William Trevino

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

William Trevino was born in 1899 in Victoria, Texas, and lived seventy-eight years, most of them as a cattle drover on the brush-country roads between the south Texas ranches and the stock pens of San Antonio. He was the only child of the cattle drover Joseph Trevino and of the seamstress Florence Proctor Bartlett of the White Ledger line, and he never married and had no children. He was not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, though he was born into the Proctor family through his mother and carried its business, in a quiet and practical way, for most of his life. He died in 1977 of old age, aged seventy-eight. The Proctors remember him as the one who kept the drover's roads open after his father was gone: a big, easy, bookish man with a long memory for water and for gossip, who read the newspapers at the pens and could tell the family, by the Thursday, what the stock agents were saying about the dead calves out past Pearsall. He was born at Victoria because his mother would not be left behind. In March of 1899 Joseph Trevino had a contract to take a string of steers to the pens at Victoria for a coastal buyer, a week's drive and a few days' business, and Florence, who was eight months gone, announced that she had been born in that same town in 1877 while her father was sent there on the railway's account and her mother had refused to stay at home, and that she saw no reason to break a family custom. Her husband, who was a patient man, argued for as long as it took to saddle a horse, and then arranged for her to go down by train with her sewing machine. William was born on the third night, in a rented room over a feed store, with the pens audible through the floor. His father, who had been driving cattle for fifteen years, said that the boy had come into the world to the correct sound. He was carried home to San Antonio in a basket, within the fortnight, and was put to sleep in the rooms above his grandmother's shop on Commerce Street. He grew up between the trade of his father and the trade of his mother, and was not entirely at home in either. His father took him to the pens at five and put him on a fence rail, and the boy, who was large and cheerful and unafraid of animals, watched the drovers for hours with great enjoyment. His mother, who had a straight line in her eye and a needle in her hand, taught him to sew a button at six, which he did very badly and with enormous determination. He was a bookish child, which neither of his parents had expected. He read everything that came into the house, the railway timetables, the German almanacs from the quarter, the catalogues of the saddlers and the Sunday paper, and at nine he was found in the workroom explaining to a hunter's torn coat what was wrong with it. His grandmother Lydia, who kept the shop and listened to everyone, said that he would either be a bishop or a bookkeeper. He was told what the Proctors did at fourteen, at the kitchen table on the south side, in the autumn of 1913, by his mother and in his father's presence, in the same even voice in which she had told his father in a hotel at New Braunfels. He listened to the end. He asked whether the bowl of salt that his great-grandmother kept by the door had been for the cat. His father said that it had not. William thought about that for a minute and said that he supposed he had better learn to read cattle properly, then. It was a decision that his parents never discussed with him again, and it was kept. The war years of his youth came to the door as beef. The cantonment at Camp Travis and the flying field at Kelly needed cattle by the thousand, and he went out at eighteen with a crew of boys and pensioners under his father, as a hand, in the second year of the Great War, taking steers from the brush to the army's pens. He was not called up, being the son of a man who supplied the army, and he was ashamed of it for years. He went in the same autumn, as an apprentice, into the trades, to a wheelwright and ironsmith on the south side, to learn a craft that would be of some use. He liked it. He could shoe a horse, set a tyre on a wheel and mend a wagon, and was said to have the best hand in the district for a hot rivet. He said that the iron was an honest material. The influenza that followed, in the autumn of 1918, killed two of his father's crew and several of his neighbours, and passed his own family by, which his grandmother attributed to the salt. Florence did not recover her strength afterwards, and died in the spring of 1921, when William was twenty-two, of what the family book calls old age, although she was forty-four. He stood in the doorway of the room above the shop. His grandmother Lydia, who survived her daughter by two years, said that the heaviest weight of her life was that the only child who could thread a needle in the dark had gone out before her. William was given his mother's sewing box and kept it on a shelf for fifty-six years. He went back to the drive after his grandmother's death, because the wheelwright's trade was dying and the pens were not. He was by then twenty-four, a broad, brown, slow-speaking man with his father's long stride and his mother's pale eyes, and he found that he liked the road. For some twelve years he worked beside Joseph, on the short hauls between the ranches of the brush country and the stockyards at San Antonio, and took over, bit by bit, the parts of the work that his father's age made hard: the paperwork at the railhead, the arithmetic of the weights, the long conversations with the ranch managers who would not sell to a man they did not know. His father, who had been sixty-two years in the pens, said that he had never seen a man so well able to be useful without being noticed. Joseph died in the summer of 1936, of a stroke, leaning on a rail, looking at a pen of steers that had gone quiet. William was at the other end of the yard, at the scales, and was the first to reach him. He was thirty-seven. He took the family's contracts that autumn, in the worst years of the Depression, when the price of a steer was less than the cost of the railway ticket and every ranch in the brush country was behind on its notes. He kept his father's crew on at a lower wage and kept the pens running. He sold his mother's sewing machine. He did not sell the box. He said that cattle were the one thing in Texas that nobody had stopped eating, and that was a sufficient basis for a business. It was in these years that he became what the Proctors needed. A drover goes where the hunters cannot: along the ranch roads, through the back pastures, past the water holes, and into the kitchens of men who will speak to a stock agent but not to a stranger. William noticed the dead calf with no blood in it. He noticed the well that a whole outfit had begun to avoid, the ranch hand who would not go out after dusk, and the pasture where the cattle stood in a ring and would not graze. He wrote them in a green notebook, in his round hand, with the dates and the distances, and carried the notebook, every month, to the back room of a boarding house on the Westside, where a cousin copied it into a ledger. He did it for forty years. He did not once call it anything but a list of the weather. The war years of the forties filled the city with soldiers and the pens with army buyers, and he drove beef to Fort Sam Houston and to the airfields until he was past forty-five. When the Korean War came, in 1950, it was beef again, and he was fifty-one, and the cattle were no more patient than they had been in 1917. He gave up the long roads at about sixty, kept the pens near the stockyards for the last fifteen years of his working life, and then retired to a small house on the south side with a cistern, a mesquite tree and an enormous number of books. He read there, in the evenings, until the lamp had to be changed. He died in the spring of 1977, of old age, in his own chair, with a book face down upon his knee. It was the almanac, and the page was open at the tides. William Trevino is remembered in the Proctor family as the drover with the green notebook, the son who inherited his father's roads and his mother's eye for a clean line. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trail men and ranch hands of the White Ledger, the unarmed watchers who noted what the night did to the brush country and wrote it down as weather, and whose patient lists made it possible for the hunters to find, in the dark, the places that needed them.