Ramon Navarro

Slayer of House of Navarro, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Ramon Navarro was born in 1853 at Bandera, Texas, in the cypress country of the Medina River, and lived forty-seven years as a machinist and a vampire slayer of the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions. The family book knows him as The Rough Tinder, a name given to a man who caught fast and burned hot and was not comfortable to stand beside, and it classes him as a Mercenary, a hunter who works on commission, names a price and keeps his word once it is paid. His craft was Ranch Tracking, the reading of cattle, horses, ground and water for the signs of something that should not be there, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He had one recorded child, Ana Navarro, born in 1875 and dead in 1934, who was not a hunter and who in 1903 married William Adams Proctor of the White Ledger. The family papers do not give the names of his own parents. He died in 1900 from a blow taken in a churchyard, aged forty-seven. Bandera in 1853 was a settlement that was barely a year old. A party of Mormon shingle cutters had put up a mill on the Medina that season to work the big bald cypresses along the river, and the town filled in behind them with Germans, Alsatians and, from 1855, a colony of Polish families who arrived speaking no English and sang at their work. The Navarros there were a small outlying branch of the mission families, running goats and a few hundred head of cattle in broken hill country where the grass was thin and the creeks ran clear. Ramon grew up in a house of rough cedar pickets with a dirt floor, a good well and a yard full of hounds. He was the kind of boy who is sent to find the lost calf and is back before dark with the calf and an account of which way the wolves had gone. By nine he could follow a shod horse over bare limestone. By twelve he said he could tell a cow that had been frightened from one that had been hungry, and nobody who tried him ever caught him out. The war years on that frontier were ugly and he was a child in the middle of them. Men rode out to join the Confederate companies and did not come back, Comanche and Kickapoo raiders came down the creeks, and the Unionist Germans of the hill country, who had no wish to fight for Richmond, were hunted by Confederate irregulars. In Reconstruction the county was short of men, money and law, and the boy left school altogether. At fourteen, in 1867, he signed on as a wrangler with a trail outfit gathering steers for the Kansas railheads, and he was gone for the better part of five months. That was the beginning of the cattle-trail years for him, and they shaped him more than any teacher. He learned to ride night guard, to swim a herd across a flooded river, to read a sky for hail and a bunch of steers for a stampede that has not happened yet. He also learned, from an old Tejano trail boss, to count the herd at dawn and to take it seriously when the count was short by a cow and nothing in the country explained it. He made six drives in all and was a good hand, but he was not a contented one. A man could spend twenty years on the trail and end with a horse, a saddle and a bad back, and Ramon, who had watched the railroads come, preferred a trade with a pay cheque in it. In 1874 he took a bench in a machine shop on Commerce Street in San Antonio, learning to file, turn and fit, and later he worked in the shops of the Gulf, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway after the line reached the city in 1877. He was a steady, exact, unsociable machinist. He lived on the Westside among his own people, took his meals at a cousin's table and was seldom seen at the dances. His daughter Ana was born in 1875, in the year after he took the bench, and he raised her in the Westside house with the help of the women of the family, who were glad to have a child to fuss over. He was not a talkative father, but she remembered for the rest of her life that he always checked the latch twice. The calling came in 1879, in June, during a harvest. A German farmer near Castroville, on the Medina below Bandera, had bought a steam thresher on credit, and Ramon, who was the only man in three counties who could keep a boiler and a set of gears in order, was sent for to get it running. He found a good crop, a hired crew of harvesters, a farmhouse with the table laid and nobody at it. The last field stood unreaped and the reapers were never seen again. The crew's wagon was still in the yard, the team was still in harness and standing very quiet, and the ground between the barn and the field was printed with bare feet that did not go back. It was sign of the sort he had read all his life. He read it, and it said something he did not want it to say. Whatever had walked the crew out into the oats had come from downwind, had not been hurried and had not left a single print of its own. He sat on the thresher until the light went, and then, for the first time in his life, he was afraid of the dark. After that he went home and told his uncle what he had seen, and his uncle, a man who had guarded the missions for thirty years, said that he had been waiting for it. A Mercenary works differently from the hunters who inherit a ledger, and Ramon was a hard case even among Mercenaries. He took commissions from ranchers, from the German farmers and, when they could pay, from the mission families, and he wrote his terms on a slip of paper and kept a copy. He would not hunt for nothing, and said so, and there were Navarros who were shocked by it. But he also never took a fee for a job he had not finished, and he was known on three rivers for returning the money of a man he had failed. His Ranch Tracking was the thing that made his name. He worked from the animals. A herd that will not drink at a certain water, horses that stand rigid at a fence, buzzards that circle and will not come down, a dog that goes home and lies under the porch, these were the things he wrote in his book, and the book, which survives in part, reads like a stockman's ledger with a second column. He carried a pistol and silver-tipped stakes, and he was said to trust the stakes. The alias came from the trail. On cold mornings when no one else could get a fire going he could, with a twist of rough tinder, a scrap of greasy rag and the heel of his hand, and he did it so quickly and so crossly that the crew called him Rough Tinder, and later the Ledger made the joke permanent. He was a man who lit quickly and hot. He quarrelled with the cattlemen who tried to beat him down on price and with the priests who wanted him to go about his business more quietly, and he and his daughter once went a whole winter without speaking over a borrowed horse. The two of them reconciled, in the end, over a matter of her marriage plans, which he met, she later said, with an unexpected courtesy. The great Galveston storm fell in the September after his death, and the city of San Antonio sent its wagons and its doctors to the coast, but by then he was three months in his grave. He had died in the spring. He had gone out at night to watch the churchyard at Mission Concepcion, where there had been trouble with the graves, and he was struck from behind, hard, as he knelt to read the ground. It was a blow that would have killed a smaller man at once. He got up, finished what he had come for, walked the two miles back to the Westside and sat down at the kitchen table, and Ana, who was twenty-five, found him there an hour later holding a cup he had not drunk from. He died two days after, in the house, without coming back to his senses for more than a minute. He was forty-seven. He did not see his daughter's wedding to William Adams Proctor three years later, but the family saw to it that his stakes were in the church. Ana, who took the White Ledger's name and kept her father's, was given the pistol and did not use it, and kept the stakes in a cedar box under her bed to the end of her life. Ramon Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as The Rough Tinder, the machinist who could read a pasture like a page and who would not hunt for nothing and would not leave a job half done. In the Slayerverse he stands for the hired hunters of the borderlands, the men who worked for wages and their word, and who proved that a price, honestly kept, was as good a bond as any oath.