Jose Navarro

Slayer of House of Navarro, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Jose Navarro was born in 1934 in the King William district of San Antonio, Texas, and lived fifty-four years as an electrician and, from 1958, as a vampire slayer of the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions. The family book knows him as The Bitter Ferryman and classes him as a Mercenary, a hunter who sells his skill by the night or the season to whichever house needs it and answers to no ledger but his own. His craft was Horse Command, the art of working a mounted creature, and of working a horse against a hunted one, by voice, knee and rein, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He had one child, the slayer Todd Navarro, born in 1970, who in 1994 married Loretta Proctor of the White Ledger, six years after his father's death. Jose died in 1988 of a long illness, aged fifty-four. The mother of his son is not named in the family papers, and Jose, who was a private man, was never heard to supply the omission. King William in 1934 was not the fashionable district it is now. It had been the quarter of the German merchants who built the big limestone houses along the river bend in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, and by the Depression those houses were being cut into rooming houses and boarding flats, and the great stables behind them were let to whoever could pay. The Navarros rented one. It was a long cedar and limestone barn on a lane off Guenther Street, with a hayloft, a tack room and eight stalls, and it had a signboard that said Navarro Livery, which was optimistic in a city that had begun to prefer motor trucks. The family kept horses for the brewery, for a funeral director, and for a few old men who wanted a good riding horse on Sunday, and Jose was born, so the cousins said, in the room over the tack room, in the smell of leather, with a mare whinnying below the window. His mother, whom the papers do not name, died when he was small, and he was raised by a great-aunt, a stern, lame woman named Tia Pilar, who ran the barn with a cane and a ledger. He grew up among horses. By four he was under their bellies, by seven he could handle a big gelding on a lead, and by ten he could talk to one, which was not a figure of speech. A horse is a nervous animal and a good deal more observant than a man, and Tia Pilar, who had a very low view of the human race and a high one of the horse, told him that all the secret of it lay in being, for ten seconds together, an animal that has nothing to fear. He learned to stand still and breathe slowly, and to let his shoulders drop. A horse that knows that a man has no fear will go through a fire for him. At twelve he was breaking colts for the brewery. At fourteen he could take a skittish mare past a streetcar with his hand flat on her neck, and the old men at the barn would stop talking to watch. The trade he took up was a different one, and a modern one. San Antonio in the nineteen-fifties was a city that wanted electricity. The air base expansions, the new subdivisions, the shopping centres and the oil company offices were all wired, and a boy who could read a diagram and keep his head had a career. At seventeen, in 1951, Jose took an apprenticeship with a union electrical contractor, and he spent the next four years in attics, crawl spaces and trenches, running wire for houses and a good many commercial buildings. He was good at it. An electrician, like a horseman, has a feel for what is going to happen a moment before it does, and a respect for a thing that can kill him without warning, and the two trades, he said, used the same part of the head. He kept the barn for his great-aunt in the evenings, and rode on Sundays, and in the autumn of 1958, at twenty-four, he was called. It happened on the towpath of the old mill race, the ditch that runs behind the mills below the Alamo, where a path of beaten earth runs beside the water. He was taking a horse home, a grey, late, after a day on a job, and the grey, which had never shied in its life, stopped in the middle of the path with its ears pricked. A barge was drifting down the old cut with every lamp lit. It was a long, flat boat, and it had no pole, no mule and no one at the tiller, and it slid down the black water with its small yellow lanterns burning steadily along the rail, like a thing in a toy theatre. On the deck were two chairs and a table, laid for four. The grey did not shake, and Jose, who knew the horse, understood that it was not afraid of the barge. It was afraid of something that was standing on the far bank, under a pecan, looking at it. He sat on the horse for ten minutes, perfectly still, with his hand flat on its neck, and neither of them moved. Then the lamps on the barge went out, one by one, and the thing under the pecan went with them, and the grey, with a long shiver, took him home at a walk. He told his great-aunt, who put down her cane, and he went the next night, and the next. A kinsman of the House, Juan Navarro, the compositor who had been a hunter since 1921 and knew the ditches of the missions better than the city did, came to the barn on the fourth evening, in a grey hat, and said that he had heard from a man at the mill that there was a young fellow with a horse who did not scare. Juan was a Mercenary, and so, before long, was Jose, because the work of hunting on horseback is the work of the hired man, the one who is sent for when a creature has gone out into open country, to the ranches, the brush and the old mission lands, where a man on foot is of little use. The two men had a long conversation in the tack room. Jose came out of it with a pistol, a case of rounds and a name for the work. Horse Command was an older craft than the Navarro house could trace. The old mission ranchers of the Tejano families had run cattle on a hundred thousand acres of South Texas brush, and they had found that a vampire in open country was a thing that could be run down, as a mustang is, by men who could ride and horses that did not panic. A horse trained properly will stand against a creature that it can smell, and Jose, who had the gift, could train one. He had four, which he kept at the barn, a grey, a bay, a black mare and an ugly sorrel gelding, and he could send any of them across a pasture by night with a touch of the knee and a word, with a hunter on its back or without one, to turn a creature toward a fence. He took work from the House, from the Proctors of the White Ledger and from three of the Texas cousins, at a fair rate and without a quarrel, and he sent a bill. He said that a hunter who worked for nothing was a hobbyist, and that hobbyists got killed. The cousins called him The Bitter Ferryman, for the barge and for the tight, flat, humourless way in which he named a price. The city turned around him. In 1968 the old German quarter next door went up for the fair, and HemisFair raised its tower on the other side of the river, and the barn on the lane was sold to a developer, who made a parking lot. He moved the horses to a ranch on the south side, by a creek, and went on with the wiring, which was now in great demand, and put in half the lamps along the new river walk. The Vietnam years took some of the young hands from the barn, and he rode alone. His son was born in 1970, to a woman whom he did not marry, and who took no part in the Ledger, and he brought the boy up himself, in a trailer by the ranch, with a great deal of help from the great-aunt, who lived to be ninety-one and ruled the child as she had ruled the stalls. The boy was on a horse before he could walk. The oil bust of the early eighties, which closed half the offices he had wired, left him with fewer jobs and more time for the creek, and he taught Todd what he knew. The illness that finished him began in 1985 and was slow. It was a wasting thing, in the lungs and the blood, and the doctors at the Medical Center gave it a long Latin name and a long tail of months. He sat in a chair by the pasture, with a blanket, watching the horses, and on the days that he could stand he went out and spoke to them, and they came to him. He died in the summer of 1988, at fifty-four, in the afternoon, with a grey of the old grey's line, as stiff in the leg as he was, standing at the rail. Todd was eighteen. He rode the grey to the cemetery, behind the hearse, and it did not shy at the gate. Jose Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as The Bitter Ferryman, the electrician who ran down the dead on horseback and charged them, in effect, a fair fee. In the Slayerverse he stands for the hired riders of the old Tejano houses, the hunters who worked for wages and for pride, and who proved that a calm hand on a horse's neck can steady a night far better than a loud one on a gun.