Dark Valley Destiny (10 page)

Robert E. Howard at about five years of

Robert E. Howard at about eight years of

grandmother's peach cream as a frozen delicacy, unequaled by any other. Remembering that delicious concoction, Robert later wrote to Lovecraft that the local peaches "weren't much."
²⁰

A photograph of Robert, probably taken in South Texas and well distributed among family and friends, shows a sturdy little boy of about five, wearing a wide-brimmed hat turned back to show his face. While he does not look particularly happy, the child appears to be healthy and cooperative. To judge from his clothes, it is wintertime, and his shoes are scuffed and worn as only a healthy, active little boy can scuff them.

In the next available picture, Robert is several years older. He is very thin and he eyes the camera distrustfully. Although he is dressed in an Indian costume, there is no play in him. He looks fey. This is the child whom Alma Baker King described as a little wild boy, completely emaciated, playing at killing everything.
²¹
Something had produced a radical change in the child. He looks disturbed and ill.

We can only guess at the nature of this illness. Nursed by a tubercular mother until he was four years old—an incredibly extended period for any mother to suckle her child—and having even occasional contacts with a tubercular uncle, Robert may have developed childhood tuberculosis. Childhood tuberculosis differs from the adult disease. Being more apt to attack bones and joints, it could easily be confused with rheumatic fever, especially if there was a swelling of the lymph glands of the neck.

That he was a puny, sickly child is a fact acknowledged both by Robert in his writings and by his mother in her talks with her nurse. Mrs. Howard admitted that she spoiled Robert because he was sickly and frail, and this period of ill health probably occurred between the ages of five and seven.

This period is in every child's life a period of conflict, engendered by a complete physical and intellectual reorganization. If this period is prolonged, as it seems to have been in the case of Robert Howard, it would have increased the boy's dependence on his mother at a time when the average child seeks autonomy through attachment to his father.

For little Robert, already sickly, the usual fears of a six-year-old stirred up by such things as loud noises, a pitch-black room, rattling winds, and the threat of fire would be heightened by the knowledge that his mother was ill and thus less accessible to him emotionally. If his own illness is added to what is usually an insecure period, the child's fears are magnified, and with them comes increasing dependence.

Moreover, at a time when most children are beginning to effect some kind of separation from their mothers and turn to their fathers for support, Robert suffered an additional rebuff. Dr. Howard's profession required that he put calls by his patients ahead of the companionship needs of his son, day after day. As a result, the six-or-seven-year-old Robert must have felt rejected and his self-esteem diminished in consequence.

To make matters even worse, Mrs. Howard was fast drawing away from her husband. His volatile temper, impulsiveness, and grandiose plans provided her with traits to scorn. She began to feel that she had married beneath herself—that the Ervins were far superior to the Howards. By the time that Robert was grown, she began to confide in a few people that hers was royal blood.

As for Dr. Howard, his "Hessie" of bridal days became "Hetch" or even "Heck" to him, and through him, to others. And our informant added: "And he didn't say it very nicely."
²²
Every effort Mrs. Howard made to maintain her standard of manners was ridiculed by her husband. The more "refined" she acted, the more crass his behavior became. When the cloctor invited guests for dinner, Hester, unlike the average wife in the community, would serve the meal in courses. As she cleared away the first course, Isaac, to tease her, would call to her in the kitchen: "Well, Heck, is that all there is?"
²³
Consequently Hester Howard entertained less and less, while the doctor took many of his meals with friends and patients and spent more and more hours confiding to them the shortcomings of his wife.

The more brash Isaac Howard became—"harum-scarum" was the term frequently applied to him by his West Texas friends—the more perfection Hester sought, to heighten the contrast between them. Her chronic invalidism became another useful weapon when all other forms of denigration failed to curb her bumptious mate.

This continuing but subtle humiliation of each parent by the other made it increasingly difficult for Robert to achieve a realistic picture of either one. As he grew older, Robert often took his father to task for "mistreating" his mother, and their loud, angry words carried across the small yard to the Butler house next door.
²⁴

The Howards' next move was to a place near Wichita Falls. Although there is no record of Dr. Howard's medical registration in the District Clerk's Office in any of the three nearby counties—Wichita, Clay, or Archer—Robert later told Lovecraft that his family had made their home in a little cattle town near the old North Texas oil field, which lies in the Wichita Falls area.
²⁵

The Howards' stay there was brief and not happy. Robert had unpleasant memories of the countryside. He found the bare land virtually uninhabitable. Endless miles of white
caliche,
a calcium carbonate crust, lay like the bleached bones of giants where the top soil had been swept away by the unrelenting winds. On a bright day the glare was blinding.

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.