Dark Valley Destiny (56 page)

After the funeral, for some curious reason yet unknown, Dr. Howard insisted that the hearse leave Cross Plains by the back streets. Thirty-odd miles away, in the Greenwood Cemetery, the two pine coffins were lowered into the graves that Robert had selected a few days earlier.

The day after the funeral, Isaac Howard pulled himself together. He and Kate Merryman went into Robert's study to try to make order out of Robert's scattered papers. While attempting to assemble one of the manuscripts, Miss Merryman came upon a single page from a letter that Robert had addressed to Novalyne. In it he chided her for ragging him about his black sombrero, adding that, considering the ordeal he was facing, it seemed small-minded to make a fuss about a hat.
⁴⁹

On June 16th, when Isaac Howard filed an application for appointment as administrator of the estate of his son, he did "solomnly swear that Robert E. Howard, deceased, died without leaving any lawful will, so far as I know or believe."

In time Robert's estate was appraised. This list of his assets, which overlooked the $1,000 still owing from
Weird Tales,
included $702 in cash, a postal savings account of $1,850, and a car with an assigned value of $350—making a total estate of $2,902. No value was placed on Howard's writings.
⁵⁰

Later a large gray granite stone was set to mark the grave site of mother and son. Across the upper edge ran the name
Howard
. A narrow strip along the lower section of the stone bore the text chosen by Dr. Howard from II Samuel 1:23: "They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided." The center of the marker contained three polished panels. The left one was inscribed with Robert's name. The center panel at last exposed to view Hester Howard's true year of birth. The third panel, at first left blank, was in due time inscribed with the name of Isaac Howard, and thus the panels read today:

robert e. hester ervin isaac m.

author and poet wife and mother physician

1906-1936
 
1870-1936
 
1871-1944

Robert and his mother each had a footstone as well, but when Isaac died, there was nobody left to provide one for him.

Dr. Howard paid $250 for the plot and, in the early weeks of his bereavement, often visited the graves. After each rain he noted puddles on the lawn and worried about the decay of the coffins. By autumn his concern had developed into such obsessive horror that he ordered the coffins dug up and reburied in steel vaults. The job was done by five cemetery workers using a truck on which a winch was mounted. Each worker got $25, a more than respectable day's wage in Depression times. One of the workers, Gomer Thomas, still remembers it as one of the most unpleasant jobs he ever had, because both the pine coffins and their contents were badly decomposed.
⁵¹

Isaac Howard also fretted over the landscaping of the plot. Since his old friend Dr. S. R. Chambers had moved back to Brown County and the doctor's son, Norris Chambers, was just reaching manhood, Isaac commandeered the youth as his relief driver and set out on several tours of greenhouses and nurseries. They drove Robert's Chevrolet, which had been cleaned up and patched by a garageman who still recalls the indescribable stench of the blood and human remains after the car had stood untended for days in the hot June sun. Isaac Howard talked endlessly about the landscaping, studied ornamental plants, and inquired all about growth patterns and prices; but in the end he planted practically nothing.
⁵²

I have not seen the face of Pan, nor mocked the dryad's haste, But I have trailed a dark-eyed Man across a windy waste. I have not died as men may die, nor sinned as men have sinned, But I have reached a misty sky upon a granite wind.
¹

Anxious, restless, and alone, Isaac Howard abandoned his medical practice. If an old friend or a kinsman sought him out, he would diagnose And prescribe; but he accepted no new patients and gave up most of those he had.

The doctor offered Robert's collection of swords and knives to his son's childhood pal, Earl Baker, who kept them until they were stolen several years later, but to Robert's other close friends he gave nothing.

He bought a new trunk to replace the battered trunk used by Robert
as
a filing cabinet and in it stowed all of his son's magazines and miscellaneous papers. This he gave, along with Robert's books, to the library of Howard Payne College as a memorial. But the library, deeming the acquisition of little worth, neglected it. Shocked by the lurid
Weird '' Tales
covers and considering the magazines un-Christian, the librarian ' consigned the trunk—manuscript fragments, letters, and all—to the ^jOellar among the water pipes, where mold began to destroy them. When Howard heard of this, he descended on the college like an avenging flngel and reclaimed his son's materials.
²

¹
He sent the trunk to E. Hoffmann Price in California, whence, in /ia roundabout way, its contents finally came into the possession of the longtime Howard admirer Glenn Lord. The contents of the trunk have been carefully preserved by Glenn Lord, now the agent for the Howard lieirs, and it is through his courtesy that these materials have been made Available to Howard's biographers.

The three hundred books that constituted Robert's slim library, however, were left at Howard Payne, where they remained on the dusty shelves of little-used stacks until the authors of this work spent a day collecting them and urged the present librarian to maintain the collection in memory of their famous former student. This, we are told, has been done.

Under the severe stress of a man suddenly deprived of his long-term props, Isaac Howard, in the early months of his bereavement, displayed some extraordinary behavior. For many years he had been "one angry son of a bitch," as he put it—his anger stimulated by and directed at Hester Howard. Scorned by his wife and spiritually barred from the inner circle of mother and son, he had coped with his resentment by spending long hours at the homes of friends and patients, with whom he ate copious meals and talked nonstop about how his Heck had kicked him out again. Now, with Mrs. Howard in her grave, his deep-seated resentment could no longer be vented in this way. Instead it expressed itself in obsessive anxiety about his deceased family, the community's spiritual welfare, and his own future.

Soon after the loss of his family, Dr. Howard went to the editor of
The Cross Plains Review
and barked: "I'm going to start a Sunday-school class. Round up all the men for Sunday night!"

Since the formidable doctor was not easily gainsaid, the editor meekly complied. More than a dozen young men met at the Liberty Theater.

Dr. Howard began the meeting thus: "Now, I want every man of you who's ever been drunk or been in a whorehouse to stand up!"

Our informant said: "Well, I stood up, and some of the others stood up; but it sure was embarrassing!"

After a few weeks, attendance dwindled. The doctor lost interest, and the project died.

Isaac Howard's next vagary was to decide to buy a farm in order to become a farmer and "live close to nature." He traveled about the state with Norris Chambers, looking for suitable sites. Chambers reminisced:

We'd carry a post-hole digger with us, and we'd go dig an old farm. He'd first go to real-estate agents, and they'd point out the ones that were available ... and I'd dig holes for him there, and he'd take that soil there, and he'd put it in little bottles, and he'd send it to College Station to have it analyzed. He was afraid he'd get some land that had nematodes in it.
³

The doctor need not have worried about nematodes. Most of these threadworms or roundworms, which may be found by the billions in ordinary soil, are harmless. Besides, for a man like Isaac Howard, who had had nothing to do with farming for forty years, the idea of becoming
a
farmer was pure fantasy—totally unrealistic.

Other crotchets swarmed from Dr. Howard's busy brain like hornets from a broken nest. He thought that he would like to learn to raise bees, but nothing came of that scheme either. He toyed with the idea of writing a biographical sketch of Robert, but this plan likewise came to naught.
⁴

He wrote to E. Hoffmann Price in California, urging the Prices to come to live with him in Cross Plains, where, he assured them, they could write undisturbed. Having quite different plans, the astonished young couple politely declined.

At this the doctor began to give thought to moving elsewhere. He asked Dr. Chambers if he might build a one-room addition to the Chambers house in Brown County and live in it. His old friend was at first good-humoredly receptive to the plan; but when Dr. Howard insisted on undertaking a search of the title to Chambers's land, the Chamberses, offended, dismissed the whole idea. Isaac also approached Calvin Baker with a similar proposal, but the Bakers quickly decided that they were too old to undertake responsibility for the retired doctor.

During these unsettled months Dr. Howard spent a considerable amount of time in correspondence with Robert's friends and pen pals. These letters disclose that the hapless man suffered a heavy weight of guilt about the death of his son. It could not have been otherwise; for he was a trained physician who sensed that his son's threats of self-destruction were cries for help, and he had had no help to offer.

Dr. Howard was well aware that his son intended to commit suicide at the time of his mother's death. A short while before, when his mother had been pronounced too ill to be cured, Robert told his father that he had no plans to live after she was gone. Isaac knew that six years earlier

Robert had left home because he could not bear to witness the death of his pet dog. And as his mother lay dying, the troubled young man had discussed with Dr. Dill, a visitor in his own home, the surest way to fire the fatal shot. Yet, no steps were taken to sedate or hospitalize him.

It is true that Dr. Howard had made some feeble attempts to forestall the act. In a letter to Lovecraft, written June 29, 1936, he relates: "I was watching Robert as this was premeditated, and I knew it, but I did not think that he would kill himself before his mother went." Moreover, we surmise the old man had removed Robert's own pistol from the glove compartment of his car, because the weapon Robert used was a gun of the same model owned by his friend Lindsey Tyson. Other than this, Dr. Howard appears to have done nothing except to beg his son "not to do it."
⁵

His inaction is astonishing. Equally astonishing is the old doctor's stunned disbelief after the deed was done. We have to conclude that Dr. Howard, like the parents of many young suicides who amply signal their intention, refused to take what he heard seriously. In view of the fact that the Howards had always dismissed unpleasant realities, or at least refused to face them squarely, the doctor's inaction seems consistent with the family's long-established attitudes.

In support of this conclusion is another statement Dr. Howard made in the same letter to Lovecraft. He wrote:

As the months grew on, his mother showed some improvement. He accepted her condition as one of permanent improvement and one that would continue. I knew well that it would not, but I kept it from him.
⁶

Instead of preparing Robert's mind for the inevitable and helping him to accept it, his father, as always, kept unhappy realities from his son and thus denied him the chance to express his grief and so to cope with it.

As a matter of fact, Dr. Howard not infrequently shaped the facts to fit his feelings. In the same revealing letter, he both twists the facts and reaches a fanciful conclusion. Speaking of the fatal morning, he reported:

He did not ask a doctor, neither did he ask me, but he asked a nurse if she thought his mother would ever regain consciousness enough to know him, and the nurse told him she feared not. This was unknown to me. Had I known, I might have prevented this, because I know now that he fully had made up his mind not to see his mother die.
⁷

It has been reliably reported that Robert did ask his father the same question the previous day; but even if he did not, what preventive measures could the doctor have taken at that penultimate hour? He had no knowledge at the time that Robert would act as long as his mother lived. Moreover, he had devised no lifesaving plan at all.

The references to the warm family life in the Howard home seem to have been another fiction embellished by bereavement rather than by fact. Admitting that he was seldom home because of the demands of his practice, Dr. Howard told Lovecraft: "Robert loved me with a love that was beautiful. He loved my companionship above that of anyone else and every time opportunity afforded, he spent his time with me in preference to anyone else . .. our hours were spent pleasantly on discussion of men, women, animals, out-door life, adventure, history of long-lived frontiersmen, and such like."
⁸
We can but hope that this roseate fancy helped to console the unfortunate man during his eight remaining years of loneliness.

During the long years after Robert's death, Dr. Howard suffered from cataracts, diabetes, and, as he said, "loneliness indescribable." He wrote: "I do not see why Robert left me. I am so lonely and desolate."
⁹
Strong as E. Hoffmann Price found him, it is hard for us not to pity the cantankerous old man, even though his own attitudes were to some extent to blame for his son's suicide.

The reader may wonder at Robert's callousness in condemning his father to such a fate. But, according to modern psychologists, when a person has determined to take his own life, he becomes so utterly self-absorbed that he no longer cares about the feelings of his friends and family or about his career. Besides, in his vivid phantasy life, Robert viewed his father as an archetypical Westerner, a man who by definition could take care of himself.