Lloyd Kalteyer

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

Lloyd Kalteyer was born in 1934 at Seguin, Texas, and lived fifty-five years as a diner cook in San Antonio, feeding a good many people who did not know whom else they were eating beside. He was the son of a German Texan family of no particular name in the Ledger, and he belonged to the White Ledger of the Proctor bloodline only by marriage, since in 1955 he married the hospital cook Mary Proctor Navarro, the eldest daughter of the slayers Juan Navarro and Harriet Proctor. They raised two sons, Harold Kalteyer Proctor, born in 1957, who became a vampire slayer, and Derek Proctor Kalteyer, born in 1960, who did not. Lloyd was not a hunter and never pretended to be one. He died in 1989 of a fall, aged fifty-five. What he was, in the language of the Ledger, was a servant of the house, the man who kept a back table, a hot kitchen and a closed mouth, and who fed, over thirty years, a great many tired people at the odd hours of a night when nothing else in San Antonio was open. Seguin sits on the Guadalupe, thirty-odd miles east of San Antonio, a pecan town of German and Mexican families with a courthouse of concrete, an old Mexican mill and a statue of a very large pecan. The Kalteyers had come to the district in the eighteen-fifties from the same Hill Country German stock as the New Braunfels family of Warren Kalteyer, who had married Elizabeth Proctor in 1920, and Lloyd's father, a cousin's son of that branch, was a baker who rose at three and was asleep by seven in the evening. Lloyd was the middle of three, a freckled, sandy, round-cheeked boy who ate whatever there was and liked the kitchen better than the schoolroom. He was born in the spring of 1934, in the dust years, when the sky on a bad afternoon was the colour of a brown paper bag and the bakery sold bread at five cents a loaf and gave a good deal of it away. He learned to make bread at six, and to make dough rise in a cold kitchen, which his father said was the hardest part, and by twelve he could run the ovens alone on a Sunday. At fifteen he left school and took the bus to San Antonio, where an uncle who knew a man got him a place as a dishwasher in a diner on Commerce Street, near the bus depot. He stayed on the grill for forty years. A diner cook of the old school is a man who works a flat-top in a white apron with a spatula and a rag, in a kitchen the size of a railway compartment, and who can see through a pass-through window every table in the room. Lloyd learned eggs, hash, chilli, chicken-fried steak and the great San Antonio breakfast, the migas and the barbacoa on Sunday, and he learned something which does not appear on any menu, which is that a man who cooks for a room at four in the morning knows who comes in, who sits with his back to the wall, and who orders coffee and does not drink it. He saw the soldiers from Fort Sam Houston, the night nurses, the printers coming off the shift, the taxi men, the girls from the clubs on Broadway, and he said nothing about any of them to anyone, and in the end this was what brought him into the Ledger. He met Mary at the hospital. She was twenty-three, the eldest of Juan and Harriet's four, a tall, dark, practical young woman who ran the kitchen at the Santa Rosa Hospital, where the doctors and sisters fed on her cooking and the patients on her broth. In the winter of 1954 the diner's owner had a heart attack, and Lloyd, who had been in his kitchen for five years, was sent with a pan of cornbread to the ward, where the sick man's wife found him standing in the corridor in his apron with nowhere to put it. A tall girl in a hairnet took the cornbread out of his hands, tasted it, and told him that it wanted salt. He said that the owner could not have salt. She said that the owner was not eating it. They were married in the spring of 1955, in the church by the river, with her father Juan in his best coat, her mother Harriet in a grey hat, and her brother Raymond Proctor Navarro, who was seventeen, as best man because no one else would stand still long enough. Her brothers Wendell and James were ushers. The reception was in the Westside yard and the food was entirely of her making and Lloyd's, and a cousin from Laredo said that he had never seen a bride and groom cook for their own wedding, and that he hoped he would not see it again. The marriage was a good one, in the quiet manner of two people who spent most of the day at an oven. They took a small house in the barrio on the south side, with a fig tree and a back porch, and they went to work at opposite ends of the clock, Mary at six in the morning and Lloyd in the afternoon, and left a plate for one another on the stove. The Ledger found their kitchens a useful thing. A hunter coming off a night in the river bottom, who could not go home and could not go to a doctor, could come to the diner's back door after midnight and be given a plate and a table by the dishwasher, and Lloyd, who had been told once what the food was for, never asked a question and never forgot a name. He fed Raymond on a number of nights, and a good many of Juan's cousins, who came up from the missions with the mud of the acequias still on their boots. Mary, who had known the work all her life, did the same at the hospital, where a plate of eggs and a bandage went to the back stair, and said nothing about either. Harold was born in 1957, and Derek in 1960. They grew up in the diner's smell of bacon and coffee, and in the kitchen on the south side, and Harold in particular was a serious boy, who from the age of eight would watch his uncle Raymond at the table and say nothing. He was called later, in his own way, and his father, who was not a hunter, did what a father in that position could do, which was to feed him at three in the morning and hold his tongue. Derek was the one who was never called. He cooked at the grill as a boy, then took up teaching and coaching, and would say, when asked by the cousins, that someone had better be at home. Lloyd, who had once been told that he was a servant of the house, said that it was a better title than his own, and he hung up a card, in the kitchen, in Mary's hand, that said that all customers were equal and all cooks were not. San Antonio changed in his lifetime, and he saw it from the pass. In 1968 the city held HemisFair, the world's fair on the old downtown neighbourhood, and the old Commerce Street went on being a street of shabby diners while the new Tower of the Americas went up beside it in concrete and light. The fair brought thousands to the town, and the diner never had a quieter week, or a busier. He fed the construction crews, the fair's guides, a Czech delegation, two bishops and a girl who played the accordion, and the Ledger, in the same week, buried a cousin in the cemetery on the Eastside, and the funeral breakfast was served in the back room by the kitchen staff. During the Vietnam years the diner was a place where mothers waited on the bus for their sons, and he cooked for them, without being asked. When the oil bust came in the middle of the eighties, the customers of the diner, who had been roughnecks and pipefitters and engineers, went from paying cash to asking for the coffee on a slate, and Lloyd, who disliked a slate, put up the sign that said that no one went hungry in his kitchen. It cost him his savings, and he never mentioned it. He died in the autumn of 1989. It was a fall, the plainest of accidents. He was up a stepladder in the storeroom behind the diner, reaching a tin of lard from the top shelf at four in the morning, as he had done for thirty years, and the ladder, which was older than Derek, slid on a puddle that someone had left, and he came down on the concrete. He was found by the dishwasher an hour later. Mary, who came from the hospital in her whites, sat with him in the corridor of the ward where she had once handed him a pan of cornbread. She said afterwards that it had wanted salt. She outlived him by eighteen years, and she kept his apron. Lloyd Kalteyer is remembered in the Proctor family as the diner cook who fed the White Ledger's hunters at the back door, at any hour and without a single question. In the Slayerverse he stands for the people who served the hunt with a hot plate, a clean counter and a closed mouth, and who showed that a kitchen light left on at four in the morning is as good a signal fire as any in the world.