Dark Valley Destiny (21 page)

In the Howards' West Texas, overshadowing both victory and the specter of disease was the discovery of oil. In Eastland County near the town of Ranger, in Jake McCleskey's pasture, on the afternoon of October 21, 1917, the first oil well—later called the McCleskey—blew in. The boom was on.

During the six months that followed the drilling of the first well, the population of Ranger leapt from 1,000 to an estimated 80,000 people. The Ranger field produced 10,000 barrels of oil a day at a time when oil was selling at $3.50 to $4.50 a barrel. This strike coincided with a research report published by the Smithsonian Institution, which concluded that the nation's oil reserve had reached such a low point that there were only seventy barrels of oil available in the United States for each man, woman, and child.

Those were exciting times. Everybody was affected by the oil boom. Local labor shortages, postwar unemployment in the north, a demobilizing population already on the move—all stimulated a migration toward the Oil Belt that surpassed even the California gold rush of 1849. Oil activity focused the attention of people within a radius of fifty miles of the McCleskey well. Drilling spread from this center to the periphery of a widening circle that first reached Pioneer in Eastland County and later the town site of Cross Plains itself.

The Texas pools of "black gold" were shallow and scattered. Some wells came in at about 1,500 feet; others went as deep as 3,000 feet. The wells came in dramatically. There would be a tremendous rumble just before the oil spurted out of the hole to rise higher and higher, sometimes over the top of the derrick, before fountaining out on the ground in a stream of 2,000 to 6,000 barrels a day.

Now all this is gone. The forest of derricks that rimmed the horizon, stretching above the mesquite and oak, have disappeared. The few remaining wells are serviced by pumps, which stand like gigantic praying mantises, rhythmically nodding up and down in the cotton fields or pastures.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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 room.

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.
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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.