Juan Navarro was born in 1905 at Bandera, Texas, and lived sixty-seven years as a newspaper compositor in San Antonio and, from 1921, as a vampire slayer of the House of Navarro. The family book knows him as The Hollow Ford, and it classes him as a Mercenary, a hunter who sells his skill by the night or the season to whichever house needs it and keeps his own accounts, and who answers to no ledger but the one in his pocket. His craft was Acequia Trapping, the use of the old irrigation ditches, gates and sluices of the Texas missions to funnel a creature into a place where it can be held, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was the only son of the typist Clara Navarro, and in 1928 he married Harriet Proctor of the White Ledger, and they raised four children, Mary Proctor Navarro, Wendell Proctor, Raymond Proctor Navarro and James Proctor, of whom Raymond became a slayer in his turn. He died in 1972 of a long illness, aged sixty-seven. The Navarros, who were Tejano ranching families and guardians of the San Antonio missions, counted him a son of the house, and the Proctors, through his wife, counted him one of theirs.
Bandera is a cypress-cutting town on the Medina River, forty-odd miles northwest of San Antonio, and Juan was born there in a cedar-picket house with a good well, in the middle of a torrid August. His mother had gone home for her lying-in. She was twenty-six, working in the city, and the family would not have it said that a Navarro child came into the world in a rented room, so she went up the hill road by wagon and was delivered in the house where she herself had been born. Three weeks later she carried him back to San Antonio on her knee, with a certificate in her bag that called him a Navarro and left the space for his father blank. He grew up on the Westside, in a narrow house under a pecan tree, with his mother, a great-aunt and a typewriter, and the first sound he remembered was the sticking e of a second-hand Remington going late into the night.
He was a thin, watchful, clever child, with his mother's level gaze, and he learned to read from her carbons. The bookishness was no accident. A boy who is raised on typed pages in three languages comes to think of print as the natural form of the world, and when he left school at fourteen, in 1919, he went straight to the composing room of a San Antonio daily, as a printer's devil, carrying forms and sweeping type. A compositor sets the paper by hand and, after a time, by machine, and Juan had the right habits for it: an eye for a transposed letter, a dislike of waste and a willingness to stand for ten hours at a case. He learned the Linotype in the evenings. By nineteen he was a journeyman, the youngest in the shop, and was said by the foreman to be the only man there who had never made the same error twice.
He was called in 1921, at sixteen, on a canal towpath at night. He was walking home late along the old mill ditch that ran below the river, in a lull between shifts, when he saw a flat-bottomed barge drift down the cut with every lamp lit. It was a pretty sight, and it was wrong. There was no pole, no mule and no one at the tiller, and the barge came on at a walking pace, turning slowly, with the lamps burning steadily over a deck that held two empty chairs and a table laid for supper. The water was perfectly still. Juan walked beside it for a hundred yards, because he could not think what else to do, and at the sluice gate it stopped, and the lamps went out one by one, in order, like a man putting out a house. Something under the bridge on the far bank breathed in. He ran. But he came back the next night, with a lantern and his mother's old pistol, and sat on the towpath with his back to the gate, and that was the beginning.
His teacher was a kinsman of the Bandera branch, a machinist named Ramon Navarro, who had seen a good deal and told very little. He took the boy out along the mission ditches, the acequias that the Spanish friars had dug two centuries before to water the fields of the five missions, and showed him that they were a map. The old ditches ran by gates and weirs and stone sluices, each of which could be opened or shut by one man with a pole, and a thing that followed water, as many of them did, could be steered along that system as a steer is steered along a chute. Juan took to it. He learned the gates by heart, and then he learned the older, forgotten ones, under the pavements of the city, and by twenty he could close a stretch of the Espada ditch around a creature in the time it took to say a rosary. He was a Mercenary because he was always working, and because the work paid. Navarros, Proctors and Delacroix cousins wrote to him when a thing had gone to ground in a place with water, and he took the next train, with a bag of stakes and his compositor's apron under his coat.
He married in 1928. Harriet Proctor was twenty-five, a tall, steady, practical girl, a Proctor of the White Ledger, daughter of a court clerk and a milliner, who had trained in the base workshop at Fort Sam Houston and could dress a rifle, mend a lock and rebuild a wagon hub, and the cousins, who had a fondness for nicknames, called her The Fort Sam Engineer. They met over a stuck door, in a house on the Westside, where Juan had been sent to look at a cellar and she had been sent to see to the hinges. She set her toolbox on the floor, looked at him, and said that he was holding the lantern wrong. They were married in the church on the river, with Clara in the front pew in a dark blue hat. It was said that Clara did not cry. She said afterwards that she had been busy counting the guests.
The children came in the next ten years. Mary Proctor Navarro was born in 1931, in San Antonio, Wendell Proctor in 1937, Raymond Proctor Navarro in 1938 and James Proctor in 1939, in Houston, where Juan had taken a post at a paper for a year during a strike in San Antonio and had not been sorry to see the Gulf Coast. They were raised in the Westside house, in a household that smelled of lead, machine oil and tortillas, and each had a place at the kitchen table, and each, in the ordinary way, was given his or her chance. Mary went to a hospital kitchen. Wendell and James took trades. Raymond, called in 1968 when a sleeper was found with every candle in the room burned to the socket, was the one who carried the stakes, and his father, who by then had a bad chest, taught him the ditches in the evenings, in the yard, with a hose and a bucket. The Depression years had been thin, as they were for everyone, and Juan had kept his place in the composing room by agreeing to work for less. In the Korean War, when Fort Sam Houston filled with soldiers and the Westside with their wives, the work doubled, and he and Harriet, who by then had a bench in the shed behind the house, worked it side by side.
He had the long illness for three years. It began in the chest, the printer's complaint, and was called by the doctors a thing of the lungs, and it brought him down by slow stages through the Vietnam years, when he watched his youngest son's friends go off to the war from the porch of the house on the Westside. In his last winter he set himself to one more task, which was to put the ditches on paper. He sat up at the kitchen table, in a cardigan, with a pencil and his mother's old carbon paper, and drew the gates of the five missions' system from memory, one sheet to a ditch, with the order of the locks and the places where a creature would stop. He finished the last sheet in the autumn of 1972. He died a week later, and the sheets, in three copies, as his mother had done with the mission book, went to Raymond, to a cousin in Laredo and to the church by the river.
Juan Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as The Hollow Ford, the compositor who set the old ditches in type and kept the water of the missions working for the family long after anyone thought it was only irrigation. In the Slayerverse he stands for the hired hands of the House of Navarro, the hunters who worked for pay and for pride, and who proved that a good map, a steady hand and a mother's carbon paper can be as deadly to the dead as any rifle.
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