Ralph Dow

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

Ralph Dow was born in 1900 in Seguin, Texas, and lived sixty-five years as a cattle drover on the roads and pens of south Texas, and as the husband of a boarding-house keeper on the Westside of San Antonio. In 1922 he married Beatrice Navarro Proctor of the White Ledger line, and they raised two children, William Dow, born in 1925 and dead in 2012, and Helen Dow Proctor, born in 1929 and dead in 1998. He belonged to no slayer house, being a Dow of the Guadalupe valley with nothing in his people's records that anyone could call a calling, and he was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer. He died in 1965 of old age, aged sixty-five, nine years after his wife. The Proctors remember him as the drover who married into the family on a Tuesday and began, within the week, to carry its business, in the plain manner of a man who has been handed a rope and sees that it needs holding. He was a long-limbed, quiet, dry man who whistled through his teeth, and the lodgers of his wife's house said that they could tell the weather from his tune. Seguin in 1900 was a town of Germans, Tejanos, Tennesseans and mill-hands on the Guadalupe, with a courthouse, a cotton gin, two churches and the famous concrete houses of the district. The Dows had lived in the valley since the Republic. His father was a gin hand and sometime teamster, a heavy, silent man with a taste for fiddle tunes, and his mother was a seamstress's daughter from Gonzales who had brought a pair of treadle shears into the marriage and not much else. Ralph was the second of six, a gangling, freckled, easy-going boy who could not be kept indoors and who was found, at the age of seven, sitting on the rail of the stock pens at the depot watching the drovers load a string of cars. He asked the foreman where the cattle were going. The foreman said Kansas City. Ralph said that he would like to go to Kansas City. The foreman, who liked a boy who knew his mind, gave him a bucket and a job. He was a drover's boy at twelve and a hand by seventeen, and by the end of the Great War he had ridden the brush country and the coastal prairies in all weathers. The long trail years were long past, and the work was shorter and more regular, a matter of taking a herd from the ranches near Cuero or Floresville to the railhead, or to the pens of San Antonio, eighty or a hundred miles at a stretch, with a crew of six and a wagon. He learned what a drover learns. He learned to ride drag in the dust, to read the weather in the way that the lead steers walked and to cross a flooded river without losing more than a calf. He learned to sleep on the ground with one eye open. The influenza of the autumn of 1918 killed two of the men on his crew in a week, and he buried them himself in a ranch cemetery near Pearsall, with a borrowed spade, and rode out the next morning with the herd. He was eighteen, and said later that it had been the last time he had thought himself a boy. He met Beatrice Navarro Proctor in the summer of 1921, at the back door of a boarding house on the Westside. He was twenty-one, and had come in off the road in a hat that had seen forty miles of dust, to bring a packet of letters from a drover who had gone ahead. The girl who opened the door was seventeen, short, dark, quick and very straight in the back, and she looked him up and down, took the letters and told him that the lodgers' dining room was through the hall and that the soap was in the dish. He said that he had no complaint about the soap. She said that it was a pity, for in her experience drovers always did. He ate a dinner of caldo and tortillas in a room with eleven strangers and a calendar from a feed merchant, and he asked the landlady, who was her mother's cousin, whether he might come again. It was the first time that he had asked anyone a question on that scale. He came again every month, with the herd, and then every week, without it. Beatrice, who had grown up in a house where the latch was checked twice, did not tell him at once what her family was. She watched him. She watched how he behaved when the lodgers were unkind and when they were drunk, how he spoke to a laundress's child and how he tied his horse. In the spring of 1922 she sat him down on the back step, in the evening, when the house had gone quiet, and told him, in a flat voice, about the White Ledger, the feud, the creature called the Guest, her father at the newspaper who cut out the deaths and her grandfather Ramon who had been struck in a churchyard. He said, when she had done, that his own grandmother in the Guadalupe valley had always nailed a horseshoe over the door, which she had said was for luck, and that his father had cut it off every year and she had put it up again. He asked whether the Ledger would object to a drover who was a Methodist. She said that it had survived worse. They were married in 1922, in the autumn, at the church of San Fernando, in a ceremony that two Methodist uncles and a Catholic aunt had spent six weeks arranging. The Navarro women, who had made the feast, took charge of the Dows at the door and did not release them until morning. He was twenty-two and she was eighteen. They took two rooms in the house on Presa Street, where the Navarro and Adams cousins had kept lodgers for half a century, and which was, in the family's phrase, a place where it was not hard to find a bed. His mother-in-law Ana Navarro, who ran the laundry on the Westside, looked him over from the doorway and said that a man who rode drag for a living would not be put off by a washing-day. His father-in-law, William Adams Proctor, who set type at the newspaper, said that there was work for a man who read cattle. It was the work. A drover on the south Texas roads sees the places that no hunter can afford to visit, the water holes that a whole outfit has begun to avoid, the pastures where cattle stand in a ring and will not graze, the line-camp cook who will not go out after dusk. Ralph, who noticed such things as another man notices the weather, said nothing, and carried them home. He gave them to his wife on Saturday nights, in the kitchen, and she wrote them in the house book that the lodgers did not see. It was a modest service, and the Ledger's Texas chapter, which could not afford to be proud, valued it highly. The hunters who stopped at the house on their rounds said that the Dow herds were the best-informed in the state. Ralph said that cattle talk to anyone who stands still. William Dow was born in 1925, in the winter, and Helen Dow Proctor in 1929, in the spring. The boy took his father's name and his father's liking for horses, and the girl, in the family's old custom by which a name passes through the daughters, took her mother's, and carried Proctor at the end of her own. Beatrice's father died in 1925, in the autumn of the year the boy was born, and the house on Presa Street passed to her by a quiet arrangement among the Proctor cousins, for which Ralph, who was twenty-five, signed the lease in a hand that shook. He worked the roads six days in seven to meet the rent. The Depression years, when a steer was worth less than the ticket that carried it, were the worst, and he took on stock for ranchers who could not pay him until they could, and kept the house in beans and flour by driving cattle to the pens at San Antonio through two winters of which he never spoke. Beatrice's cancer began in 1954, and he was a nurse for two years. He gave up the long drives, took a place at the stockyards as a tally man, counting the steers as they came off the cars, and came home every night in time to cook. He was not a skilled cook. The children, who were grown, said that his coffee could have been used to start a motor. She died in 1956, in the front room, with his hand in hers, and he did not take the news well. He worked on, in the pens, through the Korean War years, when the army again bought cattle by the thousand and the stockyards at San Antonio were as busy as they had been in 1918, and he lived for nine years more, quietly, on the Westside, with a dog, a pair of boots and the house book. He died in the spring of 1965, of old age, which was the family's kindly formula for a man who had simply run out of road. He was in the pens, as it happened, leaning on a rail with a pencil behind his ear, counting a pen of yearlings, and he stopped at forty-one. His son William came for him, and found the tally in his hat. The count had been right to the last steer. It was found afterwards that he had left the house book in the kitchen drawer, with a pencilled line in the margin of the last page that recorded, in his big, upright hand, that the weather had been fine. Ralph Dow is remembered in the Proctor family as the drover who married into the White Ledger and then counted its cattle faithfully for forty years. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trail hands and tally men of the hunting houses, who never carried a pistol or asked to be told the reason, and who made sure, by watching the herd and the weather and saying so, that the hunters knew where to go next.