Dark Valley Destiny (55 page)

Back home, Robert found his father crying in the living room. He
put
his arm around the old man's shoulders and said: "Buck up! You
Are
equal to it; you will go through it all right. Everything has to come
to
an end." Then Robert left the room singing, which Kate Merryman thought decidedly odd.

Later he gave Miss Merryman a large envelope, saying that, if anything happened to him, she should give the envelope to Dr. Howard.
³⁸

During the afternoon Isaac Howard concluded that his wife would probably die within the next few hours. He also became concerned about the increasingly strange behavior of his son. Deciding that he wanted company to see him through the night, he got in touch with his colleague, Dr. J. R. Dill of Rising Star, and persuaded him to come to Cross Plains, bringing with him two in-laws, Vera McDonough and Leah Bowden. He also asked a young local couple, the teacher Clarence S. Martin and his wife Birdie, to sit out the watch with him.

The Martins arrived about sunset. When Robert appeared, Mrs. Martin said: "Robert, if you get the hose, I'll water the flowers."

"No, Miz Birdie," he replied. "There's no use for that."
³⁹

During the evening Isaac Howard came out of the small, stifling sitting room and sat on the porch swing, rocking. Robert soon joined him and walked up and down, back and forth. Each time that he approached the swing, Robert came close to his father and stared at him in a strange manner.

Subsequently Dr. Howard said he thought that Robert had determined to kill him, but that Robert had not been able to bring himself to do so while his mother still lived. Some of the doctor's friends thought so, too. Since inviting friends to a death vigil was not a common Texan custom, albeit not unknown, they suspected that Isaac Howard had urged them to spend the night with him so that somebody could keep an eye on Robert, lest he kill either the doctor or himself. Later on, Dr. Howard retracted his statement, averring that he did not think Robert had really meant him any harm; but this somewhat lame amendment might well have been a typical Howard face-saving gesture.
⁴⁰

We can only guess what thoughts were running through Robert Howard's mind that night. Whether he thought killing his father would be an act of mercy because the old man would be miserable if left alone, whether he hoped that the whole family might enter their next lives together, or whether such a death would fit his obsession of universal destruction, we shall never know. In any case he felt sure that his father would soon be dead, as his remarks at the cemetery amply prove.

At any rate, he put such thoughts aside as the evening wore on and went into his study. There he tried to tidy up the mass of papers that he kept in his small trunk. Manuscripts, carbon copies, rough drafts, notes, and letters lay jumbled in a heap. Some were not even clipped together, their pages lying scattered throughout the pile. Robert began sorting out the papers, but after a while he gave up the job and tossed the whole mass into the air, so that the floor lay buried under a snowfall of typed sheets. Then he returned to his mother's room to sit out the rest of the night.

A little after seven on the morning of June 11th, with a red sun hanging low in a hot and cloudless sky, a flurry of activity stirred the little house. Clarence and Birdie Martin bade the doctor good-bye. The recently-hired cook came in and began bustling about the kitchen, preparing breakfast for Dr. Howard and his remaining guests. Kate Merryman set out for home when the day nurse, Mrs. Green, took up her duties in the sickroom.

Robert, who had kept an all-night vigil beside his mother's bed, turned to Mrs. Green and asked her, as he had previously asked his father, whether there was the remotest chance that his mother might recover consciousness. The nurse's answer was a gentle "No."

Stimulated by caffeine, bone-weary from the sleepless night just passed, and overwhelmed by a sense of his impending loss, Robert E. Howard paused to take a last long look at the still body of his mother. Then he strode from the airless bedroom to his own tiny, manuscript-cluttered study and tapped out his final message of despair. Like a man in a dream, he marched out to his car, fingered the safety catch on his gun, and sought the rosy dawn of a new world and a better day.

We can only hope that he found it. For a man so reared, so motivated, so victimized by circumstances beyond his control, so rent by gigantic angers and frustrations, there was no other way to find rest from
hate
and the fear of loneliness. We who have studied the man and his
Works
shall never entirely know the source of the "jets of agony" and
the
"crimson pain" of which he complained in his poetry. What was the "battle," the "dreary noise and prattle," whereof he was weary? But we know the pain was there. Perhaps the gods who hammered out his personality were careless in their handiwork, for they neglected the hardening process that endows a man with a love of life despite all its trials and disappointments.

By protecting Robert from the rack of this uncaring world, his parents denied him the opportunity to achieve maturity. By encouraging his childish idea of dying when she died—if not openly, then by tacit signs of pleasure—his mother paralyzed whatever will to independence he might have had. And to these life-denying forces should be added his father's lingering belief in reincarnation, a belief often discussed with his son.

Although Howard was a self-proclaimed agnostic, he half believed that death was not the end of everything. It was, instead, some sort of liberation, a transition to his next incarnation—a thought he eloquently expressed in the closing lines of his poem
The Tempter.
Yet he was not fully convinced. He spoke as well of the "silence and the long black rest." But even if death was the end of everything, an eternal, dreamless sleep, he preferred it to the life he knew.

Withal, Howard's attitude toward death remained that of a small child who lacks an adult understanding of the full implications of death. To him, as to so many of the youthful suicides of today, death seemed an easy, natural way to shoo away whatever vultures were tearing at his vitals. His failure to attain a realistic view of death is reflected in the casualness with which his heroes annihilate others—although to some degree this bloodthirstiness also mirrors the pulp-magazine conventions of the day. On the other hand, such real impending deaths as those of Patches and his mother filled him with revulsion. He could not accept death as an inevitable rounding out of a given span of life.

Howard's life story is the tragic drama of a man unable to cope with reality. Within the make-believe world of Conan and King Kull, Howard was fearless, inscrutable, and desired by all women—a man who could slaughter enemies by the dozen. Single-handed he toppled rulers from their thrones and created empires of Oriental splendor. He even vanquished the menaces of the supernatural by the magic that he alone controlled. But in the everyday world, with its real disappointments and inevitable disasters, Howard had no inner resources. Faced with the loss of maternal protection, he took the way of self-destruction.
⁴¹

E. Hoffmann Price understood Robert Howard's inmost needs and motivation with a clarity that time has in no way dimmed. To another Howard fan, he wrote this shrewd appraisal:

... REH at the age of 30 had the same dismay and despair that one might expect of a child who has lost his mother. When I was a kid, very young, I remember my feelings when my mother was seriously ill and survival doubtful. . . . More than mere bereavement, there was plenty of self-centered fear of unpleasant possibilities, grim certainties—a terrifying world in which I'd have not an ally.

Now it seems to me that REH, big and grown up and rugged and bluff as he was, had carried with him from early childhood a lot of the state of mind I have tried to describe; and with his growing up, he had also acquired a lot of grown-up grimness, a lack of which would have made his act impossible.

While a 5-year-old would be terrified of a world devoid of a mother's emotional and spiritual sustenance, to say nothing of her maternal support and attention, he'd finally adjust himself; he simply would not have the means of escape, or, if he had, he'd lack the brute courage to use the means on himself. But REH had, in a way of speaking, the 5-year-old's need to escape, and the grown man's stern resolution.
⁴²

A moment after the shot was fired, the cook screamed. Drs. Howard and Dill rushed out and carried Robert back to the house. They laid him down on one of the beds on the sleeping porch and saw that the bullet had entered his head above the right ear and had come out on the left side. Being old Texas medical hands, they knew that it was useless to try to get Robert to a hospital.

Leah Bowden ran after Kate Merryman to fetch her back. As word of the shooting spread, the other physicians in town came over to see if they could be of any help. The justice of the peace arrived and telephoned young Jack Scott at his newspaper office. Scott jumped in his car and sped to the Howard house. He recalls:

The JP was waiting for me on the porch. I started asking him some questions because I had to do a story and he said, "Come on in here with me, back where Robert worked."

I followed him into Robert's room and there was a piece of paper in the old Underwood typewriter he used. I pulled it out and read it: All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre; The feast is over and the lamps expire. "What does it mean?" the JP asked.
⁴³

About four o'clock that afternoon, Robert died without regaining consciousness. Lamenting his loss, Isaac Howard wept loudly. So distraught did he become that Dill and the other physicians present feared that their colleague might suffer a heart attack. They urged him to go to a hospital. Isaac agreed, and they began to collect his clothes. Then Isaac changed his mind and refused to go. Kate Merryman remembers: "He was very emotional about anything. It seemed to me he could turn his tears on and off at will, and that was the way he was for several days after the deaths."
⁴⁴

After the undertaker had removed Robert's body, several neighbors and medical acquaintances, aware of Isaac's distraught condition, decided to sit out the dark hours with him. Thus, for a second night there was no quiet in the Howard home.

Hester Howard lay oblivious to the pounding feet of strangers and the lamentations of her husband during the day of her son's death. In the hushed silence of the following evening, at 10:30 o'clock on June 12th, she slipped away without regaining consciousness.

Relatives from both sides of the family came to Cross Plains to support the bereaved doctor. Mrs. David Howard, wife of the doctor's brother, came from Mart, Texas; Mrs. W. P. Searcy, one of Mrs. Howard's sisters, arrived from Exter, Missouri; and several nieces and nephews from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri drove in for the funeral and interment services.
⁴⁵

The small living room of the clapboard house in Cross Plains held two open coffins that Saturday; and family, friends, and neighbors came by to pay their respects. Near midnight Dr. Howard, exhausted as well as distraught, went to the bathroom. He remained there so long that his friends, who knew of the arsenal of weapons in the bathroom closet, became fearful lest the bereaved man turn a gun on himself. When he returned to the sitting room, several of the men undertook to remove the guns by passing them out through the bathroom window.
⁴⁶

Disturbed as the old man was, his friends need not have worried. Isaac Howard was a strong man and courageous. E. Hoffmann Price, whom the doctor listed as one of his son's best friends, wrote this tribute to him eight years later:

. . . whenever I think of Dr. Howard, well into his seventy-fourth year, and with failing eyesight, having for these past eight years faced alone and single handed a home and a world from which both wife and son were taken in one day, I cannot help but say, "I wish Robert had had more of his father's courage."

Dr. Howard . . . has maintained a courage so high that I must pay him this tribute: my wife and I have never felt sorry for him.... He carries on, without complaint, and without any self-pity: and to regard him in the way one would regard others who have had bereavements less shocking would be to belittle the man.
⁴⁷

On Sunday, June 14, 1936, the town's first double funeral was held at the Baptist Tabernacle. It was an exceptional funeral in several ways. No fewer than four preachers took part in the service. Officiating was the Reverend B. G. Richbourg, a traveling lecturer, former Cross Plains pastor, and longtime friend of Dr.
Ho
^t
ard. He was assisted by J. C. Mann, the local Methodist minister; S. P. Collins, the Presbyterian minister; and V. W. Tatum, the Baptist minister.
⁴⁸

The Reverend Richbourg preached a hellfire-and-damnation sermon based on the text of I Samuel 31:4: "Therefore Saul took a sword, and fell upon it." The sermon, emphasizing as it did the Christian tabu against suicide, greatly displeased the old doctor. For the next week or two, he was heard grumbling about the fellow "preaching my boy to hell!"

Such a huge crowd turned out that many had to stand outside the church. Almost everybody in town attended; for despite their peculiarities, the Howards were held in high esteem. As a family, they lent the town distinction: the doctor for his salty language and devotion to his patients, Mrs. Howard for her refinement and elegance of attire, and Robert for his lonely role as the town's lone intellectual.

The outpouring of sympathy seemed faintly tinged with guilt. Even

faithful in his fashion

today
we feel that some townsfolk wonder about the strange young man
who
walked among them as a stranger, receiving little sympathy or understanding. In the reluctance of some to talk about Robert Howard,
we
sense the unasked question: Would something that was left undone
have
made a difference? And had we been asked, our answer would have
been
"No." It was the world within him, not the external world or the people among whom he lived, that determined Robert Howard's fate, and
this
inner world took shape long years before he and his family settled
in
Cross Plains.