Lisa Watson

Spouse of Dennis Navarro Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Lisa Watson was born in 1963 at San Antonio, Texas, and is living today in San Antonio, where she has worked for nearly forty years as a nurse among the barrios, river walk and military bases of that city. She belongs to no house; the Ledger lists her as unaffiliated, and she entered the White Ledger of the Proctor bloodline by marriage and by the quiet habit of being useful. In 1981 she married the lineman Dennis Navarro Proctor, the eldest son of the Air Force mechanic Wendell Proctor and the laundry supervisor Elena Navarro, and the marriage was childless. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of her own. Her husband's sister Loretta Proctor and brother Travis Proctor became slayers, and it was Lisa who, for thirty years, patched the family's hunters at her own kitchen table. The Proctors remember her as the nurse of the White Ledger in Texas, the woman who answered the telephone on the first ring at any hour and who taught the whole family to apply pressure first and ask questions afterwards. She was born in a south-side hospital in the spring of 1963, the second daughter of a tailor and a nurse's aide, in a house over a shop on a street of hair salons, panaderias and a funeral parlour, with a view of the bell tower of the parish church. Her father hemmed trousers for the enlisted men of the bases, at three bars for a pair, and her mother worked the evening shift on a hospital ward, and the two of them met, as she said, in the middle of the afternoon, on the stairs. She was a small, quick, dark girl with a way of saying what she meant. At six she bandaged the dog. At nine she set up a first-aid post under the stairs, with a shoebox, and put up a notice in her mother's handwriting that said that all injuries would be seen to on Saturdays. She had, for six months, a steady custom among the children of the street, and on one occasion a policeman, who came in for a sticking plaster and stayed to be lectured about his boots. She decided to be a nurse at eleven, when her mother took her to the ward one Sunday and she stood at the end of a bed and watched a sleeping man's chest go up and down. It was, she said, the first time that she had understood that somebody was always watching it. She never changed her mind. She was at the high school on the south side in 1979, in the fourth row of a history class, next to a tall, grave, slow-speaking boy named Dennis Proctor, who looked at the ceiling when he was thinking and had written, in the margin of his exercise book, a small drawing of a transformer. She asked him what it was. He told her, in full. She said that she had never in her life heard anyone say so much about a transformer, and that she would like to hear some more. He asked her to the spring dance a year later and she said that she would think about it. She thought about it for eleven months. They were married in the church on the south side in June of 1981, a week after the graduation, when both were eighteen, and the cousins thought them too young and said so for about a year. She was told what the family did, on the morning of the wedding, in the back room of the church, by her mother-in-law. Elena Navarro, who was forty-nine and had supervised a hundred and forty women in a river laundry, put a white clean sheet in her hands, and said, in a level voice, that it was the family's way of saying that there were things in the world which a decent person would not wish to know about, and that her new family hunted them. She did not ask for a promise. She asked whether Lisa thought that she could stand a man who sometimes came home late. Lisa said that she had been brought up over a tailor's shop, and that she could stand a great deal. Elena smiled for the first time that day. She said that the girl would do, and that the bridal sheet was for the bed. She trained at the nursing school of a hospital on the Northwest Side, in the evenings, while Dennis was laid off in the oil bust of the middle eighties, and she qualified in 1987 at twenty-four. It was a hard time. The bust took away a great many of the jobs of the south side, the base budgets tightened and the whole city seemed to be holding its breath, and the two of them lived on her salary for two years, in a rented duplex off Roosevelt Avenue, with a hot plate, a bottle of hot sauce and a good deal of cheerful bad temper. She worked the night shift on a surgical ward and came home at seven to a man who had made breakfast, and the two of them ate it in their coats. In 1989 he was taken on by the city utility. She moved, soon after, to the burn unit at the army hospital at Fort Sam Houston, as a civilian nurse, where a good many of the patients were soldiers and airmen and the children of the bases, and she stayed there for twenty-seven years, and then moved to the medical wards of a hospital on the Northwest Side. The family found her early. In the winter of 1986 her husband's sister Loretta, who was twenty and five years called, came to the door at four in the morning with a gash across her forearm, and said that she had slipped on a wet step. Lisa, who was twenty-two and a student in her second year, looked at the arm for about a quarter of a minute. She said that nobody she knew had ever fallen onto something that left a mark like that. Loretta said that she supposed not. Lisa washed the wound, drew the edges together with butterfly strips from her bag, wrapped it in a clean sheet, and then, without being asked, made the girl a cup of sweet tea. She said that she would be glad to do it again, whenever it was needed, and that she would not ask. It was the first of a good many. Her kitchen table, in the thirty years that followed, was a clinic for hunters, and she kept a drawer in the sideboard with a suture kit, a bottle of iodine and a roll of the strong white tape that nurses like. She was not the sort to keep a record of her work, and so she kept a manual. She made a small, battered, spiral-bound handbook, in her own hand, of the first-aid rules for the White Ledger's hunters, which began with a single line in capital letters: PRESSURE, ELEVATE, RING ME. It had a page on a bite that was not a dog's, a page on a fall from a roof, a page on silver burns and a page, in smaller writing, for the people who would find a hunter lying in a lane and would not know what to do. She taught from it. Every other Saturday, for about twenty years, she held a class in the back room of a church on the south side, on the pretext of a Red Cross course, and the room filled with young cousins from three families, who learned to tie a tourniquet, and to say that a person had fallen off a ladder. Her husband's brother Travis, who was the youngest, was her best pupil. He had a way of arriving a minute early, with a notebook. On the morning of the eleventh of September 2001 she was in the burn unit, at the end of a night shift, when the television in the corridor was turned on, and for the following week the whole hospital was told to be ready for casualties who did not come. The base at Kelly had closed that year, and Wendell, who had given it forty years, took the news with a long silence. She and Dennis looked in on him every day, and she did his pills and his shopping. When Elena died in 2002, at the laundry, she was the one who rang the family, one by one, in order, from a list that Elena had left in her bag. In the pandemic years she was fifty-seven, and she was put on the ward for the sick. She worked twelve-hour shifts in a mask and a visor for sixteen months, and held the hands of a great many people who could not have a visitor. In the great freeze of February 2021, when the power went out across the state, she slept in the hospital for three nights and came home on the fourth to a husband who had been on a pole for forty hours. She had made soup the day before and left it on the stove. She retired from the bedside in 2023, and now teaches the Saturday class in a smaller room, with a coffee pot. She is a small, quick, silver-haired woman of sixty-three, and she and Dennis, who had no children, have a house full of nieces and nephews and of the children of cousins, who come at all hours and who are all addressed as Mijo. She has never raised her voice. She has, she says, no need to. Lisa Watson is remembered in the Proctor family as the nurse of the White Ledger in Texas, the woman who taught a whole family to apply pressure before it asked questions. In the Slayerverse she stands for the nurses of the old houses, the ones who were never called and who stood at the kitchen table with a needle and a clean sheet, and who sent the hunters back out to be hunters again.