Dark Valley Destiny Read online

  As each little half-sister arrived, Hester Jane became her loving companion and was always remembered with warmth and gratitude. They all came to Hester Jane's funeral, bringing with them their abundant loyalty and honest grief.12 They were charming people, these Ervins, and their graciousness and courtesy were part of Robert Howard's heritage, too.

  Although her mother's odyssey was over, Hester Jane's was just beginning. The year 1884 found the Ervin family in Lampasas, Texas, southwest of Waco in the central part of the state. Lampasas was then a health resort, one of the earliest frontier spas in Texas. It was also a relic of Indian forays and family feuds amid faded elegance. Robert Howard later wrote:

  Up and down the Lampasas River, only a few years before, settlers and Comanches had fought it out mercilessly. Scarcely a hill or tree but had its legend and tale of fight and foray. The country was full of men and women who had fought and been scarred; my mother, as a child, talked with them. She knew a man who had been scalped and survived it. And to this day she refuses to believe there's any good in an Indian.13

  In Lampasas, in May of 1886, Wynne Ervin, the only son of this second union, arrived. Hester Jane was almost sixteen then, and she may have undertaken much of the new baby's care to help her overburdened stepmother, since Lulu, the last Ervin child, was born only eighteen months later.

  Although Colonel Ervin expected Lampasas to offer him many opportunities in banking, cattle, and real estate, business was slow. The cattle business was in a slump. Drouth plagued all of West Texas in 1886, and by 1887 settlers were leaving at an alarming rate. What precipitation there was had come in the form of a blizzard in January of 1886, destroying the herds. One rancher in the Panhandle reported that, out of a herd of 22,000 cattle, 20,000 had been lost in the storm.

  When, late in 1885, rumors spread that the legendary San Saba mine had actually been discovered, prospectors rushed to the scene. By late 1887, miners in Wilbarger County had recovered some silver and abundant copper. Colonel Ervin, always alert to opportunities for quick profits, decided to uproot his family again and head for New Mexico to mine silver, such a move being feasible because of the completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad's western route in 1881 and that of the Texas and Pacific shortly thereafter.

  Ervin may have thought that the high, dry air of New Mexico would benefit his family's health, if indeed there were any remaining problems with tuberculosis. But he soon found Geronimo's Apaches breathing down his neck more unhealthy than the risk of tuberculosis back home. Whatever his reasons, he turned back east, where it is recorded that in Exeter, Missouri, in 1890 he purchased a house and ten fertile acres for $2,400.

  Robert Howard tells us that George Washington Ervin's older children regarded this move as the worst mistake of his grandfather's life.14 Fed up with their father's restlessness, his get-rich-quick schemes, and the endless succession of babies, Sarah Jane Martin's children decided to remain in Texas. By now thirty-five years separated G. W. Ervin's oldest from his youngest child. Some of the older children were married; those who were not were more or less self-sufficient. Only Hester Jane, and possibly her brother Robert, still in their teens, accompanied the family to Missouri.

  For a while Hester Jane must have found security in the big old plantation house filled with little girls' laughter. She loved the broad acres, the lawns, gardens, and orchards. There she matured into a strikingly pretty woman; but, just as she was about to enter the social life of Exeter, the past laid its shadow on her. She had contracted her mother's tuberculosis.

  In 1894 Hester Jane was living in Muskogee, in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, with an older sister who was married to a cattleman. This was a desolate place beyond the frontier, without community or law, peopled by scattered householders, Indian bands, and fleeing outlaws. Many of the Indians were the remnants of tribes who, because the whites coveted their reservation lands, had been arbitrarily swept up by the U.S. Army after the Civil War and dumped into the Territory to root, hog, or die. If Hester Jane's experience in Lampasas had not persuaded her, her sojourn in this wild region consolidated her dislike of Indians.

  It is unclear what brought Hester Jane Ervin to Oklahoma, whether she herself was ill, or whether it was her sister who had active tuberculosis and needed Hester Jane to care for her. Perhaps she was merely restless, being at this point almost twenty-five and unmarried.

  In 1900, at the age of seventy, George Washington Ervin died in the midst of plans to return to Texas. He had always made a good living for his large brood and was remembered as a loving husband and an adventurous spirit. He once told his youngest daughter that, when he was gone, he wanted it known that he was a Methodist, a Democrat, and a Southerner, though not necessarily in that order. So be it said.

  After her father's death, Hester Jane must have felt particularly uprooted. The Exeter property had become the home of Alice Wynne Ervin and her children. As the only Martin among them, she was something of an outsider. She turned again toward Texas and her people there, moving to Mineral Wells to help care for some members of her own family who were suffering from tuberculosis.

  Mineral Wells, like the Lampasas of an earlier decade, was something of a spa, and its waters from nearby mineral springs were considered especially salubrious. There in Mineral Wells she met Dr. Isaac Mordecai Howard, a tall, blue-eyed, intense young doctor studying for his examination by the newly-formed State Medical Board. Overwhelmed by his attentions, Hester Jane turned her back on an earlier suitor,15 and she and the doctor were married in 1904, a few months before Hester Jane reached the age of thirty-four.

  Long and frequent dislocations, such as Hester Jane had experienced, do not make for happy wives or relaxed mothers. Thus, it must have been a strained and uncertain if beautiful bride whom Dr. I. M. Howard took to wife.

  Two years later Robert Ervin Howard was born.

  The newlyweds decided to settle on the banks of Dark Valley Creek, an effluent of the Brazos River, which the Spaniards had called Los Brazos de Dios, "the Arms of God." When the Howards arrived in Dark Valley, a sparsely-settled community consisting of a flour mill, a general store, and a handful of houses, they spent several months with their new neighbors, the Greens, awaiting the building of their own house on an adjacent lot. The Greens' house, with additions, still stands and is now known as the old Kyle place. It was originally a small, one-story boxed house with a peaked roof, to which in later days was added a right-angled wing and a small porch.

  In the Howards' time, the kitchen was located on the creek side of the house. Beyond it, overlooking the stream, lay a tiny bedroom, which could be reached either from the kitchen or from a side door. In these cramped quarters, the Howards made their first home.

  On the other side of the kitchen ran a breezeway, beyond which was the Greens' principal room, combining both living and sleeping facilities. There was no inside plumbing. The outhouse was placed near the creek, downstream from the water supply.

  To the rear of the house and slightly to the left stood a storm cellar, a dugout lined with stone and roofed with timbers, over which earth had been heaped into a mound. It served both as a root cellar and as an emergency shelter against "cyclones." This cellar, swept away by a flash flood, has never been replaced, but remnants of the structure are still in evidence.16

  It was a very small house for two couples, and the maintenance of privacy for a bride and groom must have been difficult. Nora Green remembers Hessie Howard as a tall, slim woman, rather frail, with thoughtful gray eyes, which lighted up suddenly when she laughed. And she laughed often in those days, with her handsome husband beside her and, later, with her baby on the way.

  Isaac and Hester Howard had not expected to have a child. They believed that "Hessie," as Dr. Howard called his Hester Jane in those days, was both too old and too ill for childbearing. Having had a baby in her arms for most of the past twenty years, albeit another woman's child, Hester Jane must have felt bereft as she contemplated her own childlessness, and she mus
t have shared her sorrow with her doctor-husband, her "Howie." It was without doubt her yearning that prompted Dr. Howard to appeal to his brother David, who had many children (ultimately twelve), to allow the Howards to adopt little Wallace, David's most recent son, and to bring the little fellow up as his own.17

  While the two brothers were engaged in this dialogue, Hessie discovered that she was pregnant.

  During her pregnancy, Hester Jane's joy was tempered only by her fears. Women had good cause to fear childbirth in those days. Antisepsis was relatively new and little practiced. Few operating areas were "Listerized," that is, organized to minimize contamination in recognition of the "germ theory." Certainly no delivery rooms were so protected, and childbed fever was far from unusual on the frontier. Infant mortality was high. Women were known to have made their own shrouds along with their layettes and to have set them aside together while waiting. All too often the shroud was used. The risk was compounded for a woman with tuberculosis, as Hester Jane well knew. Her knowledge of her own mother's exhaustion and death must have added to her apprehension.

  Tuberculosis is a strange disease. Relatively rare today, in 1900 it was second only to pneumonia as a major cause of death. Whenever people move about a lot, whenever there is crowding, unhygienic living conditions, poverty, or privation, tuberculosis becomes epidemic. In spite of the rarity of the disease in the United States today, for example, in 1960, in Alaska, it was as prevalent as it was through our entire country at the turn of the century.

  The experts agree that, while the tuberculosis bacillus is a necessary condition for the onset of the disease, its development depends in large part on personal unhappiness and conflict and afflicts people who lack adequate techniques for coping with their environment. William Menninger, of the famed Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, thought that a predisposition for the disease was established early in life as a kind of infantile despair, which resulted in a flight from adult responsibilities. As the disease develops, to the tubercular person's feelings of helplessness is added the real helplessness and dependency of illness. "The patients refuse to believe they are tuberculous and at the same time cling to the illness . . . and indulge in indiscretions which serve to give the disease a better hold."18

  During her pregnancy, Hessie was all smiles and laughter, forever joking with her neighbors, but she never left her husband's side. She traveled with Dr. Howard wherever he went.19 Her fear, and the dependency it generated, must have been enormous and unquestionably carried over into her relationship with her son.

  Although Hester Howard seemed determined to see that her baby did not lack the love and nurturance that she had been deprived of, the conflict between her needs and her infant's added anxiety and depression to her ill health. Mrs. Howard later recalled a time when little Robert was ill and cried continuously unless she sat beside him and rocked his bed. When she grew too tired to push down on the mattress any longer, she lay on the floor and pushed up on the springs from below.20 Such an intense investment in a relationship leads to high expectations of compensation from the relationship. Fiercely protective in all her responses to her son's needs, real or fancied, Hester Howard expected his grateful devotion in return. And Robert did not fail her.

  "Texas is all right for men and dogs but hell for women and oxen," said an unknown but knowing pioneer woman, and there was nothing in Hester Howard's experience the winter following Robert's birth to gainsay it. In Dark Valley the isolation was great; so were the physical hardships. Although the Howards' two-room house was new when they moved into it a few months after their marriage, their circumstances were far from idyllic. There was no electricity, only kerosene lamps. There was no plumbing. Water was drawn from a well or carried from the creek— when there was water in it—for dishwashing and baths. Wood had to be chopped for the cookstove. The only heat for the house came from the stove in the kitchen or from the drafty fireplace at the far end of the main room.

  The Howards' house, like that of the Greens', was so built that the interior and exterior walls were constructed of the same wide planks, which were nailed vertically to simple upright framing timbers to form two small rooms separated by a breezeway, referred to locally as a "dogtrot." Although the boards were joined by dowels or by tongue-and-groove construction and the seams sealed by slats or laths nailed over the joints, the house was far from windproof. When the northers swept down the canyon, roaring through the breezeway and howling up the chimney, the whole house shook, and the little family within shivered in their wake.

  The family wash must have been a prodigious undertaking during the winter. Water was heated outdoors in a black iron wash pot fired by kindling or dried wood gathered along the creek bank or carried by the armload from the woodpile. Soiled garments were boiled in water to which washing soda or lye soap had been added, then lifted out of the pot on broomsticks and carried to the washtubs for soaping and rinsing. Finally, wrung out, they were taken from the partial shelter of the breezeway and hung on clotheslines to dry. If a norther overtook washday, the drying garments would freeze solid and rock back and forth like ghosts of wooden soldiers on parade.

  Thus, staggering under the heavy round of daily chores that was the lot of the pioneer woman, an exhausted Hester Howard nursed her baby and tended him with care. But her awareness of the emotional poverty of her own childhood, her loneliness, her sense of perennial danger lurking just beyond her doorstep, and her deep-seated feelings of inadequacy led to periods of despondency. And these unhappy moods, these anxieties, these frustrations, were transmitted to the babe-in-arms by body language that rang out as clearly as a bell.

  Years later an adult Robert Howard realized that his troubled spirit had its roots far back in the earliest experiences of his infancy. He was probably describing his reaction to his mother's despondency; but, being unaware of the source of his malaise, he projected his somber feelings on the landscape of Dark Valley. There in Dark Valley, he wrote, lay the seeds of his destiny.

  The very name suggested to Howard the gloom, the loneliness, and the isolation of that small valley set in the Palo Pinto hills. He wrote to Lovecraft that he thought his inmost being had absorbed some of the valley's darkness during his infancy there. Then, in language reminiscent of Coleridge, Howard described the enclosing cliffs, the elusive shadows of the tall oaks, the brooding silences. He said that owls called weirdly over a ruined cabin at the mouth of the valley, telling a story of betrayal at dusk and murder by moonlight. Bats flitted about the chimney in the gloaming, while on the darkling plain of the sky a single star ventured forth.21 This was his heartland; this had shaped his destiny, this dense darkness beside the trickle of water that flowed to the Arms of God.

  Flashes of insight such as this were characteristic of Howard's writing. By intuition alone, he often came upon truths that elsewhere have been validated by years of clinical evidence. He was aware that early panics, undefined anxieties, even periods of ecstasy, are recalled later as moods or feelings associated with people, or places, or levels of development. He also seemed to know that an adult's longing for an earlier, simpler time, or phantasies of world destruction, or fears of going insane may be associated with traumatic events that occurred when the infant ego was so undeveloped that the child could not relate his experiences to a coherent self.

  It would be difficult to recognize Dark Valley from Howard's description. The real Dark Valley, which is referred to locally as a canyon, is broad and shallow. The hills are low. During the summer the stream bed, as it emerges from the canyon, often runs dry. Since the family moved away when Robert was very young, his childhood memories would have been vague at best.

  But Robert Howard was not writing about reality; he was writing about himself. His description of the valley was based on feelings that had their roots in the earliest years of his life. He intensified the properties of the terrain to reflect his prevailing emotional tone or mood as an adult and to make a statement about the nature of his experiences, the memory of whi
ch lay beyond his recall.

  III. DARK VALLEY LORD

  And her darkening eyes at last were sane; she passed with a fearsome word:

  "You who were born in Dark Valley, beware the Valley's lord!" As I came down through Dark Valley, the grim hills gulped the light; I heard the ponderous tramping of a monster in the night. . . .

  I climbed the ridge into the moon and trembling there I turned— Down in the blasted shadows two eyes like hellfire burned. Under the black malignant trees a shapeless Shadow fell— I go no more to Dark Valley which is the Gate of Hell.1

  Disrupting the intimacy of mother and child was Dr. Howard, daily tramping in and out of the house, carrying his saddlebags and smelling of disinfectant. To a small child, he would have been an awesome figure, a large, aggressive man with an authoritative air and piercing blue eyes beneath a full head of coal-black hair.

  Dr. Howard was a hard-working frontier doctor who looked every emergency in the eye and attacked it fearlessly. To him illness and death were enemies with whom he waged a continuing war. If he relaxed his vigilance for one moment, he felt, death would win; and he viewed death, not as a part of life, but as a failure.

  Isaac Howard was a restless man, always searching for something. He sought a "proper" world, one that conformed to his standards and expectations. Things were either good or bad; there was nothing in between. And he saw himself as a Christian soldier committed to the obliteration of evil. Dr. Howard was torn between the need to "rescue the perishing" and to "care for the dying," as the old hymn goes. He was a physician who wanted to be a minister, but as one of his cousins put it: "He had too much of the devil in him for that."2

  This judgment seemed to refer to the doctor's mercurial temper, which readily got out of hand. One day, so the old-timers tell, while the doctor and his wife were leaving church, a clumsy churchgoer stepped on Mrs. Howard's skirt, tearing it. Before the whole congregation, the doctor threatened the offender with mayhem in language so salty that it is still remembered, with shocked delight, seventy years later. His neighbors decided forthwith that Isaac Howard was unsuited to the ministry, being unable—among other things—to turn the other cheek.3