San Antonio went about with a quiet, public grief. In the summer of 1968, when the city threw open the great world's fair that it called HemisFair, tore down a whole district of old houses to do it and filled the river walk and the new tower with a million visitors, she was lent for six months to the first-aid station at the fairgrounds, and treated sunstroke, blisters, heat and a good many fainting ladies. She enjoyed it. She said that it was the only job that she had ever had in which she had been paid to do nothing but be kind. Her mother had died in 1963, in her chair by the window, with the little book in her basket, and Evelyn, who had come to the house at noon, found her. She nursed no one else in the family after that, until she was ill herself. The illness began in 1976, with a tiredness that she described to her colleagues in the language of the chart, and it took four years. She kept her own record of it to the end, in the small notebook, in a hand that grew smaller, with the date and the dose and the temperature and, in the last weeks, a note of the weather. She died in the autumn of 1980, in a hospital bed on her own floor, with her brother Warren, who had come down from Chicago, at the foot of it. The night sister, who had trained under her, said that she had asked for the window to be opened, and had observed to the room, quite clearly, that the patient in the corner was not as well as he looked. Evelyn Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse who asked what had bitten you and wrote the answer down. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses and healers of the White Ledger, the ones who never took the field, who mended the hunters and kept the record of the wounds, and who proved that a clean dressing and an honest chart are as much a part of the long war as the pistol that makes them necessary.