Mildred Chandler

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

Mildred Chandler was born in 1937 at Corpus Christi, Texas, and is living today, in the same city, at the age of eighty-nine. She worked for forty-four years as a hospital cook, most of them in Houston, and she belongs to the White Ledger of the Proctor bloodline by her marriage and not by birth. She came of a family that the papers enter as unaffiliated. In 1958 she married the electrician James Proctor, the youngest son of the slayers Juan Navarro and Harriet Proctor, and they raised two sons, Marcus Chandler Proctor, born in 1961, and Scott Proctor, born in 1963, neither of whom was called. James, who was not a hunter either, died in 2000. Mildred has never been a vampire slayer, or wished to be mistaken for one. She has been, for sixty years, what every house of hunters finds it cannot do without and rarely thinks to thank, the woman in the kitchen who does not ask where the blood on the cuff came from, and who has hot soup on the stove when the door opens at four in the morning. She kept a recipe box, and it tells most of her story. It is a green tin box, dented at one corner, that was given to her at twelve by her mother, and it holds some three hundred cards in a small round upright hand, with a column on each for the cost, the number served and a note. The note on the card for red beans says that it is better the second day and that Raymond will want it hot. The card for caldo says that it is for sick people and for people who have come a long way. The card for a plain cornbread has, in a different pen, a line reading that the dishwasher at the diner on Commerce Street swears by the salt. She has cooked from the box for seventy years, and when asked for the best thing she ever made, she says that it was a pot of rice in a flooded kitchen, which is not on any card. Corpus Christi, in the year of her birth, was a port and a resort and a cotton shipper on a shallow bay, with a seawall, a fish market, a new causeway and a great many shrimp boats, and it was an easy-going town, a little frayed, full of Mexican American and Anglo families who had long ago stopped noticing which was which. Her father was a clerk in the harbour master's office who spent his days over a column of tonnages, and her mother cooked at the Methodist church, for weddings, funerals and the Wednesday supper. Mildred was the middle child of three, a small, solid, quick-handed girl with a freckled nose, who could ice a cake at nine, make a roux at eleven and run the church kitchen by herself at fourteen, when her mother broke a wrist. She cooked through the end of the Korean War. She finished at the high school in 1955, and in the autumn took a place in the kitchens of the Spohn hospital, on a ward that fed two hundred patients a day, for fourteen dollars a week. She met James Proctor over a stove. In the winter of 1957 a crew of electricians from San Antonio came to wire the new kitchen at Spohn, and the youngest of them, an apprentice of eighteen with the Proctor chin and a good deal of Juan Navarro's patience, was sent to find out why a burner would not light. He stood in the middle of the kitchen with a meter. She told him that if he would stop tapping the thing, she would show him where the pilot was. He said that the pilot was not his department. She said that nothing in her kitchen was anyone's department but hers. He came back three weekends in a row, on the bus, and in the third he stayed to dinner. The cook, who was a tall, silent Mexican woman who had worked the line for thirty years, looked at the pair of them over the stock pot and said that the beans were getting cold. They were married in the church on the Westside of San Antonio, in the spring of 1958, in the presence of Juan, Harriet, and Mildred's mother, who had made the cake and had brought a spare, in case. The Proctors received her with what she described as polite curiosity. Harriet, a tall, grey, practical woman who could dress a rifle and rebuild a wagon hub, took her through the shed behind the house, showed her the bench, gave her a cup of coffee and said that the family had certain obligations. She did not go into detail. Mildred, who had been brought up in a harbour master's household, said that she understood the principle of a manifest. She was told in the end, in a short dry paragraph, that there were things in the world that a decent person would not wish to know about, and that the family hunted them, and that her husband did not, but that his brother Raymond did. She said that she supposed Raymond would want feeding. Harriet laughed for the first time that afternoon. She said that Raymond would eat anything that was put in front of him, if it was put there at midnight. The couple moved to Houston in 1959, when James took a job with an electrical contractor on the Ship Channel, and they remained there for forty years. Houston was a city of oil offices, refineries, a long muddy bayou and a ship channel that carried half the state's trade, and it was building, in those years, with a recklessness that kept an electrician in work and a cook in demand. Mildred took a place in the kitchens of a hospital in the Medical Center, in the great, noisy, white-tiled department that served four thousand meals a day, and by the middle of the sixties she was the chief cook of a ward kitchen. Marcus was born in 1961 at Galveston, in rooms above a chandler's while James wired the wharves, and Scott in 1963 in a small brick house with a carport on the east side of Houston, and the boys grew up among pipe fitters, line cooks and cousins who passed through. They rode their bicycles on the levee and fished off the Ship Channel docks. The White Ledger had a few cousins on the Gulf coast, and they found the house. A hunter coming off a night in the bayous, from the marsh at Baytown or the mudflats at the head of the channel, could knock at Mildred's back door after midnight and find a pot of soup, a clean towel and a bed on the sleeping porch, with no one asking him why his boots were wet. Her brother-in-law Raymond Proctor Navarro, the Spy of the family, who tracked records and rumours across half of Texas, came more often than the others, as the card in her recipe box had foretold, and sat at her table with his head in his hands, saying nothing for an hour. In the Vietnam years she cooked for the sons of the neighbours who went off to the war and for their mothers when they came back. When the oil bust of the middle eighties emptied the offices of Houston and the whole city went quiet, she fed the families of three out-of-work engineers on her street from the hospital's surplus, and James, who had been laid off, wired the church hall for nothing. She was among the first of the family to go to Corpus Christi in the aftermath of Hurricane Celia in August 1970, when her mother's house on the north side was stripped of its roof, and she cooked for the neighbourhood for four days in the ruined kitchen on a camp stove that she had driven down on the back seat. She came home to Houston with a sunburn and a pot. It was the only holiday that she took in thirty years. Raymond died in 1992 of a fever caught in a plague house, and she travelled to San Antonio to cook for the wake, and James, who had lost the brother he admired, did not speak for two days. He died himself in 2000, of the heart, at sixty-one, at the end of a shift, and Mildred, who had retired the year before, sold the house in Houston and went home to the bay. She lives there still, in a small house within sound of the seawall, with the green recipe box on the shelf and a grandchild's drawing on the refrigerator. Her sons, Marcus and Scott, who were never called, ring on Sundays. She has, by the family's account, cooked for something over four hundred thousand meals, and she remembers the people who ate the ones that mattered. She says that she was never asked to do anything more than keep the pot hot, and that it was a good deal more than she had expected. Mildred Chandler is remembered in the Proctor family as the cook of the White Ledger's Gulf coast kitchen, a woman who kept the soup hot and the door unlocked for sixty years. In the Slayerverse she stands for the keepers of the hearth, the people who were never called, who never asked, and who knew that a bowl of beans handed across a table at four in the morning is sometimes the whole of the hunt's mercy.