Mary Proctor Navarro was born in 1931 at San Antonio, Texas, and lived seventy-six years as a hospital cook, a woman of the House of Navarro and the White Ledger who fed the hunters of the Westside and was never asked to carry a pistol. She was the eldest of the four children of the newspaper compositor and slayer Juan Navarro, The Hollow Ford, and of the slayer Harriet Proctor, the army engineer's wife who trained at the base workshop and whom the cousins called The Fort Sam Engineer, and the sister of Wendell Proctor, Raymond Proctor Navarro and James Proctor, of whom only Raymond became a slayer. In 1955 she married the diner cook Lloyd Kalteyer, and they raised two sons, Harold Kalteyer Proctor, born in 1957, who became a slayer, and Derek Proctor Kalteyer, born in 1960 and dead in 2026, who did not. She was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer. She died in 2007 of a stroke, aged seventy-six. The Navarros remember her as the cook who said that a hunter who has been fed is a hunter who comes back, and who proved it for fifty years.
She was born in the front bedroom of the narrow house under the pecan tree on the Westside, the first child of a couple who had been married three years and had not yet noticed that their house was a clearing-house for the cousins. Her father was at the composing room of a San Antonio daily, and he came home at three in the morning with ink on his collar and a pocket full of silver-tipped stakes. Her mother, a tall steady practical woman who could dress a rifle, mend a lock and rebuild a wagon hub, was in the shed behind the house with a lamp and a bench. Mary's earliest memory, she said, was of the smell of the shed, which was machine oil, brass polish and warm cornbread. Her grandmother, the typist Clara Navarro, who had lived two streets away and who typed ninety words a minute with her hat on, took the child to the typewriter at three and showed her the letter M, and told her, with perfect seriousness, that it was the first letter of her name and also of the word that would matter most in her life, which was meals.
The Depression kept the house thin. Her father worked for less in the composing room to keep his place, her mother took in mending and repaired the cousins' pistols for a few cents a time, and there was seldom meat. Mary, at seven, learned to make a pot of beans last a week. She learned that a few pounds of cornmeal and some lard could turn into forty tortillas, and that a cousin who arrived at the back door at midnight with nothing in his stomach would give you, in the morning, a good deal of useful information. Her mother taught her to measure. Her father, who had a bad chest and a love of order, taught her to read the newspaper from the back, and her grandmother taught her to type and, in the same years, to keep her mouth shut. When her brothers were born, in 1937, 1938 and 1939, she was the one who carried them, burped them and handed them to their mother, and she learned the grammar of the house, which was that the work of the family was done at the stove as much as the shed.
She left school at sixteen, in 1947, and took a place in the kitchen of one of the city's hospitals, where a girl who could cook for twenty and not be seen was wanted. She started at the vegetables. The head cook was a stout, cheerful, fierce woman of fifty who had been in the post for twenty years, and she took to Mary in a week and taught her, as she said, to cook by the clock. A hospital kitchen is a very exact place. It must feed four hundred beds on three meals, to a diet sheet, to a tray, to the minute, with the soft diets and the salt-free diets, and the patients who cannot eat and the patients who cannot stop, and Mary, who had been feeding eleven for a dollar, found that she liked it very much. She was a cook by nineteen and the night cook by twenty-two.
The Korean War filled the hospitals with the wounded, and filled the diner on Commerce Street, where she ate her midnight meal, with the people who looked after them. It was there that she met Lloyd Kalteyer, a short, round, brisk young man of nineteen with a pencil behind his ear, who had been cooking at the counter since he was sixteen and who looked at her order, which was a plate of eggs, and said that she had not been eating properly. He was a New Braunfels Kalteyer, a nephew of the railway clerk Warren Kalteyer, who had married her mother's sister Elizabeth Proctor, and so, by one of the family's habits, a person whom the Ledger already knew. He was not born to the line and not called. He had, as she said, a very good pan. They were married in 1955, in the church on the river, with her father in the front pew in his best collar and her mother, who had dressed a good many guns and no wedding, in a hat. Lloyd cooked the wedding breakfast himself.
They set up in a small house near the Westside church, and for thirty years they were two cooks in one kitchen, one at the hospital by day and the other at the diner by night, and the food of the White Ledger's Texas chapter was cooked, in a great part, by the pair of them. Harold was born in 1957 and Derek in 1960. The family took the name Proctor in the old way, so that the sons carried Kalteyer in the middle or at the end, as their mother's side required. Harold, who was slow and watchful, showed signs of the calling from a very early age. At eleven, when his uncle Raymond Proctor Navarro, who had been called in 1968, took him out along the old mission ditches to teach him the gates, Mary packed the lunch. She packed it every time, for eleven years. It was a plain tortilla, a wedge of cheese, a boiled egg and a thermos of coffee with sugar in it, and the boy said, afterwards, that it was the only thing that told him the family was coming back to the house.
Derek, who did not take to the ditches, took to the whistle and the clipboard, taught and coached at a San Antonio high school, and cooked at the diner on the side. He grew into a good plain cook who was a regular at every Proctor and Navarro funeral, and he lived long enough to bury his brother's friends and, in the end, to be buried himself, in the spring of 2026, at sixty-six, the last of his generation to carry the pans. The family papers record him as a cook who was never called and never absent.
Her own part, she thought, was to make a table. She made one for her father, who died in 1972 after three years of chest trouble, and for whom she brought a tray every day, with a spoonful of the broth that he said was too strong. She made one for her mother in 1976, in the spring, in the same month in which her sister-in-law Elena Navarro lost her own mother, Catalina Navarro, in a car accident on a wet road from the mission, and the two women, who were the same age within a year, spent most of the week together in the church hall peeling potatoes for two funerals. She fed the mourners of two houses. She said that if she had to do it again she would not do it differently. Her brother Wendell and his wife Elena, her niece Loretta, her nephew Travis and her son Harold were at the table, and each of them, as she observed, was served first.
The oil bust of the middle eighties hit San Antonio hard. The diner on Commerce Street lost its night trade, and the hospital, which let go a third of its kitchen staff, kept her because nobody could do her job. Lloyd died in 1989, of a fall in the diner storeroom, and she kept the house, the pans and the hospital post for another eight years, and retired in 1997 with a pin. She was sixty-six. In the last years she cooked on Sundays for as many Proctors and Navarros as would sit, which was usually twenty, and her kitchen, where the stove had been the centre of the house for half a century, was said by the cousins to be the best-guarded place on the Westside. She died in the spring of 2007, of a stroke, in the kitchen, with a wooden spoon in her hand and the beans on.
Mary Proctor Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as the cook of the Westside, the eldest daughter who kept the stove lit for the hunters of two houses. In the Slayerverse she stands for the cooks and kitchen-keepers of the old families, who never carried a pistol, who fed the ones who did, and who made it a good deal easier to come home.
Occult IncUniverseIn development
