Dark Valley Destiny (11 page)

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 discovered 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.

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.

"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.

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.