William Dow

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

William Dow spent forty years collecting fares in San Antonio and, in the course of it, made the transfer slip the nearest thing that the White Ledger's Texas chapter had to a passport. He was born in 1925 in Bandera, Texas, and died in 2012 of old age, aged eighty-seven. He worked as a streetcar conductor, first on the last of the city's electric cars and afterwards on its buses, in the barrios, along the river walk and out to the military bases of modern San Antonio. He belonged to the House of Proctor and to the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and he was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer. He was the elder child of the cattle drover Ralph Dow and the boarding-house keeper Beatrice Navarro Proctor, and the brother of Helen Dow Proctor. He never married and had no children, and the house on Presa Street was his home for sixty years. The Proctors remember him as the conductor who knew every face on the line and who punched, on the back of a certain kind of ticket, a mark that opened a door in any part of the city. He was born in Bandera because his mother went home to the hills, as the Navarro women do. It was the last week of January 1925, and Beatrice Navarro Proctor, who had been born in the cedar-picket house on the Medina in 1904 and had been told since she could stand that a child who was born anywhere else would never learn to find a well, was twenty-one and in the last month of her pregnancy. Her father, William Adams Proctor, the newspaper compositor, lay ill in the front room of the house on Presa Street, and the family doctor had advised that she should not be in the house when it came to the worst. She went up to Bandera on the afternoon bus with her mother, Ana Navarro, a laundry basket and a flat iron, and the baby, a long, fair, sleepy boy with his father's freckles, was delivered in the old Navarro house in the middle of a freezing night, by candlelight, on a bed that had been used for the purpose for three generations. A neighbour held the lamp. Ralph Dow, who was on the trail with a herd of Hereford steers somewhere south of Kerrville, heard the news by a rider two days later, and named the boy for his own father-in-law before anyone could object. They were back in San Antonio within the month, and in the autumn of that year the old compositor died, and the boy, who had been laid on his bed for his grandfather's blessing, was said to have grabbed the old man's moustache. He grew up in the Presa Street house, a tall, narrow, shabby place on three floors with a porch and a green kitchen, in the passage between the dining room and the stove. His mother kept the lodgers and his father, when he was home, kept the horses, and between them they brought up two children in a household in which the only quiet hour was the one between the Sunday dinner and the Sunday supper. His sister Helen was born in 1929. They learned, as children of boarding houses do, to carry a tray at six, to lock a door at seven and to read a stranger at eight. It was William who was good at it. He was a quiet boy, a great reader of timetables, with a memory for numbers, and by ten he could say, of any lodger in the house, what time they got up, what time they came in and whose boots were whose. He ran messages for his mother. He ran, in the evenings, down to the end of the street to watch the cars go by on the long hill, the red and cream trolleys with the sparks falling from the pole, and he said that when he grew up he would be the man in the cap on the back platform. His father said that a drover's son might do worse. He left school at sixteen, in 1941, to drive cattle for his father, and was at the stock pens when the war broke out. He was called up in the spring of 1943, at seventeen and a half, and served for three years in an Army transportation corps, in Louisiana, in England and in France, driving a six-by-six truck across a continent of mud, and was demobilised at Fort Sam Houston in 1946 with a good conduct ribbon and a poor opinion of Louisiana. He came home to a city that had become a great garrison, in which the barrios of the Westside and the new camps on the north side looked at each other across the river. The war years had changed the place beyond recognition. The old compositor's newspaper had gone over to cold type, the Navarro cousins were dispersed to the factories, and his father, who was forty-six, was driving cattle to the pens by truck. In the autumn William presented himself at the barns of the public service company in a clean shirt and was handed a cap and a change-maker. The cars that he worked on were the last of their kind in the city. The company had taken most of them off the streets before the war, and had put in buses, but there remained a few electric lines, one of them out to Fort Sam Houston by way of Broadway, and the men who worked them were known, with some affection, as the old guard. William, who was twenty-one, was the youngest of them by twenty years. He was a good conductor. He was patient with drunks and with soldiers, gallant with old women and absolutely exact about the money, and he had the knack of seeing, as the car lurched round the curve by the Alamo, the whole of the people in it. He knew who rode which line at what hour, and who got on at the usual stop and did not get off at the usual one. In the Korean War years, when the line to the fort was crowded with young men in uniform and the car was a moving hospital, he carried the hurt, the drunk and the desperately homesick in the same weary, gentle way, and he is said to have lost only one passenger in the whole of the war, who fell asleep and was found at the end of the line by the night cleaner. The Ledger came to him by way of his mother. Beatrice had told him, when he was sixteen, in the dining room, with a list of lodgers in her hand, what the family was, and what it had been since 1455, and he had said that he thought that he had guessed. She did not ask him to serve. She asked him merely to keep his eyes open, and he did. It was in 1948, in the winter, that his cousin, a hunter of the White Ledger who had been tracking something along the Broadway line, came into the house one night and said that he had had to ride the car in a hurry and had no way to show the conductor that he was in the family. William thought for a moment, took a transfer from his pocket, punched a small star in the lower right corner, with the punch that every conductor carried, and said that the next man to show him one of those would be treated as a cousin. It was the best joke he ever made, and it was taken up. By the following year the Texas chapter was using it. A hunter who had got into trouble in the city, and who had no one to ask, could board any car or bus that William Dow worked, and put down a fare, and be given a transfer with a star. It meant that the conductor would turn his head, take the passenger off at the right stop, and see that a message was passed. It meant, on the line, that he could be relied upon. He served in this way for thirty-eight years, long after the electric cars were pulled out and the buses came in, and the star went with him. It travelled, in the end, to the other conductors, who did not know what it meant and who punched it for him anyway out of habit, and to the Ledger's cousins, of whom there were several hundred in the barrios and on the bases. He knew them all by their walk. He was the man at the back of the car in the Vietnam years, when the buses were full of young men with duffel bags, who stood at the door, said a few plain words, and put a hand on the arm of anyone who looked to be about to be sick. In 1968, when the city threw open the great fair that it called HemisFair, tore down half a district to do it and filled the river walk with visitors, he drove the shuttle from the fairgrounds to the hotels for six months, with a cap and a smile, and said that it was the only time in his life that he had been asked a hundred times a day where the Alamo was. His mother died in 1956, of cancer, in the front room on Presa Street, with the iron bed and the lace curtain, and he was thirty-one. His sister Helen, who was twenty-seven, took the lodgers, and he took the rent, which was to say the heavy end of it, and for the next forty years, until Helen died in 1998, the two of them kept the house. His father, who went on driving cattle until he was sixty, died in 1965, at the pens, with a pencil behind his ear, and it was William who came for him, and who found the tally in his hat. He never married. He said, when pressed, that a conductor already had a wife, who was the schedule, and that she was exacting. He retired in 1987, at sixty-two, with a gold watch, a pension and a drawer of punched transfers, and sat on the porch of the house on Presa Street for another twenty-five years, watching the buses go by. He knew the driver of every one. In the spring of 2012, on a Sunday, he was found in his chair by a cousin, with his cap on his knee and his punch in his hand, and in the pocket of his jacket was a transfer, punched with a star, with a time on it, as if he had meant to get off somewhere. The coroner, who was asked for a cause, wrote old age. It was the ninth of the family to be given that cause, and William, if he had been consulted, would have thought it a fair one. William Dow is remembered in the Proctor family as the conductor with the star-punch, the quiet son of the Presa Street house who knew everyone on the line. In the Slayerverse he stands for the carriers and ticket-takers of the White Ledger, who never drew a pistol, who asked only that a cousin be got safely to the next stop, and who proved that a small mark on a piece of card, honoured by someone who has been told what it means, will take a hunter farther than a horse.