Dark Valley Destiny by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

III. DARK VALLEY LORD
    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. 1
    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." 2
    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. 3
    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. 4
    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