Dark Valley Destiny Page 9

  Members of both congregations sat on the grass and feasted, washing down the meal with iced tea or lemonade. Replete, the people would discuss the sermon or trade views, news, and gossip. Then cakes would be brought out for the cutting: old-fashioned pound cake, devil's food, sponge cake, and angel food with mocha icing. Although the stuffed picnickers groaned when the cakes appeared, the adults lined up with alacrity to receive their portions; while the children, big-eyed before such abundance, crowded around, holding paper plates.

  Finally, while the women cleaned up, exchanged recipes, and sought advice about their children, the men returned the benches to the tabernacle before settling down to smoke their pipes, talk of crops, cattle, and local politics, and watch their youngsters playing on the lawn.

  It was to this friendly community Dr. Howard brought his family: Hester, mortally ill, and Robert, ready to enter the fourth grade. He rented a white frame house a mile south of Cross Cut on the road to Brownwood, just a few hundred yards east of the local cemetery.6 The house had four rooms on the ground floor, and stacked above the two front rooms were two bedrooms. A detached cellar in the rear was connected to the house by a breezeway. This provided covering for a large cistern in which was stored the runoff rain water from the roof. Two outbuildings completed the premises: a privy and a barn for the horses and the milch cow.

  There was neither electricity nor running water in the house. Hence, although Mrs. Howard liked flowers, her garden was restricted to the hardiest species. Still, the absence of a garden was not necessarily a deprivation to a countrywoman in those days. Each spring the fenced-in pasture land behind the house and the meadow beyond the cemetery became a riot of wildflowers.

  If the spring is wet, the fields of Central Texas are transformed into a wonderland. After the redbuds begin to glow amid the post oaks, the wild plums blossom. Soon the verbena covers the raw earth with lavender blooms, and scattered among them are buttercups and wine-cups, small burgundy-colored mallows that spring from mosslike plants. Mid-March is the time of the bluebonnet,7 and the pasture behind the Howards' barn would have exploded into a carpet of blue lupines. Hester Howard must have enjoyed arranging these long-stemmed, cobalt-blue blooms in one of her prized cut-glass vases.

  After the bluebonnets fade, the prairie decks itself in daisylike Indian blankets, wild gaillardias whose yellow-tipped rust petals are reminiscent of a chiefs war bonnet. On his tramps across the hillsides, young Robert must have discovered many other wildflowers: the standing cypress, three-foot scarlet sentinels, erect among the post oaks; pale, spiky clusters of wild belladonna; violets along the creek banks; and in summer, Texas bluebells, Queen Anne's lace, black-eyed susans, and purple horsemint. Horsemint was thought to drive mites from hens' nests and fleas from dogs. Had Robert heard of this belief, he surely would have rubbed Patches with the leaves, just as he buttered his mangy cats later on in Cross Plains.

  Autumn in this part of Texas is all purple and gold against the terra cotta landscape. Amid the goldenrod and bursting milkweed pods the purple thistle stands, its royal color rivaled only by the flaming leaves of the sumac growing along the fences.

  Such were the fields, woods, and hills that made up the ranch of the X-Triple-Bar, and as Robert roamed among them, they became a part of him. Years later he splashed the same bright hues over his Hyborian landscape.8

  For Robert Howard, the years in Cross Cut were probably the happiest of his life. He had a constant companion in Patches. Patches was a large, short-haired, black-and-white mongrel, half collie and half Walker foxhound which had been given to Robert for Christmas 1917. "Patch" was a puppy with his eyes barely open when Robert got him, but under the boy's care the animal throve. Boy and dog became inseparable. When Robert ate, the dog sat beside his chair. When Robert helped himself, before eating a bite, he helped Patch to food.

  With the prescience that animals appear to develop in intimate contact with human beings, the dog gave his young master total, uncritical acceptance. A wish for just such perfect acceptance and understanding from human beings underlay Robert's disappointment with the world. "Take Patch, here," he once said wryly. "He's been around for years, and not once has he ever criticized me. He never so much as implied that he is better than I am, and he never has corrected me about my manners. He doesn't know anything about man's inlrumanity to man." He mused: "Humanity will probably destroy itself," adding: "It'd leave a good world for the animals."9

  We wonder how much nagging criticism and correction young Robert endured from his ever-present parents in their attempts to mold him into their image of a perfect man.

  Facing down whatever fears remained from his previous school experience, Robert entered the fourth grade of the Cross Cut school in the autumn of 1915. Although he never came to accept the confinement of the classroom and the authoritarian attitudes of his teachers, he made enough of an adjustment to get good grades and to take part in one-to-one games on the playground. In Cross Cut, Robert escaped the bullying that had made his early school years a nightmare. While the school did have a gang of four or five young hellions of about Robert's age, their misbehavior consisted mainly of fighting among themselves and plaguing their teachers. Rarely did they make trouble outside their own group.

  The school was small. According to Austin Newton, one of Robert's earliest friends:

  It was a three-teacher school. Each teacher taught about three grades. I remember our first grade teacher very well. Her name was Miss Mae Butler. She was an excellent teacher, and made quite an impression on me. Mr. Gage taught some of the middle grades perhaps fourth, fifth and sixth.

  Mr. Gage walked with a limp. He was very stern and all the kids were afraid of him.

  Miss Murrah taught the upper grades.10

  Even as late as 1932, Robert recalled these three teachers as "awesome and superior beings." He wrote that he had been wrestling with a schoolmate, a boy whom he regularly overpowered, when the teachers came out on the playground to watch. At once Robert fell into delighted contemplation of the easy victory he would have before this audience, when his opponent, for the first and only time in his life, seized him and threw him. Even sixteen or seventeen years later, Robert acutely felt this humiliation and disgrace, recalling his frustration in knowing that the teachers would think that day's outcome not a mere mischance but a true measure of his prowess. He hoped to stage a rematch to vindicate himself. But that, reported Howard, was not to be. A few days later, he said, the boy he had wrestled with perished, "shot through the heart."11 Since Robert's schoolmate, Norris Chambers, remembers nothing of such a tragic event, this tale appears to be one of Robert's many lapses into phantasy in order to liquidate discomfort; and nowhere else is the connection between Robert's whoppers and his ego defenses more clearly shown.

  For the first time in his life, Robert began to make friends, boys of whom his mother approved or children of Dr. Howard's cronies. Besides Austin Newton his buddies included Earl Baker, Percy Triplett, and a crippled boy, Fowler Gafford. Robert enjoyed wrestling and informal sparring, which developed into his lifelong interest in boxing. He read all he could find on the subject and practiced with his friend Austin Newton. Newton recalled:

  We didn't have any boxing gloves, but we spent a lot of time sparring. One afternoon we were sparring out in our back yard. I ran into a left jab which hit me on the Adam's apple and knocked me down. That ended the sparring for that day. But sparring continued to be one of our main pastimes.12

  Although Robert learned to play the local boys' games, such as snap-the-whip, wolf-over-the-river, hide and seek, and farmer-in-the-dell, the Cross Cut children found the nine-year-old odd. Robert seemed even more fascinated with violence than the other boys. One of the Baker girls noted that he always acted like a boy who wanted to kill someone. She added: "He was shy of girls and had a mind that wouldn't quit. 'Some day I will fly away on wings,' he said. We thought he was a little crazy."13

  Still, the children liked Robert. They found him intere
sting and went along with his imaginative schemes. Like all boys, he enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians or fencing with sticks or laths, but unlike most, his pretend play was choreographed like a ballet, and each role was supported by suitable language. He made up little plays and told Earl Baker and Austin Newton exactly what they should say.

  These games of make-believe were derived from the adventure tales that he so avidly devoured. Stories of pirates like Captain Kidd and Henry Morgan absorbed him until he came upon a realistic account of the squalid lives and violent deaths of pirates. When he was in the tenth grade at Cross Plains, some years later, he wrote a class paper expressing his disillusionment:

  I began to perceive that there might be disadvantages attached to piracy. At the back of the aforesaid book there was an illustration which shattered my hopes entirely. It portrayed a pirate of my acquaintance just after his execution. He was fastened to the mast of a man-of-war, by a great spike which was driven through his head into the wood . . . and his villainous features were streaked with blood and twisted with the awful agony that had been his before death came to his release.

  This gruesome picture haunted me for days and caused me once and for all time, to give up any thoughts of sailing under the skull and crossbones.14

  With Earl, Robert roamed the pastures with bows and arrows, playing Indians; at other times they were gunmen like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Sometimes, aboard "Old Charlie," the infinitely patient horse on which Robert and the Baker children were taught to ride, each boy would round up a pretend calf or two. On other occasions they took two of the Baker horses, and the hillsides resounded to war whoops and Rebel yells as they charged the enemy.

  Robert later told colorful tales, apparently with a foundation in truth, of going out with a companion to bulldog a half-wild young bull, only to have the venture end in flight from the enraged animal. In the resulting stampede, Robert's horse ran under a tree limb, which caught the youngster in the chest and would have fractured some ribs had not the branch been so rotten that it broke off at the impact.15

  Years later Robert wrote Lovecraft a dramatic tale of going on horseback to locked-up country schoolhouses during the summer vacation to borrow books. These, he said, he carried off in a flour sack but always returned them.16 Since none of Robert's friends confirms this story, and since Texas schoolhouses of the time would have contained few books of interest to the precocious youngster, we suspect that this was just one more of Robert Howard's whoppers. He probably invented the tale to impress the sage of Providence, for whose intellect he entertained a somewhat exaggerated respect.

  But the boys did have other adventures as they swaggered over the wide lands of the X-Triple-Bar. They went armed, Robert with a big clasp knife, which had a catch to keep it from closing accidentally, and young Newton with an inoperative Civil War pistol. They bivouacked wherever the afternoon overtook them and practiced living off the land. "On one occasion," reported Newton, "we caught some fish out of Turkey Creek.

  We broiled them over an open fire and ate them, without any salt or other seasoning. They tasted horrible, but we thought it was fun."

  On these forays they pretended to hunt and trap, but they never really tried to kill any bird or beast; Robert was already a fervent wildlife lover. In later letters he wrote of detesting snakes and killing several, but a friend from his high school years said, "He wouldn't even kill a snake."

  One spring, in climbing down a bluff to look at one of his traps, Austin Newton found he had put his hand to within inches of a four-foot diamondback rattlesnake that had crawled out of a small cave to sun itself. Fortunately the rattlesnake, lately awakened from hibernation, was too sluggish to strike. With the agility of a squirrel, a howling young Newton scampered up the rock face, while Robert Howard rolled on the ground with laughter.17

  When not roaming over the fields with his friends, or engaging in games of combat with them, or absorbed in his reading, Robert perfected his skill with his knife. He practiced hours on end, throwing the opened knife at a tree or a post. To the amazement of friends fifty years later, he even learned to snap the blade open with one hand as he withdrew it from his pocket, although it was not a switchblade.

  On Sundays, when the Bakers asked the Howards to dinner, Robert invited the little Baker girls out back to watch him throw the knife. There, standing before a tree in their back yard, he would begin to hurl the knife rhythmically, each throw penetrating the tree. The little girls, huddled together, admired Robert's prowess. "We were utterly fascinated," Vera Baker (now Mrs. Nichols) confessed, "but we were scared."18 And sixty-odd years later she giggled as she recalled those early days.

  As young Robert had indicated to Mrs. Burns, the postmistress, his literary ambitions were already forming. In later years he wrote the editor of Weird Tales: "I've always had a honing to make my living by writing, ever since I can remember,"19 and he early put his plans into action. In Cross Cut he attempted a story which he later described as:

  ... the adventures of one "Boealf' a young Dane Viking. Racial loyalties struggled in me when I chronicled his ravages. Celtic patriotism prevented

  him from winning all his battles; the Gaels dealt him particular hell and the Welsh held him to a draw. But I turned him on the Saxons with gusto and the way he plundered them was a caution; I finally left him safely enscounced [sic] at the court of Canute, one of my child-hood heroes.20

  The text of this juvenile effort has not survived, nor have any other juvenilia from this period. We do know, however, that Robert very early conceived the character Francis Xavier Gordon, alias El Borak, a Texas gunman turned adventurer in the Orient. With him the typical Howard hero began to emerge.

  When he came to Cross Cut, Howard wrote later, he was "gaunt, spare and wiry, with lean, hard and unbeautiful limbs."21 His boyhood friends have confirmed Robert's view of himself at the age of nine. "He was just plain skinny—a skinny kid," recalled his playmate Austin Newton. Another acquaintance called him "practically emaciated." Since a third friend remembers him as a husky boy, we may infer that he grew and filled out during his four years in Cross Cut and Burkett.22

  Robert at nine was not only thin and small for his age, he was also timid and immature. Old residents of the village remember a shy little boy clinging to his mother or hiding behind her skirts at church.23 Dr. Howard recalled that his son seemed happy with his parents and doubted if Robert ever had any urge to leave them, "Especially his mother, around whose knees he stayed so close in baby and childhood. And his mother's devotion was equally as strong for him."24

  Mrs. Burns, also, observed the exceptional closeness of mother and son. "During the father's absence, while on duties made by an ever-demanding patronage, mother and son keep close contact, and are inseparable, portraying a devotion seldom known, even between parent and child."25

  Such devotion is suspect in a child of Robert's age. It suggests at the very least that the normal separation of child from mother will be difficult. While Robert's early manifestations of dependency may be attributed to the lack of stability in his home situation, as a result of so many moves from one locality to another, family resettlements were by no means the only cause of Robert's dominant, and eventually fatal, personality trait. The major part of his problem stemmed from the interaction between a sickly, bullied, brilliant child and unhappy parents who were intensely hostile toward one another during the years that their son was in grade school.

  By the time the family settled in Cross Cut, Hester Howard was becoming increasingly disenchanted with her marriage. The swashbuckling young physician who had swept her off her feet in Mineral Wells had proved a flash in the pan. Her former suitor from Goldthwaite26 began to assume all the exaggerated dimensions of the fish that got away, especially as his fortunes, Hester heard, were rising while Isaac Howard's dwindled.

  This was especially true when the doctor's collections were slow and he did not aggressively push the farmers for payment. Sometimes, to Hester's annoyance, he too
k his fee in farm produce, often in canned goods, home canning being common in Texas at the time. People who knew Dr. Howard agree that he was generous with medical service to patients who could not, or said they could not, pay his fees. Hester often quarreled with her husband over his profligate ways with money and his preposterous get-rich-quick schemes, which had kept the family wandering over Texas for nine years. He was still raring to go, while she was just as determined to stay put, wherever "put" might be.

  Although she must have been taught that comparisons were odious, Hester was not averse to reminding her husband of the virtues and financial success of the stalwart gentleman from Goldthwaite and deploring the folly of her choice. Thereupon the doctor would fling himself out of the house, whistling loudly to control his rage, and seek out a friend to tell his troubles to.

  The Howards' neighbor Annie Newton—later Mrs. Davis—thinks that this contention between his parents was responsible for Robert's problems with adjustment:

  Mrs. Howard was in love with ... a young man, and she expected to marry him. But this dashing young doctor came along, and she hurriedly married him. Then the rest of her life she lived in disappointment. . . . She had no love for him, and she didn't want the child to have anything to do with the father. She just wanted to hold him. And I feel like if Robert had been reared under different circumstances, he'd have been different. . . .

  I feel that [Robert] was what he was because of this family disturbance. ... I knew them because I talked to all of them; and of course I

  knew . . . the child. I have been with Dr. and Mrs. Howard and I know they were desperately unhappy . . . her being in love with someone else and married to this dashing young doctor. And then after she married him, she wouldn't divorce him, but she lived with him. She treated him fair, but he knew and they all knew that her heart was some place else. So she took it out on Robert. . . .

  But she didn't mind letting you know that this other fellow . . . became prosperous, and made more money than the doctor. And here she's married to this poor country doctor, and the other man was making lots of money, and what a mistake she'd made!27