Warren Kalteyer

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

Warren Kalteyer was born in 1896 in New Braunfels, Texas, and lived forty-five years as a railway clerk, in the freight offices and waybill rooms of the lines that ran in and out of San Antonio. In 1920 he married the seamstress and vampire slayer Elizabeth Proctor, the elder daughter of the court clerk Barnabas Proctor and the milliner Ada Menger, and they raised two children, Evelyn Proctor and Warren Proctor Kalteyer, neither of whom hunted. He died in 1941 of a sudden collapse, aged forty-five. He belonged to no great house and was not born to the Proctor line, but he married into the White Ledger of the Yorkist bloodline, which descends from Isabel Proctor, and he served it for twenty-one years in the one way that a man with a pencil and a timetable could. He knew where everything on the Texas rails was, and when, and in what sort of car, and he never wrote any of it down in a place where it could be read. New Braunfels in 1896 was a German town on the Comal and the Guadalupe, founded by a prince's agents fifty years before, with a Vereins church, a sangerfest, a main street of limestone shops and a spring that never froze. The Kalteyers had come in the second wave, in the 1850s, and kept a feed store on the plaza. Warren was the youngest of five, a thin, fair, short-sighted, orderly boy who liked trains better than horses and who, at nine, could recite from memory the timetable of the International and Great Northern from Austin to San Antonio, with the stops and the connections. His father, who had expected a feed merchant, said that the boy had at least inherited the family gift for stock. He was given a place in the depot at fourteen as a messenger. By sixteen he could read a bill of lading faster than the agent. He went down to San Antonio in the spring of 1914, by train, with a trunk, a Bible and a reference from the agent at New Braunfels, and took a clerk's stool in the freight office of the Southern Pacific on Commerce Street. It was a long room with a high ceiling, fourteen desks and a wall of pigeonholes, and the clerks in it worked with a speed that Warren, who had thought himself fast, found alarming. In a month he was the equal of the rest. In a year he was better. The Great War filled the city with soldiers at Camp Travis and Kelly Field, and the freight office with troop cars and mule trains, and he went down to enlist in the spring of 1917 and was turned away for his eyes. The recruiting sergeant said that a man who could see a wrong figure at forty feet was of more use at a desk. Warren, who took it as an insult, went back to the desk and was never again heard to complain of it. He had a trick of seeing, as he went down a column of waybills, the car that did not belong, the consignee who did not exist or the weight that did not match the bill, and he marked it with a very small tick in the margin. His chief, a lean Irishman named Dunleavy, found that Warren's ticks were never wrong, and for that reason began, in a small way, to hold them back. The Ledger found him through his chief. Dunleavy, a Catholic and a quiet friend of the Proctors, had been passing along for years, through a hatbox shop on Soledad Street, a note of any car that looked odd. A closed car with a locked door and no stated contents, for instance, travelling by night in a month when there was a plague of livestock deaths in the Hill Country. He had been doing it alone. When he retired in 1919, he said to the milliner Ada Menger that he knew a clerk who ticked, and she sent her elder daughter, Elizabeth, with a hat that needed trimming, to look him over. Elizabeth Proctor was twenty, a tall, dark, direct young woman with her father's gift for saying a good deal less than she knew, and she had been called to the work two years before. She was a seamstress by trade, in her mother's workroom, and she took her trimming into the freight office at lunchtime and sat on the end of a bench in the sun. She looked at the waybills over his shoulder. He did not like it, and said so. She said that he had missed a car on the fourth line. He had not. He had ticked it, and she had seen it. She asked him what the tick meant, and he, who had never explained one to anyone, told her. She said that it was the most useful mark that she had ever seen, and that she would be obliged if he would go on making it. He said that he supposed he could. Three weeks later he proposed. They were married in 1920, in the church at Castroville, by the same priest who had married her parents, with Ada, who had made the hat, in the front pew, and the eleven Kalteyers of New Braunfels in the back, singing the hymn in German. Elizabeth's father had died the year before. Her brother Edwin gave her away, in a borrowed collar, and her sister Harriet, who was seventeen and did not talk, stood up with her. Warren, who had been warned about the family, took it as a clerk would take a change in the tariffs. He asked only to be shown the rules. He was shown them that evening, in the back room of the hat shop, by Ada, who gave him a cup of tea, a sheet of paper and a rule of thumb. The paper was a list of the Ledger's contacts along the lines. The rule of thumb was that a clerk who remembered nothing was a clerk who could not be made to say. His daughter Evelyn was born in 1923, in the winter, at a lying-in house in Alamo Heights, and brought home to the little house that they rented near the Southern Pacific yards, and his son Warren Proctor Kalteyer in 1925. The children were brought up among timetables. He taught them the stations of the Sunset Route before they could tell the time, and each of them, at five, could name the stops from San Antonio to El Paso. Neither was called. Elizabeth, who had her own opinion of the work, watched them, at supper, for the signs, and finding none was quietly relieved. Evelyn became a stenographer. Young Warren took after his father's side, and went into the railway office, and afterwards into the army. He did not hunt, and was never asked to, and it did not stop him from being of use. Elizabeth would come home in the early hours, in the dark, with the smell of cordite on her coat, and say a name. He would go to work the next morning and say nothing. By the evening he would have found out, from the waybills, which car had come in on which night and whose goods had been consigned to the freight house on the wrong side of the river. He passed it on in the form of a recipe. His wife, who understood this, said that she had never been given a better report in a worse hand. She added that in a household where one person could not sleep, the other should at least be useful at breakfast. The Depression was kind to the railways for no one but the clerks, and the clerks who survived the cuts were those who made themselves hard to do without. He survived. He took on the work of two men in 1931, and of three in 1934, at the pay of one and a half, and the Ledger, which paid him nothing, was the richest of the three. When the army began to fill the city again in 1940, with the draft and the new camps and the troop trains, he worked fourteen-hour days at the freight office and drew, by his own account, a good deal of pleasure from the sight of so many cars in order. He died on a Tuesday in the autumn of 1941, at the stool, a little after noon. He had been looking at a waybill for a car of cattle, and had made a tick in the margin, and put down his pencil, and sat for a moment with his hands on the desk, and was gone. His fellow clerks, who were afraid to touch him, asked the foreman. The foreman looked at the waybill. The tick, he said, was in the right place. Warren Kalteyer is remembered in the Proctor family as the clerk of the Southern Pacific, the husband who ticked the margin. In the Slayerverse he stands for the railwaymen and office workers of the White Ledger, who never raised a stake, who knew what was moving and where, and whose small marks in a margin were enough to keep a hunter on the right track.