Helen Dow Proctor

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

Helen Dow Proctor was born in 1929 at Bandera, Texas, and lived sixty-nine years as a nurse in the hospitals and army wards of San Antonio, a woman of the White Ledger who served it with a thermometer, a clean apron and a closed mouth. She was the younger child of the cattle drover Ralph Dow and of the boarding-house keeper Beatrice Navarro Proctor, and the sister of William Dow, who was born in 1925 and who, like her, was not called to the work. She did not marry and had no children. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, though she was raised in a house where a pistol lived in a cedar box under the bed and the chalkboard in the hall said Supper. She died in 1998 of old age, aged sixty-nine, which is the phrase the family papers use for a woman who wore herself out on other people. The Proctors remember her as the nurse who could be telephoned at any hour of the night about a cousin who had come home with something on his sleeve, and who never once asked what it was. She was born at Bandera because her mother followed a custom. The Navarro women had been delivered, for three generations, in the cedar-picket house on the Medina where Beatrice's own mother, Ana, had come into the world, and Beatrice, who had been born there herself in 1904 and who ran a house of twelve rooms on the Westside of San Antonio and trusted very little, trusted that. In the spring of 1929, three weeks before her time, she took the bus up the hill road with a bundle of linen, left her husband to feed the lodgers and her son William, who was four, with a neighbour, and was delivered of a daughter in the same back room, with the same good well in the yard and a different goat. Ralph Dow, who had a herd to move from Cuero and could not leave it, arrived on the third day with a sack of oranges and an expression of grave embarrassment. The child, who was small and noisy, was carried back to the Westside in a basket, and carried the name Proctor at the end of her own, according to the family's old custom by which a name passes down through the daughters. The house on Presa Street was a good place for a child who liked to know what was going on. It was tall and narrow and shabby, with a porch, an iron bed in every room and a green-painted kitchen, and it held, at any one time, a dozen lodgers, a retired army sergeant, a pair of railwaymen, a travelling salesman in corsets and, on the second floor, in the end room, whichever cousin of the White Ledger happened to be passing through. Helen learned to carry a tray at six and to lock a door at seven. She learned that a tired drover who has been paid will eat three helpings, and that a man who comes in at three in the morning with his collar turned up does not wish to be asked about his evening. At twelve, when her brother was driving cattle for their father and the war had filled the town with soldiers, she ran the dining room, and the lodgers, who called her a tyrant, tipped her anyway. The cedar box was another matter. Beatrice, who had been given it by her own mother, Ana Navarro, in 1934, had put it under her bed unopened, and she told her children, once, plainly, what the box was and what it was for, and that nobody in the house was to touch it. William took the news with a shrug. Helen took it with a question. She asked her mother who, in that case, set the broken arm of a man who came in with one, and her mother, who was a woman of few words, looked at her for some time and said that it was usually whoever was nearest. It was the best career advice she ever received. At seventeen, in 1946, Helen entered the nursing school at one of the San Antonio hospitals, in a stiff cap and a pair of black stockings, and found that she was good at it. She was patient and fast. She had a pair of hands that were never in the way. She also had, from the lodging house, the rarer gift of being able to look at a person who was lying and see exactly how frightened he was. She was a graduate by 1950, in the first summer of the Korean War, and the city, which had been a garrison town for as long as anyone remembered, filled again with young men in uniform and then, within the year, with the wounded coming back. She took a post in a ward at Fort Sam Houston as a civilian nurse, among the army doctors and the orderlies, and she kept it, with a short interval at a private hospital on the Westside, for the rest of her working life. The wounded from Korea came in on stretchers, with the frostbite and the shrapnel and the long silence of men who had seen too much, and she learned that the first duty of a nurse is to be a steady object in a room. She did not talk about the work at home. She said that if she carried it she would drop it, and that the dining room was no place for either. The Ledger found her, in the ordinary way, through the ward. A Proctor cousin who was a vampire slayer, and who had come in with a deep cut across the forearm and a story about a barbed-wire fence, found that the nurse who dressed it was the daughter of Beatrice Navarro Proctor. Nobody said anything. He came back the next week with a bruise and a different story, and the week after that with a friend. By 1953 Helen was the nurse to whom the White Ledger's Texas chapter sent its wounded, and she cleaned and sewed and bandaged and wrote it up, in a plain hand, under a code of her own, in a notebook that lived in the pocket of her uniform. The hospital's own records were extremely tidy, and most of them were true. She had an eye for a bite that was not a dog's, and she asked her patients no more than a good nurse should, which was whether it hurt and when they had last eaten. She was never seen to hurry. Her mother's illness began in 1954, and Helen, who by then had a room of her own in the nurses' home, took the night shifts on the Presa Street house and the day shifts on the ward, and slept, by her own account, in the streetcar. Beatrice had hidden the cancer for six months and went to bed in the spring of 1955, and her husband Ralph, who nursed her with great devotion and a bad cook's confidence, took the days. It was the nurse's part to know what was coming, and she knew. She told her father, in the green kitchen, in clear plain words, what the doctors had said, and he put down the coffee pot and sat for some time. Beatrice died in 1956, with the family beside her and the lodgers in the hall with their hats off. Helen, who was twenty-seven, had made the bed that morning, and said that she had never been so useful and never so little use. Ralph, who lived nine years longer, kept the house on, with the stockyards by day and a dog by night. The war in Vietnam brought the burn cases, and the long wards at Fort Sam Houston, where the army kept its surgeons for that kind of injury, were full for ten years of boys in bandages. She worked among them in the late sixties and the seventies, and the White Ledger, as it happened, had its own use for such a nurse, since a creature that has been dealt with by fire leaves a particular kind of mark. She advised a number of hunters on their burns. She never said where she learned it. When her father died in 1965, at sixty-five, of old age, she nursed him too, in the front room, for a week, and then went back on shift on the Monday, having arranged for the dog. She was never married. She was asked, twice, once by an army surgeon and once by a sergeant from the lodging house days, and refused them with the same kindness, and the cousins who knew her best put it down to the ward. She lived in a small frame house on the Westside, not far from the church, with a porch, a garden of tomatoes and chillies and a succession of cats, and her door, as the family say, was never locked. Her brother William, who farmed and drove cattle, lived near. She had the habit of keeping a spare room made up. When the oil bust came in the middle of the eighties and the city's money went with it, she cut her hours at the hospital and took in the ones who could no longer pay, among them two Proctors, and she charged them nothing and kept the book. She retired in 1994, at sixty-five, with a pension, a pin and a very sensible pair of shoes. She spent the last four years in the house on the Westside, with the cats and the garden and the telephone. She died in the autumn of 1998, of old age, at sixty-nine, in the same chair in which she had done her accounts, with a cup of tea at her elbow and a stack of notes beside it. The notes were a hospital's worth of the White Ledger's wounded, forty years of them, in a clear small hand, each one with a date, a dressing and a name. Helen Dow Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse of Presa Street and Fort Sam Houston, the girl from the lodging house who kept her hands steady while others held the pistol. In the Slayerverse she stands for the healers of the White Ledger, the women and men who closed the wounds, kept the notes and sent the hunters out again in the morning, and who never needed a craft to be indispensable.