Dark Valley Destiny Read online

  Here he felt the impact of a Texas norther, a storm that Robert called a "blue blizzard." The "blue norther" is characterized by the deep blue of the northern horizon, whence rises a sudden, chilling wind. With the wind comes a temperature drop of as much as thirty to forty degrees Fahrenheit in a single hour, transforming a warm, sunny morning into a freezing afternoon. The blue of the horizon may spread across the sky, and a mizzling rain may change to fine snow or stinging ice. If the wind persists and snow develops, the norther can turn into a blizzard.

  Robert was living in the Wichite Country when he was around seven, a time when, in those days, children usually started school. But the records show that Robert did not enter the first grade until he was eight, and he confirms this fact in his letters. It is probable that he had not completely recovered from his illness.

  There may have been another reason as well; schoolboys everywhere—who themselves are leery of strangers—have a propensity for ganging up on the new boy in town or on anyone who seems in any way different from them. And Robert, the perennial tenderfoot, was a ready-made victim.

  Frail, introverted, and looking to his mother for protection, Robert was a natural butt for bullies. Even before the opening of school, every day saw a series of terrifying encounters, which varied from the merely mean to the Inquisitorial. He could not leave his yard for fear of being set upon. The fact that his mother read extensively to him, and in so doing enhanced the closeness already established, only made matters worse.

  Boys play rough in North Texas. According to Larry McMurtry's reports from Archer County, young Robert Howard had cause to be fearful. Mr. McMurtry writes:

  Scatology is also widely used as a method of sexual intimidation. In its crude form this generally involves the stupid flinging of shit at the smart, for in the small town the person with brains poses a direct threat to the masculinity (or femininity) of the person without them. Many a smart kid had his face pushed into a commode bowl at one time or another and not a few have endured analgesic enemas and other rectal horrors. I have a bright friend who grew up in a rural area when outhouses were still in use; by the time he had reached the second grade his intelligence had marked him as dangerous and on days when he had the temerity to answer questions in class, he would be ganged up on at recess and shoved through one of the holes in the men's outhouse down into the shit.26

  Whether or not such treatment was ever accorded Robert, he had undoubtedly heard of such incidents. They are echoed in a passage from the story "Rogues in the House." Young Conan, who has been making a precarious living as a thief, escapes from jail, only to learn that his girl has betrayed him to the law on behalf of a rival lover. After killing his rival, Conan picks up the faithless female and carries her along a window ledge.

  Reaching the spot he sought, Conan halted, gripping the wall with his free hand.... His captive whimpered and twisted, renewing her importunities. Conan glanced down into the muck and slime of the alleys below .. . then he dropped her with great accuracy into a cesspool. He enjoyed her kickings and flounderings and the concentrated venom of her profanity for a few seconds, and even allowed himself a low rumble of laughter.27

  For Robert any move—particularly a move to an area where such experiences were common—was extremely unfortunate. Moving to a new locality enhances whatever conflicts a seven-year-old may have and requires a major readjustment in terms of an unfamiliar environment. When a child, who is fearful to begin with, is placed in a situation like that in North Texas, he has no chance to adjust at all. And this was the tragedy of Robert Howard's life: time and time again, people or events made adjustment impossible for him.

  Aware of his son's misery and isolation, Dr. Howard, not surprisingly, accepted an offer to take over Dr. Steven's practice in Bagwell. This town lay in Red River County in East Texas, at the edge of the Piney Woods. The Howards lived about half a mile from the town center, in what was known as the old Baker house, just past the Church of Christ.

  Although Bagwell has gone the way of most little railroad towns, in 1914 it was a thriving community. It boasted a population of 500, including 170 voters, eight to ten stores, two banks, a hardware company, three hotels, and two drug stores. With its two cotton gins, the Texas and Pacific Railroad for shipping, and its surrounding fertile cotton fields, Bagwell was fast becoming a cotton center. Four freight and eight passenger trains stopped at Bagwell each day and were met by hacks from the local livery stable. There were three blacksmith shops for shoeing horses. Three churches ministered to the spiritual needs of the community.

  Sam Buzbee, who still lives in the house where he was born, remembers Dr. Howard well. Mr. Buzbee, now in his eighties and full of stories of the past, recalled a prank that involved Dr. Howard shortly after his arrival in Bagwell. Buzbee used to hunt regularly with a group of townsmen. After hunting, they would usually build a fire and cook a stew or barbecue some meat.

  One fellow was something of a cheapskate. He never paid his way, so the men decided to teach him a lesson. They persuaded their stingy friend to steal a chicken from Buzbee's hen house. Buzbee, alerted to the prank, dashed out of his house, gun in hand, and filled the thief full of bird shot.

  Scared half out of his wits, the fellow dashed to the drugstore. Jim Reese, the druggist, got excited and sent for Dr. Howard. When the doctor heard that a man had been shot, he did not take time to saddle his horse but grabbed his bag and ran all the way to the drugstore. In the interim Buzbee, with the druggist's help, had picked the bird shot out of his victim's buttocks, and when Dr. Howard arrived, the two men were arguing about who was to pay the doctor.

  "When the doc saw that the injuries were not serious," recalls Sam Buzbee, "he was mad as hell. He began cussing out everybody in sight, and he could cuss. Jim Reese tried to calm him down, assuring him we'd pay him for the visit."

  Finally Dr. Howard quieted down. "Hell, no," the doctor said. "I can't charge you for doing nothing."

  Mr. Buzbee continued: "I have heard he was a pretty good doctor. Mrs. McWhorter's mother named one of her boys after him."28

  Bagwell had a school. Although everybody called it "The Little Red Schoolhouse," it was a converted home, painted white, with lacy Victorian woodwork trimming the porches and eaves. Here Robert entered the first grade.

  Robert was eight years old and already knew how to read. Being an omnivorous reader all his life, he probably learned to read spontaneously at a very early age. Often early readers are eidetic as children; that is, they have a "photographic memory."

  In Robert's case this photographic memory persisted into adulthood. His friends wondered at his capacity to pull books off the library shelves, devour them rapidly, and then have perfect recall. Of course, interpretation was a different matter; Robert's understanding was often clouded by his continual self-references. This assimilation of the facts to his own experiences made the facts come alive but robbed him of objectivity.

  Although eight-year-old Robert was withdrawn and shy, he was able to overcome his fears enough to enter school and to make a few friends. These friendships were probably orchestrated by Dr. Howard, for they were largely with children of the doctor's colleagues. Throughout his childhood many of Robert's friends were the children of Dr. Howard's cronies, who were usually physicians. But once the affiliation was established, Robert was accepted by these youngsters because his lively imagination and good stories enriched their play.

  Being unused to the ordinary games that children play, Robert liked to make up a story, turn the tale into a drama, and assign roles to each of his playmates. Although he no longer felt that he might actually become the character whose part he was playing, Robert was cautious about the possibility of being contaminated by these roles. During the summer of 1914, for example, when the First World War began, Robert and his friends played at war. Quickly Robert threw his lot in with the

  Allies and thereafter refused to pretend to be a German soldier. Because of the widespread hatred of the German Army, Robert dis
covered to his delight that he was on the popular side, despite his enmity for the British.29 It was at this time that Robert developed a liking for the French. In the fiction of his later years, if the hero was not an American or Irishman, he was likely to be a citizen of France.

  Eight-year-olds are most anxious to overcome the fears of their earlier years. The unknown and unseen, though fascinating, are still fraught with terror; but such fears can be exorcised, they discover, if they can name and define them. Later, an adult Howard insisted that the most terrible fears arise from things that are sensed but not described or labeled, as was the dread that Poe suggested in his famous line: "dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

  A splendid way for a boy to rid himself of fear of ghosts and other supernatural beings is to frighten some less hardy soul with tales and myths of the boy's own making. The boys in Bagwell found a "witch," an ancient black woman who lived at the edge of the town. She went barefoot, drove a flock of black geese, and gathered manure in her bare hands to fertilize her garden. Although Robert did not say so in his letter to Lovecraft describing the Witch of Bagwell, the youngsters must have heckled their witch; for she put a "death curse" on one of his friends, which nearly scared him to death. It is just as well that she did not live in Salem, Howard went on to observe, for shortly thereafter the child died.30

  While eight-year-olds often discover an aged "witch," and while almost any small town will yield at least one eccentric who might be so dubbed, the coincidence of the curse and the child's death is arresting. The story may be a youthful example of what E. Hoffmann Price called Robert's "whoppers";31 still, it could well serve a young boy whose purpose it was to impress a friend or to alarm an enemy.

  The Howards' cook in Bagwell also tried to help Robert overcome his fears of the supernatural by telling stories that topped anything his eight-year-old imagination could conjure up. Old "Aunt Mary" Bohan-non had been born into slavery. She was light-skinned and at one time beautiful, and her mistress had been wildly jealous and cruel. Memories of the torture and sadism that Aunt Mary suffered persisted into Robert's adulthood, filling him with the same fascinated horror that he had experienced when first he heard them and—we venture to suggest— providing him with role models for the few incidents of sadistic practices that appear in his stories.

  Aunt Mary, moreover, had ghost stories enough to produce a never-ending tingle down the spine. A plantation house haunted by a headless giant; footsteps heard when no one else was present; rattling chains, chill winds, hot blasts; dismembered bodies; groans, moans, and other eerie sounds—all were part of Aunt Mary's repertoire. And Robert sat wide-eyed in the kitchen and listened.32

  The fact that the Howards had a hired cook suggests that Mrs. Howard was even less well than usual. Unless she were ill, Hester Jane Howard always did her own housework. Although in later years she sent out the shirts to a laundress, she was an excellent cook and proud of her skills.

  Robert's health was still uncertain. He was too thin and had a chronically running nose and a hacking cough, which his father attributed to the dampness. Bagwell was unquestionably a poor place for anyone with those allergic symptoms that used to go under the name "catarrh." In a short autobiography, probably a school assignment, fifteen-year-old Robert wrote:

  [Seminole] was prairie country—extremely so. Water was scarce there; too scarce; so we moved to Bagwell, Texas, which is between Texarkana and Paris. ... If we had too little water in Seminole, we had too much in Bagwell. It rained for weeks at a time; rained until the ground turned green; rained until the fish swam around in the roads.

  Robert went on to say that his chronic catarrh prompted the family's move to West Central Texas.33 Indeed, in January of 1915 Dr. Howard once more gathered up his ailing family and moved to the high, dry air of Brown County. Thus began the first more or less stable life that Robert had known. He was just about to turn nine years old.

  V. THE REALM OF THE -TRIPLE-BAR

  With the joys of the sun and love and growth

  All things of the earth are rife, And the soul that is deep in the breast of me Sings with the pulse of life.1

  Between the shadowy, ghost-haunted world of Robert Howard's early childhood and his adult creation of the shining kingdoms of his Hyborian Age, a very different realm lay under the bright West Texas sun, wherein visionary ranches drowsed beneath the big skies. Hither came the boy Robert, a world-builder, who claimed the longhorn cattle, the clumps of mesquite, and even the sandstone outcrops as his own. These vast holdings were the first coherent universe that Robert Howard dreamed into being; and here he roamed, carving his brand X— (X-Triple-Bar) on the trees and on the gabled roof of his family's house.

  Elsie Burns, the postmistress of Burkett, Texas, was probably the first person to discover the proprietorship of these broad lands. She learned about it on an early spring morning in 1915 as she rested on a large rock in one of the pastures of Robert's imaginary domain. Not thinking of herself as trespassing, she had settled down to read in the perfumed meadow. Suddenly Robert's dog, Patches, bounded down from a ledge behind her. Both woman and dog were startled, Mrs. Burns by the swiftness with which the big black-and-white animal appeared, the dog by the sheer bulk of the woman, who weighed over 350 pounds. A crisis was averted when Robert called: "Come, Patches; come, Patches!"

  Turning, Mrs. Burns saw Robert. Although the day was young, the nine-year-old climbed wearily over the fence and strode toward the seated woman. Leaving Patches to explore a small cave under a ledge, Robert apologized politely.

  V X

  "I'm Robert Howard," he announced. "I'm sorry if we frightened you. Patches and I are out for a morning stroll. We like to come here where there are big rocks and caves so we can play make-believe. Some day I am going to be an author and write stories about pirates and maybe cannibals. Would you like to read them?"2

  Assured of Mrs. Burns's interest, Robert and Patches vanished over a nearby hill.

  The Howards had decided to settle in Cross Cut, in the northwest corner of Brown County, eight or ten miles from the junction of Brown, Callahan, and Coleman counties. This well-wooded section is known as the West Cross Timbers,3 although at the western edge of the area the trees become sparse and the rolling prairie begins. Watered by the Brazos, the West Cross Timbers area supports large stands of a small oak, seldom over twenty feet high, called the post oak or jack oak.4 Among the post oaks one finds a moderately thick cover of grass, herbs, and wildflowers. In some places the oaks form solid patches of woods; in others the trees give way to pastures or fields of wheat or peanuts. When the first settlers arrived, they reported grasses as high as a man on a horse, but farming and stock-raising have destroyed the long grasses, and planters have cleared away many of the trees. In their place have come spreads of "shinnery"—thickets of shin oak and other bushlike species of dwarf oaks. Mesquite brush further clutters the pasture land and harasses the rancher; but where there is adequate moisture, the mesquite grows into a graceful tree. Cattle feed on mesquite beans, which in primitive times were ground and eaten by the Indians.

  The pale green of the mesquite contrasts vividly with the dark olive-green of the live oak,5 a species much larger than the post oak. The live oak is the shade tree of the western plains. This hardy evergreen, with its small, serrated leaves, adds a welcome touch of color to the stark winter landscape. Standing alone in the yard of a Texas home, a gnarled live oak with its spreading boughs provides young tree climbers with all the space they need to flee from imaginary foes.

  Scattered over the low hills are the "cedars"—two species of juniper—which provide fence posts for ranchers and Christmas trees for children. In Robert's day, families made expeditions into the hills to cut their own trees and gather mistletoe, which wreathes the bare branches of the mesquite with jade-green leaves and ivory berries. Robert, an experienced tree-climber, may have pulled down his own mistletoe for the season's decoration.

  Cottonwoods, river willows, and
an occasional sycamore hug the water's edge, while pecan trees climb higher on the banks of creeks and bayou. Early ranchers found that, by budding these native trees, they could obtain a lucrative crop of "paper-shell" pecans. Local children often gathered pecans and spread them out in the sun to dry. In the autumn Robert, like the other boys, probably came to school with hands stained almost black from husking pecans. Perhaps, with a finger wet with pecan "gall," he stained a forearm with his secret brand X—, while his less imaginative schoolmates were content with mere initials on their wrists.

  The hamlet of Cross Cut lies along one of the two main roads between Abilene and Brown wood. Today it boasts about twenty houses and one church. In 1915 it was larger, with a drugstore, a school, a general store, and both a Baptist and a Methodist house of worship.

  The churches were the focus not only of spiritual guidance but also of the town's social activities. In the summer everyone attended the "tabernacle," a kind of open-air church in the middle of the village. It was a building without walls—a roof upheld by beams, beneath which a few feet of lattice hung to screen off the slanting rays of the sun. The only flooring was the platform for the choir and the pulpit. Here each denomination held revival meetings in turn.

  All the townsfolk made a party of it, no matter which church sponsored the occasion. First a shouting, sweating preacher delivered a hellfire-and-damnation sermon, interspersed with "yea verily's," "amens," and now and then a "hallelujah" from the worshipers. After the service the benches, pushed together to serve as tables, were spread with bright cloths and food from the farm kitchens: fried chicken, potato salad, sliced tomatoes, homemade pickles, and perhaps wild-plum preserves to heap on buttered rolls. In season a pot of boiling water yielded ears of corn, which willing hands spread with melted butter dipped from a pot on the bristles of a new paint brush.