Lloyd Lamar

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

Lloyd Lamar was born in 1946 in Bandera, Texas, and lived fifty-two years as a postal clerk in San Antonio, a man of no house who married into the Proctor bloodline of the White Ledger and who served it, for twenty-seven years, with a rubber stamp. In 1971 he married the librarian Ethel Schleicher Proctor, the daughter of the machinist Clifford Proctor and the bookkeeper Dorothy Schleicher and the sister of the vampire slayer Edwin Proctor, and the marriage was childless. Lloyd was not a hunter and never wished to be one, and he had no alias, archetype or craft. He died in 1998 of a stroke, aged fifty-two. The family remembers him as the slow-spoken clerk from the Hill Country who could find a lost letter in a sack of ten thousand and who saw to it that the Ledger's mail was never, in the whole of its long history, delivered to the wrong hand. Bandera in 1946 called itself the Cowboy Capital of the World, and the claim was not entirely idle. It was a small stone town on the Medina river, in the cedar hills west of San Antonio, where the main street had a feed store, a saloon, a dance hall and a courthouse with a lawn, and where the dude ranches, which had started in the thirties, brought in tourists from the city on weekends. The Lamars were not ranchers. His father worked on the roads for the county, his mother kept the books for a store, and an uncle, Ray, kept a riding stable on the river, with a dozen horses, a barn and a loft. Lloyd, who was the third of five, was a tall, lean, patient boy who ran errands, mucked out stalls and carried the county's mail from the post office to the stable on Saturdays. He said later that he had learned his two trades in the same barn, and that the horses had been the more reasonable of his customers. He was a careful child. He liked order in small things, a nail driven straight, a saddle blanket folded in three, a letter in the right box, and he would stand for a quarter of an hour at the post office counter watching the postmistress sort the day's mail into the pigeonholes, a motion that he thought the most elegant that he had ever seen. At twelve he asked if he might help. She said that he might, if he washed his hands. He went to the school in Bandera, played second base for a team that lost every game, and at eighteen went to San Antonio to find work, taking a room on the Southside and a job as a casual at the main post office, sorting parcels in the dark hall beneath the old marble stairs. In the Vietnam years, when the draft came, he was called up, as most of his classmates were, and spent two years in the Army, from 1966 to 1968, at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, where the postal detachment sorted the letters of the whole of the Fifth Army. It was a curious war to have fought. He saw, in those two years, a million letters in and a million out, and said afterward that he had learned more about men from the envelopes than he would have done from a rifle. He did not go overseas. He stamped, sorted and re-addressed, and came home to a clerk's job at the main post office downtown with a quiet sense that he was lucky and was not allowed to say so. He met Ethel Schleicher Proctor in the spring of 1970, over a postage meter. She was a young librarian at a branch on the Southside, and had come to his window with an overdue-notice ledger, a cheerful face and a complaint that the postage was wrong. He looked at her figures, found the error in four minutes and handed the ledger back with a stamp. She said that she had never been corrected so politely. He said that it was the one thing he was qualified to do. He asked her to lunch at a cafe on Commerce Street, and she, who talked, and he, who listened, found at the end of the hour that neither had said anything that was not true. They were married in the autumn of 1971, in her family's church on the Southside, on the same year in which her brother had married. He was twenty-five and she was twenty-three. Her mother, Dorothy, who had a feeling for the sound of a decent sum, said that it would balance. He was told what the family did on the evening of the wedding, at the dining table in the house on the Nogalitos Road, by her father, who put down his fork and said it in a single sentence, and by her mother, who produced the cash book. Lloyd looked at the book for some time. He then asked if there was any mail. There was. The Ledger had a small, ancient and precarious system of letters, passed between cousins in three states, in plain envelopes with no return address, some of which had gone astray in the past and had caused a good deal of trouble. He said that he could mend that. He said it so simply that Clifford, who made things, was visibly moved. It was his only contribution, and it lasted twenty-seven years. A letter that came into the post office addressed to one of the three Proctor boxes in San Antonio passed through his hands, and Lloyd, who knew the building as a priest knows his church, saw to it that it reached the box and not a clerk's desk. He kept a drawer. He sorted by the hand, by the paper and by the weight, and he flagged, with a small tick in the corner in a pencil that he sharpened himself, the letters which were not to be forwarded, copied, delayed or opened. He caught, in that time, nine letters that had been misdirected, two that had been steamed open at the sorting plant and one, in the autumn of 1981, that had been addressed in a hand that he recognised as a cousin's and that, when he held it to the light, smelled of cold smoke. He passed it to his brother-in-law Edwin without comment, and the letter proved to be the warning that preceded the Ledger's busiest winter in San Antonio. He was no hunter, and the Ledger's papers say that he never carried a weapon. He was an excellent shot at a county fair. He took his wife's brother and nephew to Bandera for the deer season every November, and the three of them sat on a hillside and said nothing for ten hours. He never again slept at his uncle's stable after the autumn of 1972, and never explained why, but he went back to Bandera every summer, and mended the fence. In the oil bust, when half the clerks in the city were laid off and the post office froze its hiring, he held his place, and trained three young clerks, all of whom were instructed, with great gravity, in the arts of the cancellation mark and the lost parcel. He died in 1998 at fifty-two, of a stroke, on a Saturday in October, in the garden of the house near the Nogalitos Road, with a tomato in his hand. Ethel found him. She said that he had gone as he did everything, without fuss, and in the right order. The Ledger's three boxes were cleared that week by a young clerk whom he had trained, and who, without being asked, kept the tick in the corner. Lloyd Lamar is remembered in the Proctor family as the postal clerk who never lost a letter and never opened one, the quiet brother-in-law from Bandera. In the Slayerverse he stands for the carriers, clerks and sorters of the White Ledger, the unnoticed hands in the middle of the system, whose steady work meant that a warning written in one state arrived, still sealed, in the next.