Dark Valley Destiny (6 page)

The Howards' house, like that of the Greens', was so built that the interior and exterior walls were constructed of the same wide planks, which were nailed vertically to simple upright framing timbers to form two small rooms separated by a breezeway, referred to locally as a "dogtrot." Although the boards were joined by dowels or by tongue-and-groove construction and the seams sealed by slats or laths nailed over the joints, the house was far from windproof. When the northers swept down the canyon, roaring through the breezeway and howling up the chimney, the whole house shook, and the little family within shivered in their wake.

The family wash must have been a prodigious undertaking during the winter. Water was heated outdoors in a black iron wash pot fired by kindling or dried wood gathered along the creek bank or carried by the armload from the woodpile. Soiled garments were boiled in water to which washing soda or lye soap had been added, then lifted out of the pot on broomsticks and carried to the washtubs for soaping and rinsing. Finally, wrung out, they were taken from the partial shelter of the breezeway and hung on clotheslines to dry. If a norther overtook washday, the drying garments would freeze solid and rock back and forth like ghosts of wooden soldiers on parade.

Thus, staggering under the heavy round of daily chores that was the lot of the pioneer woman, an exhausted Hester Howard nursed her baby and tended him with care. But her awareness of the emotional poverty of her own childhood, her loneliness, her sense of perennial danger lurking just beyond her doorstep, and her deep-seated feelings of inadequacy led to periods of despondency. And these unhappy moods, these anxieties, these frustrations, were transmitted to the babe-in-arms by body language that rang out as clearly as a bell.

Years later an adult Robert Howard realized that his troubled spirit had its roots far back in the earliest experiences of his infancy. He was probably describing his reaction to his mother's despondency; but, being unaware of the source of his malaise, he projected his somber feelings on the landscape of Dark Valley. There in Dark Valley, he wrote, lay the seeds of his destiny.

The very name suggested to Howard the gloom, the loneliness, and the isolation of that small valley set in the Palo Pinto hills. He wrote to Lovecraft that he thought his inmost being had absorbed some of the valley's darkness during his infancy there. Then, in language reminiscent of Coleridge, Howard described the enclosing cliffs, the elusive shadows of the tall oaks, the brooding silences. He said that owls called weirdly over a ruined cabin at the mouth of the valley, telling a story of betrayal at dusk and murder by moonlight. Bats flitted about the chimney in the gloaming, while on the darkling plain of the sky a single star ventured forth.
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This was his heartland; this had shaped his destiny, this dense darkness beside the trickle of water that flowed to the Arms of God.

Flashes of insight such as this were characteristic of Howard's writing. By intuition alone, he often came upon truths that elsewhere have been validated by years of clinical evidence. He was aware that early panics, undefined anxieties, even periods of ecstasy, are recalled later as moods or feelings associated with people, or places, or levels of development. He also seemed to know that an adult's longing for an earlier, simpler time, or phantasies of world destruction, or fears of going insane may be associated with traumatic events that occurred when the infant ego was so undeveloped that the child could not relate his experiences to a coherent self.

It would be difficult to recognize Dark Valley from Howard's description. The real Dark Valley, which is referred to locally as a canyon, is broad and shallow. The hills are low. During the summer the stream bed, as it emerges from the canyon, often runs dry. Since the family moved away when Robert was very young, his childhood memories would have been vague at best.

But Robert Howard was not writing about reality; he was writing about himself. His description of the valley was based on feelings that had their roots in the earliest years of his life. He intensified the properties of the terrain to reflect his prevailing emotional tone or mood as an adult and to make a statement about the nature of his experiences, the memory of which lay beyond his recall.

And her darkening eyes at last were sane; she passed with a fearsome word:

"You who were born in Dark Valley, beware the Valley's lord!" As I came down through Dark Valley, the grim hills gulped the light; I heard the ponderous tramping of a monster in the night. . . .

I climbed the ridge into the moon and trembling there I turned— Down in the blasted shadows two eyes like hellfire burned. Under the black malignant trees a shapeless Shadow fell— I go no more to Dark Valley which is the Gate of Hell.
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Disrupting the intimacy of mother and child was Dr. Howard, daily tramping in and out of the house, carrying his saddlebags and smelling of disinfectant. To a small child, he would have been an awesome figure, a large, aggressive man with an authoritative air and piercing blue eyes beneath a full head of coal-black hair.

Dr. Howard was a hard-working frontier doctor who looked every emergency in the eye and attacked it fearlessly. To him illness and death were enemies with whom he waged a continuing war. If he relaxed his vigilance for one moment, he felt, death would win; and he viewed death, not as a part of life, but as a failure.

Isaac Howard was a restless man, always searching for something. He sought a "proper" world, one that conformed to his standards and expectations. Things were either good or bad; there was nothing in between. And he saw himself as a Christian soldier committed to the obliteration of evil. Dr. Howard was torn between the need to "rescue the perishing" and to "care for the dying," as the old hymn goes. He was a physician who wanted to be a minister, but as one of his cousins put it: "He had too much of the devil in him for that."
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This judgment seemed to refer to the doctor's mercurial temper, which readily got out of hand. One day, so the old-timers tell, while the doctor and his wife were leaving church, a clumsy churchgoer stepped on Mrs. Howard's skirt, tearing it. Before the whole congregation, the doctor threatened the offender with mayhem in language so salty that it is still remembered, with shocked delight, seventy years later. His neighbors decided forthwith that Isaac Howard was unsuited to the ministry, being unable—among other things—to turn the other cheek.
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Although in later years Dr. Howard learned to control his temper to some degree, he always remained quick to anger, brusque, and irascible.

As an adult, Robert liked to say that, despite his English name, he was at least three-quarters Irish, the rest being English with a Danish admixture. Actually, his ancestry was more mixed; his cousin Maxine Ervin maintained that, for all Robert's Celtophilia, the family was more English than anything else.
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Robert's father, Isaac Mordecai Howard, was the son of William Benjamin Howard, a Georgia planter. The Howard family, part of Oglethorpe's original colony and active in the building of the city of Savannah, settled finally on a farm in Oglethorpe County around 1733. This became the family stronghold; and here, in 1849, lived one Henry Howard, schoolteacher and planter, with his three sons.

Lured by the promise of California gold, the three sons joined a group of forty-niners and headed west. Cholera struck down the party at Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Of the original band of nineteen, seven survived. Among these were the Howard brothers. One brother continued on to California. The other two headed back for Georgia; but William Benjamin Howard, too weakened by the disease to keep up with his remaining brother, halted in Mississippi. Once recovered, William B. Howard became the overseer of the plantation of James Henry, whose daughter Eliza he married on December 6, 1856. This Eliza, christened Louisa Elizabeth, was to become Robert E. Howard's grandmother.

In none of the Howard family did the pioneer flame burn more brightly than in the Henrys, declared young Robert Howard. Shamus McHenry, the family's founding father, could not wait to reach American shores. He was born aboard ship, one month out of Ireland bound for the colonies, and grew up in South Carolina. There in January 1796 he married Anna O'Tyrrell, also fresh from the land of saints and scholars.

By the time their son James was born in 1811, Shamus McHenry had become plain Jim Henry and was preparing to move his family west. As soon as the hostilities of 1812 subsided, the Henrys settled in the Black Warrior River area of what was to become Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. There young James Henry, Jr. grew up, and there he met Mary Ann Walser, daughter of his German neighbor, old Samuel Walser, who lived out his life on his Tuscaloosa farm. Mary Ann had been born in Georgia in 1816 and, like her husband-to-be, had moved to Tuscaloosa with her family shortly after her birth.
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James Henry, Jr. and Mary Ann Walser were married on September 9, 1834. The young couple chose to remain in Tuscaloosa to raise their family. By 1847, when they decided to move to Mississippi, six of their children had been born: Dave, William H., Martha, Eliza, Mary, and James T., then a newborn infant. They had moved to their Mississippi *i plantation and established themselves there just in time to offer refuge to the ailing William Benjamin Howard when he applied for a job and, later, for Eliza's hand.

After their marriage, Eliza and William apparently stayed on with the Henrys. Caroline, Eileen, Georgia, and Amazon were born to the James Henrys before the family resettled on a larger property in Quachita County, Arkansas.

When war came, William Benjamin Howard and all the Henry men of fighting age rode for the Confederacy under General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Robert Howard's two grandfathers-to-be could have known each other during the Civil War, although there is no evidence that they did. Young Dave was killed early in the conflict, and word came from Bibb County, Alabama, that old Jim Henry, who had once been Shamus
 
McHenry, was dead. James Henry, heartbroken and ill, was discharged from the army in January 1862 after a scant six months of service. He was fifty-one years old.

After the war James Henry was unable to recoup his fortune. In the latter part of his life, lacking slaves or any other reliable source of labor to help him work his land, he turned to merchandising. In Holly Springs, where most of his children had been educated, he opened a small business.

In the years immediately following the war, William Benjamin Howard, whose fortunes were intertwined with those of his wife's father, James Henry, tried to keep his own property together and to manage the holdings of his father-in-law. Three sons, born to Eliza and William, were growing up. William Benjamin, Jr., the eldest, was born in 1858 and died at twenty-nine on August 2, 1888. The other sons were David Terrell Howard, born March 25, 1866, and Isaac Mordecai Howard, born April 1, 1871. The couple also had three daughters: Mary Elizabeth (1869), who married M. H. Ruyle and died January 4, 1908; Annie, who married Lee Ellison in 1884; and Willie, the youngest child of the family, who married William Oscar McClung.

The stable organization of the Howard family was disrupted by the death of James Henry in 1884.
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Perhaps on the strength of their inheritance, the Howards decided to move to Texas; but before they could complete their plans, William Benjamin Howard himself was stricken and died. Eliza Howard, determined to carry out her husband's wishes, sold her property—fine timberland—for fifty cents an acre, and with her children headed west. In 1885 she located on a farm in Limestone County, between Dallas and Austin, near Waco. Mrs. Howard and her daughters, Annie and Willie, may have traveled to Texas on the railroad; but Dave and Isaac brought the family goods overland in a covered wagon with a group of other immigrants.

This move to Texas was a courageous undertaking for a widow. It placed a great responsibility on Dave, the only one of the Howard children old enough to care for the family. Why Eliza chose to go so far from her family is not explained by the known facts. There could have been friction over the division of the Henry property; there often is in such cases, especially when the son-in-law has had an active part in the management of his wife's family affairs.

Nothing points to a family squabble, however, except the precipitous departure of Eliza and her children and the fact that in later years David (according to one of his sons) was "very close-mouthed about his people."
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This reticence does not necessarily imply that there was anything to hide. David may have merely been too busy supporting his twelve children to be hankering after the past. Certainly no irrevocable break occurred, for loving letters were exchanged all their lives between Eliza Henry Howard and her brothers and sisters.

People had many reasons for coming to Texas in the 1880s. The Indian strife had long since been put to rest, and the whole state was booming. Between 1880 and 1900, the population of the state increased 34.6 percent. By the turn of the century, the total population of Texas was 3,048,710, making it the sixth most populous state. Completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1883 had opened West Texas for immigration. Local citizens were amazed to learn that the first train from San Francisco had averaged fifteen miles an hour. While the run through West Texas was interrupted several times for track repairs, the expected attacks from outlaw bands never materialized. After such success, rail lines in Texas expanded rapidly.

Mrs. Howard and her girls probably came to Texas on some of the ten thousand miles of new track that was laid down in the state between 1875 and 1885, a striking contrast to the 426 miles of usable track available in 1866, when George Washington Ervin settled in Hill County. The new shipping lines made it possible for cattle to reach the market by means other than overland trails. Open range being no longer necessary, fence-cutting had become a felony; King Cotton marched westward to small farms located as much as one hundred miles west of Fort Worth.