Dark Valley Destiny (14 page)

During the twentieth century, many adherents of New Thought became interested in the Vedanta philosophy, brought from India in the 1890s by a young swami named Vivekananda. Ramacharaka's book— one of many he wrote—contained some authentic Yogic philosophy and a great mass of the pseudo-Oriental notions concocted by Helena P. Blavatsky and her Theosophical followers. It described such wonders as astral telepathy and an astral tube whereby an adept can behold scenes on other planets.
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Robert Howard, avid reader that he was, would browse through the libraries of his father's friends whenever he could. The boy "was never interested in getting out on the farm. When he came down there, he just sat down and read."
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Ramacharaka's
Fourteen Lessons,
together with similar books that he read over the years, gave Robert a grounding in occult and pseudo-scientific doctrines, which he exploited in his fantasies. Both he and his father became, at least for a time, convinced reincarnationists. Dr. Howard liked to propound the theory that the human spirit evolved to a higher state with each successive incarnation. As a youth, Robert expressed the same belief. Later he declared himself a complete agnostic, neither affirming nor denying the existence of a spiritual world. Still, he continued to harbor at least a tentative belief in rebirth in other bodies.
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Despite Hester Howard's efforts to separate her son from the mate she despised, Robert did accompany his father on some of his rounds and often visited at the Chamberses'. Sometimes Drs. Howard and Chambers would sit for hours, telling Robert and Norris, as well as adult friends, about comic or dramatic events that supposedly took place at a country syrup mill. Eager to outdo each other, they would pile one unlikely happening upon another; for in the days before radio and television, storytelling was a favorite form of entertainment.

In Texas, where the tall tale is the currency of social conversation, one never knew what to believe. Youngsters of nine or ten, whose thinking is very concrete, cannot always distinguish between an exaggeration and a factual report. In Robert's case, hearing adults tell tall tales would have condoned his own invention of ego-saving whoppers. It would also have further blurred for him the line between fiction and reality.

Neither Isaac Howard nor Solomon Chambers did much to edit their conversation before the boys, and sometimes topics were chosen less for humor than for shock value. Particularly grisly were their reminiscences about medical school and early practice. Dr. Howard liked to tell about a job he did for his medical school. He would take a corpse out in the woods and boil the flesh off it in a black iron wash pot or cauldron. When the bones were properly cured, the skeleton would be reassembled for use as a model for instruction. One day Isaac Howard was boiling a black body—most of the cadavers being Negroid—when he was discovered by a black man. The doctor's account of the poor Negro's fright and flight always triggered great mirth among his auditors; but to the young son of the pot boiler such a tale would inevitably acquire a sinister connotation.

Years later Norris Chambers, who reported the story, added:

Dr. Howard was a master at using strong language to describe violent action. No doubt this conversation influenced Robert's writing. [Dr. Howard] often told what should be done to certain characters in the community, and the list was longer than any torture routine ever described in fiction. My dad was good at this, too, and when they got together, the conversation was pretty smoky.
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Norris Chambers believed that no one took these conversations very seriously. Although he did not, it is doubtful whether this was true for young Robert. As Robert grew older, he and his father did some yarning together, each trying to top the other's story, a competition which E. H. Price observed on his visits to the Howard home in the 1930s.

Fortunately, not all between Isaac and his son was competitive phantasizing. Norris Chambers indicates that while "Much of the conversation was on the Bible and history," the doctor also "told about things that Robert was reading, so Robert must have discussed his business with him some."
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Tales told during visits to the Chambers family were not alone in giving Robert ideas for later horror stories. His paternal grandmother, Eliza Henry Howard, was another source of ghostly happenings, which influenced young Robert's fancies and gave him material for his fantastic tales.

When Robert and his family lived in Cross Cut, Eliza Howard spent her time shuttling between the farms of her son David and her widowed daughter Willie Howard McClung, both of whom lived just east of Waco. In time her eyesight dimmed, and a trip to Arkansas for a cataract operation failed to restore her sight. Although she became completely blind before her death in 1916, all her relatives—save for her daughter-in-law Hester Howard—remember her as a "tremendous woman."
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Eliza Howard, though blind, continued to knit with great skill. On Sundays, with a relative to guide her, she marched to church with a Bible under her arm, clad in nineteenth-century style with a black bonnet tied under her chin and a black taffeta dress over four or five petticoats.
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And when the families visited back and forth, she told gl\pst stories to young Robert, tales he would never forget, tales that surpassed even the shockers that he had heard from Mary Bohannon in Bagwell. In 1930 Robert wrote to Lovecraft:

But no negro ghost-story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told me by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature were hers, and there was no light and mirth in her. . . .

As a child my hair used to stand straight up when she would tell of the wagon that moved down the wilderness roads in the dark of the night, with never a horse drawing it—the wagon that was full of severed heads and dismembered limbs; and the yellow horse, the ghastly dream horse that raced up and down the stairs of the grand old plantation where a wicked woman lay dying; and the ghost-switches that swished against the doors when none dared open those doors lest reason be blasted at what was seen. And in many of her tales, also, appeared the old, deserted plantation mansion, with the weeds growing rank about it and the ghostly pigeons flying up from the rails of the verandah.
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Years later, in 1934, Howard based his story "Pigeons from Hell" upon these tales. In it a New Englander, Griswell, and his friend Branner, wandering the Deep South on vacation, stop for the night at a deserted mansion. As they approach, "pigeons rose from the balustrades in a fluttering, feathery crowd and swept away with a low thunder of beating wings."
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Inside, Branner is mysteriously murdered and Griswell becomes involved in the voodooistic revenge of a former Negro servant for the cruelties of her onetime mistress. This story, not sold until a year after Howard's death, proved to be one of his most popular tales of supernatural menace.

When Isaac Howard first settled in Cross Cut, his practice, like that of Dr. Chambers, covered a large rural area around the meeting point of Brown, Coleman, and Callahan counties. Both men visited their patients by buggy, driving the light vehicles along the graded dirt roads to the staccato beat of their horses' hooves.

Soon after Dr. Howard's arrival, Dr. Chambers began to find these far-flung journeys in all weathers onerous. He felt that his patients' demands kept him too much away from his family, with whom he had a close relationship. Consequently he gave up his medical practice and bought the local drugstore. Dr. Howard, likewise finding the long and lonely buggy rides time-consuming and tiresome, became one of the first men in the region to own an automobile. He bought a Model T Ford and hired a workman, Ben Gunn, to teach him how to drive.

All that winter Dr. Howard kept the Chambers family laughing with yarns about his travels with Gunn. Although Ben was at the wheel, the doctor would tell him where to go. He directed his driver across pastures, through post-oak flats, or around cedar brakes, until the hard-pressed Gunn began to collide with the landscape. Isaac Howard told the Cham-berses:

You know, Ben didn't know any more about driving the car than I did, and here I was hiring him to teach me to drive! I looked back one time, and it looked like Christmastime. It looked just like the stars were shining on those little trees, where the boy was switching that old Ford back and forth and knocking the hub caps off. He didn't miss a tree.
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When Dr. Howard became a motorist, he stabled his carriage and horses —a spirited pair of "Spanish" ponies—in the Chamberses' barn. Versatile though the Model T was, it could reach only those patients who lived along the better-kept roads. When rain turned the roads into deep-rutted, slimy mud, with water-filled potholes deep enough to swallow a whole wheel, Dr. Howard drove his car to the Chamberses' place and hitched up his horses and buggy. Later, as the roads improved, he relied entirely on the automobile, even though cars of the time often required the services of a strong dray when they had engine trouble or slipped off the bank of a narrow dirt road.

In time Dick Pentecost, who had moved to Arizona after renting his Cross Cut house to the Howards, decided to settle permanently in the West. He notified the Howards that he had sold the house to Elijah De Busk and that it would no longer be available to them.

In compliance with Pentecost's wishes, the Howards vacated the property and moved to Burkett, a village six miles west of Cross Cut, in Coleman County. Dr. Howard probably welcomed the move, if for no reason other than his liking for change. His dalliance with the Newton women—if it ever existed save in the doctor's mind—was drawing to a close. Mrs. Newton was recovering. Annie Newton was teaching out of town, returning home only for vacations, when her time was filled with the attentions of young Porter J. Davis, whom she married "in 1920.

There is some uncertainty about just where the Howards first set up housekeeping in Burkett. Several of the townspeople remember Mrs.

Robert E. Howard, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, Dr. and Mrs. Solomon R. Chambers, Galveston, Texas, probably 1918

Howard and Robert reading or playing together in a small gazebo on the lawn of the Cochran house, a large dual dwelling belonging to old Dr. Cochran. People tend to think in pictures, and the summer morning tableau of a mother in a white embroidered cotton dress seated beside a young boy in white shirt and knickers was an appealing sight still remembered by several residents of Burkett.
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Whether the Howards briefly occupied half the Cochran place before they found the Pentecost house in Cross Cut, or whether this was a way station on their move to their Burkett home, we do not know. The former seems more likely.
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In any case, during their two-year stay in Burkett, the Howards lived in a big white house a stone's throw from the Pecan Bayou, which was visible from their porch. The porch, on which Robert used to sit and read, was extensive and surrounded by banisters. Set on a two-acre lot, the house was a single-story structure with a T-shaped floor plan. The living room, occupying the center of the cross-bar, was flanked on either side by a bedroom, while the dining room and kitchen formed the stem.

The cistern, standing on an L-shaped porch at the back of the house, collected rain water from the roof, water that was evidently more potable than that from the cistern of the Cross Cut house. In the back yard stood a dirt cellar, a barn for the milch cow and horses, a buggy shed, and of course the privy. As in the house at Cross Cut, heat was supplied by an enormous fireplace in the living room and the cookstove in the kitchen.

The move to Burkett caused no great change in Robert's life. He continued to see the same friends, to indulge the same fantasies, and to plow his way through countless books. He found a new playmate in Burkett, a boy named Loren Crocker, and the two eleven-year-olds had much business together. Every day they made their rounds, cutting across the L. L. Morgans' back yard on their way to the Post Office— a counter flanked by rows of mailboxes, at one end of the postmistress's living room. After collecting the mail, the boys would walk back through the village, stopping at Morgan's drugstore for a soda or a dish of ice cream before going home. On some days, being short of funds, they contented themselves with a penny candy or two.

At the Burkett school, probably under the influence of Austin Newton and Earl Baker, Robert decided to try team sports. He went out for basketball but was quickly dropped from the team for persistent roughness. He could not understand the principles of team play. He saw his own function as a player personally to take possession of the ball and shoot the basket himself. Thus he reduced the game to a one-to-one combat, rushing upon the boy who possessed the ball and bowling over anyone who got in the way.
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After that, he was not encouraged to take part in team play—even in baseball, for which he had some liking. Later on, as an adult, he disparaged team sports as favoring the physical development of a chosen few, while the rest of the students grew flabby as spectators. Nevertheless he himself became an enthusiastic sports fan.
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He attended many football games, but his favorite sport remained boxing, a one-to-one contest.