Dark Valley Destiny (22 page)

For most Cross Plains housekeepers of the twenties, electric refrigerators, along with washing machines and vacuum cleaners, were things to dream about.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On other days, if some of the gang were armed with "rubber guns" —weapons whittled out of scraps of pine and loaded with rubber strips salvaged from inner tubes—the pirates turned into cowboys and Indians. Those who did not possess rubber guns had "nigger shooters"—slingshots made by attaching a rubber band to a forked stick. Many of the boys learned to shoot these weapons with surprising accuracy, sometimes bringing down a bird, a prairie dog, or even a cottontail. All of the youngsters, including the girls, wanted to acquire proficiency with their slingshots. They believed that this was the instrument with which David conquered Goliath; and, like him, they hoped to win glory by means of a slingshot and a smooth stone held in sweaty hands under the mulberry tree.

Robert was still fond of creating little plays and assigning to the other boys parts which he had outlined. On such afternoons, when the Indians' bows had become Norman crossbows, the live oak was transformed into Sherwood Forest, whence Robin Hood's merry men would harass the Sheriff of Nottingham while Patches darted about giving tongue.

Sometimes, sitting in the shade with Patches beside him and other children gathered round, Robert would spin a yarn for them, his power as a storyteller overcoming any difficulty his listeners might have had in overlooking his exceptional ways. His father's new automobile made it possible to visit back and forth with friends from Cross Cut and Burkett. Occasionally Robert would have Earl Baker and Austin Newton up for the weekend. Once he took Lindsey Tyson with him to ride horseback at the Bakers.

For a long time Cross Plains observed a tradition: the town held a picnic in the middle of the summer. The town picnic was usually staged at the time a traveling carnival passed through. Besides the usual attractions of a carnival midway, there were speeches by aspiring politicians, boxing matches, and sometimes less formal battles between drunken celebrants.

The arrival of the carnival was a major event; without doubt Robert and the other youngsters hastened to make the rounds that summer of 1920. Although the carnivals provided an exotic dazzle of color in many routine lives, relations between the carnies and the townsfolk were hostile, each regarding the other as fair game. Robert was scornful of the yokels who came to gawk at the garish outsiders or who played the gambling games, hoping to get something for nothing, and then waxed furious over the all-too-obvious fact that the games were rigged.

He also hated the town bullies who assaulted carnies just for the fun of it. He told how a friend of his attended a game where the object was to knock wooden cats off a rack with hard baseballs. Instead the joker threw a ball at the girl who ran the game, knocking her unconscious. Earlier, when Robert was just fourteen, he himself had worked at a similar concession, setting up the cats after they had been knocked down. One day a beefy citizen beaned Howard with a ball, nearly flooring him, and then walked off laughing.
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The town picnic was discontinued early in the Depression. It was revived in 1932 and held for several years before it finally fell into disuse for good.

Thus passed the summer days of 1920. They proved to be a happy hiatus before Robert's world was once more overwhelmed with change. The autumn of 1920 did not vouchsafe Robert an uninterrupted school year. Dr. Howard decided to take a course in "Special Lens" in the ophthalmology department of the Graduate School of Medicine of Tulane University in New Orleans. The course ran for six weeks, from October 18th to November 27th, and cost seventy-five dollars. So, in mid-October, the Howard family headed for New Orleans.

The doctor's sudden interest in ophthalmology may have been triggered by the remembered plight of his mother, who was totally blind at her death in 1916; but it is more likely that he was motivated by anxiety over the visual changes that he had observed in himself. As we know, early symptoms of diabetes appeared in the doctor before he left Burkett: The water in his cistern did not quench his thirst, and he developed a prodigious appetite. In addition to these symptoms, some diabetics experience visual discomfort early in their disease, long before there is any evidence of the cataracts that occur in more advanced cases. Indeed, Dr. Howard did suffer from cataracts during the final years of his life, and his diabetes was medically confirmed; so we may assume that between 1915 and 1919 Isaac Howard developed diabetes mellitus.