Dark Valley Destiny

by Unknown

  Robert Howard was thirteen years old when his family bought their home in Cross Plains. Although Robert had not outgrown the Burkett school system, which lacked high-school facilities, we surmise that Mrs. Howard's nephew, Earl Lee Comer, who had come to live with them, had already reached high-school age. Very little is known about this nephew, except that he shared the Howards' house for several years. Robert, in his later letters to Lovecraft, never once mentions the slightly older lad whose presence must have affected him in one way or another. Since the two boys shared the sleeping porch, ate at the same table, and even attended the same high school, it is indeed curious that no mention of him appears in the correspondence of either Robert or his father.

  Queries to former teachers at the Cross Plains school and to others who lived in the neighborhood have revealed nothing. All we know is that after completing his high-school courses, Lee Comer left Cross

  Plains to work for one of the oil companies in Dallas. Perhaps no one will ever know what Robert thought of this interloper in his home or what this orphaned youth thought of his thirteen-year-old cousin.

  Cross Plains built its first electric plant in 1919; but by and large, rural Texas was slow to modernize. As late as June 1931, according to a Texas A&M survey of five Central Texas counties, eighty percent of the homes were lighted by oil lamps; fifty percent of the people cooked and heated their houses with wood; ninety percent of the women still boiled their clothes in a big iron pot in the yard, scrubbed them on a washboard, and ironed them with a flatiron. Only fifty percent of the homes had telephones, and there were very few radios. For a third of the population reporting, the Bible was the only book in the house. But since the land was large and travel difficult, eighty-five percent of the people owned automobiles.

  The new Howard home stood on a lot 107.5 by 200 feet.15 Bounded by a picket fence, the property lay on the south side of State Route 36— then graded but not paved—where the road snakes from Cross Plains to westward. A large open field lay behind the house, providing a spacious if unbeautiful view.

  A large ornamental cedar softened the outline of the northwest corner of the house; a smaller one stood near the front door. On the other side a mature mulberry, separating the Howard from the Butler property, gave the local boys a satisfying climb. Mrs. Howard grew roses and crepe myrtle in the yard, while under the east windows boxes were planted with ruffled petunias or nasturtium. In times of drouth, like other housewives, she probably watered her flowers with used dishwater or bathwater. An enormous mint bed grew around the outside faucet on the west side and pressed against the wall, a bed which Robert was forever recommending to his friends for mint julep or iced tea.16 West of the fenced-in yard a j dirt driveway (labeled "Coffman Street" on the map) led to the barn and ; other outbuildings in the rear, in which were housed the cow, the doctor's car, and years later, at various times, Robert's horse, two goats, and many cats.

  The house was of a kind Texas call a "boxed house"—a frame house with a single layer of wooden walling, not two layers separated by; studs with an insulating airspace between as in the "balloon house" of

  The Howard House in Cross Plains (north and east sides)

  The Howard house in Cross Plains (south side, showing the field overlooked by Robert E. Howard's study windows)

  "Old Main," administration building, Howard Payne College

  more northerly climes. A hall ran from the front door straight through to the rear. To the right of the hall were three connecting rooms: first the living room, projecting several feet northward of the front door; then the dining room; and beyond that the kitchen.

  To the left a single large bedroom stretched eastward from the main body of the house. A front porch filled the area between the projecting side wall of the living room and the outer limits of the bedroom wall. Here, not far from the front door, hung a porch swing, and here the family often sat and talked in the cool of the evening.

  When Dr. Howard bought the house, there was also an L- shaped porch in the rear of the building, which occupied the recesses between the bedroom and the southern extension of the house. Without going to the expense of sealing off the window in the southern end of the bedroom, the doctor had this porch rebuilt and glassed in. This alteration created a small, airy room with three windows facing south, one facing east, and one on the north wall, beyond which lay the main bedroom. An enclosed sleeping porch stretched southward from the end of the center hall of the original building.

  Adjacent to this sleeping porch, and entered from it, was constructed a large bathroom, the first bathroom the Howards had. Against one wall a long, white enamel tub stood on claw feet with the other facilities opposite it. The entire west wall of the room consisted of closet space. Although, no doubt, originally intended as a general storage area, it gradually became the repository for Robert's firearms. While few rural Texas families in the 1920s were without guns, a bathroom armory was uncommon; yet here, in addition to swords and knives, Robert Howard kept the .25 Colt automatic pistol that he often carried during his high-school years. At various times he also owned a .32 hammerless revolver bought in a pawnshop in East Texas, a .380 Colt automatic, and an old single-action .45 revolver. He said that, despite considerable practice, he never would become a first-class marksman.17

  The remodeled house, small as it was, could have functioned as an individual tuberculosis sanitarium; for in that period the medical profession considered it advantageous for tubercular patients to spend most of their time in the open air. A definitive work on tuberculosis, published in 1906, shows that the value of fresh air and rest was almost an obsession with the physicians of the time, who recommended that the patient spend twenty-four hours of every day outdoors, both for his own welfare and for the protection of other family members.18 Even in 1919 pure air was the only known cure for tuberculosis; and Dr. Howard doubtless had this in mind when he ordered the renovations of a home that was to house his ill wife and a son who was approaching adolescence, a vulnerable age for the onset of the disease.

  It is a good guess that, when the Howards settled in, Dr. and Mrs. Howard shared the closet space in the bedroom but that she slept in the little room beyond it with all the windows open. Several years later, when Lee Comer moved out, the family's sleeping arrangements were entirely rearranged.

  Robert got the little room with four windows, three of which looked out across the meadow at the rear of the house, and this became the bedroom-study, which he occupied for the rest of his life. Mrs. Howard moved into the main bedroom. Although there were two double beds in this fairly generous room, Dr. Howard appears to have largely retired to the sleeping porch, especially when he and Heck were not getting on or when her repressions precluded intimacy.

  In those days the married consumptive was advised to avoid intercourse during periods of illness or fatigue.19 Awareness of this medical caveat would surely have intensified Dr. Howard's sense of guilt about his sexual desires, if indeed the restraints imposed by his Victorian upbringing and the years of rejection by his wife had not already completely estranged the couple. Since "nice people" in Texas did not talk about such personal problems, their lack of communication must have driven them further and further apart. As a modern writer from North Texas puts it: "Sex is still a word to freeze the average Texan's liver, particularly if the Texan is over forty and his liver not already pickled."20

  In contrast to the Cross Cut and Burkett houses, the new Howard home had no fireplace, being heated like other dwellings in the area by small individual space heaters standing in each room. These "heating stoves" were often ornate little radiant heaters, burning gas from the local wells.

  The living room was furnished with a leather davenport, two leather chairs, and a library table on which Mrs. Howard always kept flowers or plants—fiddlehead ferns, mother-in-law's tongue, and possibly the ubiquitous aspidistra, so well beloved by the Victorian housewife. Maroon velvet draperies contrasted with the plants and furnished color to this small sitting ro
om.

  Cut flowers brightened the living room from time to time. We have seen a handsome blue glass vase with crystal handles, which ornamented the room, and a small earthenware container whose chocolate-brown glaze was enlivened with light-beige fronds. In addition to a painting of three small ships at sea hanging behind the davenport, an unusual object of art may have reposed on the table. This was a painted plaster bust of Cleopatra, whose Classical Greek beauty remained chilly and composed despite the asp crawling upward between her breasts. This four-teen-inch-high statue, crafted in France, was, we were told, Robert Howard's favorite work of art; and we wonder whether her queenly serenity somehow added to the glamour of her suicide.21

  The dining room, in which Robert probably did his homework as a growing lad, was dominated by a heavy, round oaken table and chairs of quarter-sawed oak. On a matching buffet, Mrs. Howard displayed a collection of cut glass inherited from her mother. Her finest piece, a cut-glass bowl, stood on the dining room table, sparkling with rainbow hues when the late afternoon sun slanted in.

  "Prisms in the windows make rainbows in the room," children used to chant as they hung up their wind chimes. Young Robert doubtless felt the same delight in these miniature rainbows, and years later they may have splashed with color his many-hued Hyborian Age.

  The kitchen adjoined the dining room. It was of generous size and contained a simple kitchen table at which the family often ate and at which Mrs. Howard shared an occasional cup of tea with her younger neighbor, the cultivated Mrs. Hester Butler. There was a gas stove and a wooden ice chest, to which a burly iceman regularly carried on his leather-covered back fifty- or seventy-five-pound chunks of ice.

  For most Cross Plains housekeepers of the twenties, electric refrigerators, along with washing machines and vacuum cleaners, were things to dream about.22 The automobile could not compete with the horse and wagon for the delivery of ice. The beast came to know the route and would move ahead and wait at the next stop while his master made each delivery afoot. In summer children would often follow the wagon, begging for the shaved ice that the ice man would scrape into waxed-paper cornucopias for them. Robert and his friends may have brought their cones of shaved ice into the kitchen to flavor them with a little milk, sugar, and vanilla, or the sweetened juice from canned crushed pineapple, before savoring the fluid and crunching the ice between their teeth.

  The large bedroom, which eventually became Hester Howard's room, contained two full-sized metal beds of simulated walnut and a dainty oaken chiffonier. Of this piece Mrs. Howard was especially fond and would proudly throw open the pair of small doors to display the rank of well-crafted drawers within. A sewing machine stood against the east wall, where in summer white ruffled curtains fluttered in the windows and white ruffled petunias nodded in the window boxes. Rag rugs chased the chill from the floor in winter. Scattered about the room were many souvenirs—a conch shell from Galveston, an ornamental fan, postcards and photographs of relatives, and a watercolor of pale peonies set against a blue background. Perhaps there was even a "Kewpie doll," a decorative pillow, or some similar prize brought back by Robert from one of his trips to Brownwood or from a day's outing to one of the carnivals that visited Cross Plains regularly.

  The small many-windowed room made from a part of the rear porch became Robert Howard's bedroom-study after the departure of his cousin Earl Lee Comer. Here, against the windowed wall that separated Robert's room from his mother's, stood a narrow bed. Since this window remained undraped and usually open, Robert had no recourse to the privacy necessary to a young man whose strict family attitudes toward sexual conduct precluded visits to a house of ill repute or even occasional necking parties with a high-school classmate of the opposite sex. During a time of rapid bodily changes and the onset of powerful sexual desires, the normal inhibitions and feelings of guilt that accompany early feelings of desire, enhanced as they were by these exceptional sleeping arrangements, could not have failed to affect Robert's adjustment to, and satisfaction with, life.

  Some of Robert Howard's admirers have stated in public that Robert patronized houses of prostitution. While we understand their wish to promote a macho image for the creator of Conan, all the evidence points the other way. Robert Howard was a most proper young man. His devotion to his staid mother and his respect for his father would have discouraged such conduct in his home town, if indeed such institutions existed there after the oil boom faded away.

  Furthermore, Robert seldom traveled far without his mother, even when he had a car. His dislike of the tawdry women who followed the oil boom is manifest in his letters and in his unpublishable autobiographical novel. While it is not impossible that, on some unaccompanied visit to Brownwood, his friends there took him to "Sal's House," as one ofi the three local whorehouses was called, the weight of such evidence as we have makes it more than likely that he died without ever having) enjoyed the pleasures of sex.

  This is not to say that Howard was in any way a deviate. He was a young man of normal sexuality, but his sexuality was thwarted by an unkind environment. Had he lived longer, his maturation might well have overcome the repressions of his youth. What effect that change would have had on his fantasies and their written expression we do not know, but perhaps we owe Conan with all his flamboyant swordplay and sexual triumphs to the fact that his creator was forced to sublimate his own dreams and fancies to bring his character to life. j

  Opposite the bed, facing southward, Robert's writing table abutted! the triple windows, giving him a pleasant view of the open field beyond. This writing table was a sturdy, handsome piece of furniture, somewhat higher than the usual typing table. The thick mahogany top, measuring! 28 by 48 inches, was upheld by two pairs of massive four-by-four-inch; legs that terminated in a single expanded foot on either side. The table ; was furnished with a center drawer, in which Robert surely kept pencils, erasers, and other writing supplies. When he began to write in earnest, a chair, an old Underwood typewriter, and an elderly flat trunk, serving as a filing cabinet, completed the furnishings.23

  It appears that a narrow chest of drawers to hold his clothing; huddled in the hall just outside the room; but since Robert favored khaki pants, work shirts, and ankle-high work shoes, the small chest was all that was needed to store his limited wardrobe.

  Little is known about the furnishings of the sleeping porch at the' end of the hall, except that it contained two white-enameled iron beds' in tandem and that on the nearer bed Robert spent the last few hours of his life. Since the door to the bathroom opened from this narrow glassed enclosure, one may assume that there was little charm or privacy; about it. i

  Whether or not the Howards moved to Cross Plains before the renovations on the house were completed is unknown; but in a letter to Love-

  Robert E. Howard's worktable (with its legs cut down to make it a coffee table) craft, Robert stated that he was nearly fourteen years old before he lived in a community large enough to support a law enforcement office.24 This suggests that the family arrived in Cross Plains late in the fall of 1919 and that Robert entered the eighth grade there. Since the Cross Plains school system covered only ten grades at that time, he could expect to graduate in the spring of 1922.

  Although the new boy in town, Robert did not have too much difficulty adjusting to life in the Cross Plains school. As ever, he hated school; yet he went through the eighth grade with acceptable grades. The hazing he feared did not materialize. He even made a few new friends. Among these was Lindsey Tyson, who was to remain Robert's closest and most steadfast pal for the rest of Robert's life. Tyson was the son of one of the six doctors practicing in Cross Plains when the Howards moved into the town. Although the friendship initially may have been encouraged by Dr. Howard, who always introduced his son to the offspring of his colleagues, it ripened because of the boys' mutual love of sporting events and hunting expeditions.

  It was a curious relationship in some ways. While Lindsey was always a welcome and frequent visitor at the Howard house,
Robert never introduced him to his writing friends or to his inmost thoughts. Lindsey Tyson had no idea that Robert had ever contemplated taking his own life. He never understood the reasons for some of the unusual things Robert did or the anger that churned inside him. He could neither share nor sympathize with Robert's passion for writing. And yet, as the years went by, Lindsey—who could not remain in college because his father's protracted illness demanded a decade of his nursing care—continued to be the major person with whom Robert tramped the woods, talked of guns, and attended football games. Thus did Robert Howard compartmentalize his relationships with people.

  While Robert kept up with Earl Baker in Burkett, he and Austin Newton drifted apart. Young Newton had developed an interest in team sports, to which Bob, as his friend called him, remained indifferent, and grew up to become a professional athletic coach.25 Tom Ray Wilson, who lived in Cross Plains until 1924, became another intimate. As a high-school boy, Tom sometimes drove Dr. Howard on his rounds while the doctor dozed in the back seat of his car. From time to time, Bob slept over at Tom's house, but later Tom reported that he had been scared of

  Bob because he always carried a hunting knife and often a pistol and suffered from nightmares. So severe were these nightmares that Tom used to tie Bob's toe to the bedpost with a piggin string lest, in his sleep, he rise up and attack his roommate.26

  Adjoining the Howards' lot stood the Butler house. There Robert found another playmate in LeeRoy, one of the Butler children, about two and a half years older than he. Two great trees—an ancient live oak in the Butlers' back yard and a burgeoning mulberry on the property line —became ship and shore, mountain and swamp, for pirates who clambered among their branches, complete with eye patches and Jolly Rogers. Bright sashes wound around corduroy knee breeches, while tousled heads were covered with red bandanas or floppy black hats with turned-back brims emblazoned with skulls and crossbones.27