Clare Furnace Serial Number
The master of River Valley Farm, Herbert William Clutter, was forty-eight years old and, as a result of a recent medical examination for an insurance policy, knew himself to be in first-rate condition. Though he wore rimless glasses, and was of but average height, standing just under five feet ten, Mr. Clutter cut a man’s-man figure. His shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained, and strong enough to shatter walnuts, were still intact. He weighed the same as he had the day he graduated from Kansas State University, where he had majored in agriculture—a hundred and fifty-four. He was not as rich as the richest man in Holcomb—Mr. Taylor Jones, a neighboring rancher.
He was, however, the community’s most widely known citizen, prominent both there and in Garden City, the close-by county seat, where he had headed the building committee for the newly completed First Methodist Church, an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar edifice. He was currently chairman of the board of the Garden City Co-Op Equity Exchange, and his name was everywhere respectfully recognized among Midwestern agriculturists, as it was in certain Washington offices, where he had been a member of the Federal Farm Credit Board during the early years of the Eisenhower administration. Always certain of what he wanted from the world, Mr.
Clutter had in large measure obtained it. On his left hand, on what remained of a finger once mangled by a piece of farm machinery, he wore a plain gold band, which was the symbol, a quarter century old, of his marriage to the person he had wished to marry—the sister of a college classmate, a timid, pious, delicate girl named Bonnie Fox, who was three years younger than he. She had given him four children—a trio of daughters, then a son. The eldest daughter, Eveanna, married and the mother of a boy nine months old, lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcomb frequently. Indeed, she and her family were expected within the fortnight, for her parents planned a sizable Thanksgiving reunion of the Clutter clan (which had its beginnings in Germany; the first immigrant Clutter—or Klotter, as the name was then spelled—arrived here in 1880). Fifty-odd kinfolk had been asked, several of whom would be travelling from places as far away as Palatka, Florida. Nor did Beverly, the child next in age to Eveanna, any longer reside at River Valley Farm; she was in Kansas City, Kansas, studying to be a nurse.
Mar 30, 2012. The serial number, and represents the year and month of manufacture. CLICK ANYWHERE IN THIS DOCUMENT TO RETURN TO HEATING BOILER & FURNACE AGE DETERMINATION GUIDES AT. Clare (also known as Clare Brothers) is a product line of oil furnaces, and is owned by International.
Beverly was engaged to a young biology student, of whom her father very much approved; invitations to the wedding, scheduled for Christmas week, were already printed. Which left, still living at home, the boy, Kenyon, who, at fifteen, was taller than Mr.
Clutter, and one sister, who was a year older—the town darling, Nancy. In regard to his family, Mr. Clutter had just one serious cause for disquiet—his wife’s health. She was “nervous,” she suffered “little spells”—such were the sheltering expressions used by those close to her. Not that the truth concerning “poor Bonnie’s afflictions” was in the least a secret; everyone knew she had been an on-and-off psychiatric patient the last half-dozen years.
Yet even upon this shadowed terrain sunlight had very lately sparkled. The past Wednesday, returning from two weeks of treatment at the Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, her customary place of retirement, Mrs. Clutter had brought scarcely credible tidings to tell her husband; with joy she informed him that the source of her misery, so medical opinion had at last decreed, was not in her head hut in her spine—it was physical, a matter of misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she must undergo an operation, and afterward—well, she would be her “old self” again.
Was it possible—the tension, the withdrawals, the pillow-muted sobbing behind locked doors, all due to an out-of-order backbone? If so, then Mr. Clutter could, when addressing his Thanksgiving table, recite a blessing of unmarred gratitude.
Ordinarily, Mr. Clutter’s mornings began at six-thirty; clanging milk pails and the whispery chatter of the boys who brought them, two sons of a hired man named Vic Irsik, usually roused him. But today he lingered—let Vic Irsik’s sons come and leave—for the previous evening, a Friday the thirteenth, had been a tiring one, though in part exhilarating.
Clare Furnace Serial Number Ho 158262
Bonnie had resurrected her “old self”; as if serving up a preview of the normality, the regained vigor, soon to be, she had rouged her lips, fussed with her hair, and, wearing a new dress, accompanied him to the Holcomb School, where they applauded a student production of “Tom Sawyer,” in which Nancy played Becky Thatcher. He had enjoyed seeing Bonnie out in public, nervous but nonetheless smiling, talking to people, and they both had been proud of Nancy; she had done so well, remembering all her lines, and looking, as he had said to her, in the course of backstage congratulations, “Just beautiful, honey—a real Southern belle.” Whereupon Nancy had behaved like one; curtsying in her hoopskirted costume, she had asked if she might drive in to Garden City. The State Theatre was having a special, eleven-thirty, Friday-the-thirteenth “Spook Show,” and all her friends were going.
In other circumstances, Mr. Clutter would have refused. His laws were laws, and one of them was: Nancy—and Kenyon, too—must be home by ten on week nights, by twelve on Saturdays. But, weakened by the genial events of the evening, he had consented.
And Nancy had not returned home until almost two. He had heard her come in, had called to her, for, though he not a man ever really to raise his voice, he had some plain things to say to her, statements that concerned less the lateness of the hour than the youngster who had driven her home—a school basketball hero, Bobby Rupp. Clutter liked Bobby, and considered him, for a boy his age, which was seventeen, most dependable and gentlemanly; however, in the three years she been permitted “dates,” Nancy, popular and pretty as she was, had never gone out with anyone else, and while Mr. Clutter understood that it was present national adolescent custom to form couples, to “go steady” and wear “engagement rings,” he disapproved, particularly since he had not long by accident, surprised his daughter and the Rupp boy kissing. He had then suggested that Nancy discontinue “seeing so much of Bobby,” advising her that a slow retreat now would hurt than an abrupt severance later—for, as he reminded her, it was a parting that must eventually take place. The Rupps were Roman Catholic, the Clutters Methodist—a fact that should in itself be sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and this boy might have of someday marrying. Nancy had been reasonable—at any rate, she had not argued—and now, before saying good night, Mr.
Clutter secured from her a promise to begin a gradual breaking off with Bobby. Still, the incident had lamentably put off his retiring time, which was ordinarily eleven o’clock. As a consequence, it was well after seven when he awakened on Saturday, November 14, 1959.
His wife always slept as late as possible. However, while Mr. Clutter was shaving, showering, and outfitting himself in whipcord trousers, a cattleman’s leather jacket, and soft stirrup boots, he had no fear of disturbing her; they did not share the same bedroom.
For several years, he had slept alone in the master bedroom, on the ground floor of the house—a two-story, fourteen-room frame-and-brick structure. Clutter stored her clothes in the closets of this room, and kept her few cosmetics and her myriad medicines in the blue-tile-and-glass-brick bathroom adjoining it, she had taken for serious occupancy a spare bedroom, which, like Nancy’s and Kenyon’s rooms, was on the second floor. The house—for the most part designed by Mr. Clutter, who thereby proved himself a sensible and sedate, if not notably decorative, architect—had been built in 1948 for forty thousand dollars.
(The resale value was now sixty thousand dollars.) Situated at the end of a long, lanelike driveway shaded by rows of Chinese elms, the handsome white house, standing on an ample lawn of groomed Bermuda grass, impressed Holcomb; it was a place people pointed out. As for the interior, there were spongy displays of liver-colored carpet intermittently abolishing the glare of varnished, resounding floors; an immense modernistic living-room couch covered in nubby fabric interwoven with glittery strands of silver metal; a breakfast alcove featuring a banquette upholstered in blue-and-white plastic.
This sort of furnishing was what Mr. Clutter liked, as did the majority of their acquaintances, whose homes, by and large, were similarly furnished. Other than a housekeeper who came in on weekdays, the Clutters employed no household help, so since his wife’s illness and the departure of the elder daughters Mr. Clutter had of necessity learned to cook; either he or Nancy, but principally Nancy, prepared the family meals. Clutter enjoyed the chore, and was excellent at it—no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf of salt-rising bread, and his celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to go at charity cake sales—but he was not a hearty eater; unlike his fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts.
That morning, an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee nor tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City’s First Methodist Church, a congregation totalling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire. While he was careful to avoid making a nuisance of his views, to adopt outside his realm an externally uncensoring manner, he enforced them within his family and among the employees at River Valley Farm. “Are you a drinking man?” was the first question he asked a job applicant, and even though the fellow gave a negative answer, he still must sign a work contract containing a clause that declared the agreement instantly void if the employee should be discovered “harboring alcohol.” A friend—an old pioneer rancher, Mr. Lynn Russell—had once told him, “You’ve got no mercy.
I swear, Herb, if you caught a hired man drinking, out he’d go. And you wouldn’t care if his family was starving.” It was perhaps the only criticism ever made of Mr. Clutter as an employer. Otherwise, he was known for his equanimity, his charitableness, and the fact that he paid good wages and distributed frequent bonuses; the men who worked for him—and there were sometimes as many as eighteen—had small reason to complain. After drinking the glass of milk and putting on a fleece-lined cap, Mr.
Clutter carried his apple with him when he went outdoors to examine the morning. It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumn rewards western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until Christmas.
Clutter contemplated this superior specimen of the season, he was joined by a part-collie mongrel, Teddy, and together they ambled off toward the livestock corral, which was adjacent to one of three barns on the premises. One of these barns was a mammoth Quonset hut; it brimmed with grain—a dark, pungent hill of milo grain worth considerable money: a hundred thousand dollars. That figure alone represented an almost four-thousand-per-cent advance over Mr. Clutter’s entire income in 1934—the year he married Bonnie Fox and moved with her from their home town of Rozel, Kansas, to Garden City, where he had found work as an assistant to the Finney County Agricultural Agent. Typically, it took him just seven months to be promoted; that is, to install himself in the head man’s job. The years during which he held the post—1935 to 1939—encompassed the dustiest, the down-and-outest the region had known since white men settled there, and young Herb Clutter, having, as he did, a brain expertly racing with the newest in streamlined agricultural practices, was quite qualified to serve as middleman between the government and the despondent farm ranchers; these men could well use the optimism and the educated instruction of a likable young fellow who seemed to know his business. All the same, he was not doing what he wanted to do; the son of a farmer, he had from the beginning aimed at operating a property of his own.
Facing up to it, he resigned as County Agent after four years and, on land leased with borrowed money, created, in embryo, River Valley Farm (a name justified by the Arkansas River’s meandering presence but not, certainly, by any evidence of valley). It was an endeavor that several Finney County conservatives watched with show-us amusement—old-timers who had been fond of baiting the youthful County Agent on the subject of his university notions: “That’s fine, Herb. You always know what’s best to do on the other fellow’s land.
Terrace that. But you might say a sight different if the place was your own.” They were mistaken; the upstart’s experiments succeeded—partly because, in the beginning years, he labored eighteen hours a day. Setbacks occurred—twice the wheat crop failed, and one winter he lost several hundred head of sheep in a blizzard—but after a decade Mr.
Clutter’s domain consisted of over eight hundred acres owned outright and three thousand more worked on a rental basis—and that, as his colleagues admitted, was “a pretty good spread.” Wheat, maize seed, certified grass seed—these were the crops the farm’s prosperity depended upon. Animals were also important—sheep, and especially cattle. A herd of several hundred Hereford stocker cattle bore the Clutter brand, though one would not have suspected it from the scant contents of the livestock corral, which was reserved for ailing steers, a few milking cows, Nancy’s cats, and Babe, the family favorite—an old fat work horse who never objected to lumbering about with three and four children astride her broad back. Clutter now fed Babe the core of his apple, calling good morning to a man raking debris inside the corral—Alfred Stoecklein, the sole resident employee.
The Stoeckleins and their three children lived in a house not a hundred yards from the main house; except for them, the Clutters had no neighbors within half a mile. A long-faced man with long brown teeth, Mr. Stoecklein asked, “Have you some particular work in mind today? Cause we got a sick-un.
Me and Missis been up and down with her most the night. I been thinking to carry her to doctor.” And Mr. Clutter, expressing sympathy, said by all means to take the morning off, and if there was any way he or his wife could help, please let them know. Then, with the dog running ahead of him, he moved southward toward the fields, lion-colored now, luminously golden with after-harvest stubble. The river lay in this direction; near its bank stood a grove of fruit trees—peach, pear, cherry, and apple. Fifty years ago, according to native memory, it would have taken a lumberjack ten minutes to axe all the trees in western Kansas.
Even today, only cottonwoods and Chinese elms—perennials with a cactuslike indifference to thirst—are commonly planted. However, as Mr. Clutter often remarked, “an inch more of rain, and this country would be paradise—Eden on earth.” The little collection of fruit-bearers growing by the river was his attempt to contrive, rain or no, a patch of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden, he envisioned. His wife once said, “My husband cares more for those trees than he does for his children,” and everyone in Holcomb recalled the day a small disabled plane crashed into the peach trees: “Herb was fit to be tied! Why, the propeller hadn’t stopped turning before he’d slapped a lawsuit on the pilot.” Passing through the orchard, Mr.
Clare Furnace Serial Number
Clutter proceeded along beside the river, which was shallow here and strewn with islands—midstream beaches of soft sand, to which, on Sundays gone by, hot-weather Sabbaths when Bonnie had still “felt up to things,” picnic baskets had been carted, family afternoons whiled away waiting for a twitch at the end of a trout line. Clutter seldom encountered trespassers on his property; a mile from the highway, and arrived at by obscure roads, it was not a place that strangers came upon by chance. Now, suddenly, a whole party of them appeared and Teddy rushed forward roaring out a challenge. But it was odd about Teddy. Though he was a good sentry, alert, ever ready to raise Cain, his valor had one flaw: let him glimpse a gun, as he did now—for the intruders were armed—and his head dropped, his tail turned in. No one understood why, for no one knew his history, other than that he was a vagabond that Kenyon had adopted years ago. The visitors proved to be five pheasant hunters from Oklahoma.
The pheasant season in Kansas, a famed November event, lures hordes of sportsmen from adjoining states, and during the past week plaid-hatted regiments had paraded across the autumnal expanses flushing and felling with rounds of bird shot great coppery flights of the grain-fattened birds. By custom, the hunters, if they are not invited guests, are supposed to pay the landowner a fee for letting them pursue their quarry on his premises, but when the Oklahomans offered to hire hunting rights, Mr. Clutter was amused. “I’m not as poor as I look. Go ahead, get all you can,” he said. Then, touching the brim of his cap, he headed for home and the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last.
“Good grief, Kenyon! I hear you.” As usual, the devil was in Kenyon. His shouts kept coming up the stairs: “Nancy!
Telephone!” Barefoot, pajama-clad, Nancy scampered down the stairs. There were two telephones in the house—one in the room her father used as an office, another in the kitchen. She picked up the kitchen extension: “Hello? Oh, yes, good morning, Mrs. Katz.” And Mrs. Clarence Katz, the wife of a farmer who lived on the highway, said, “I told your daddy not to wake you up. I said Nancy must be tired after all that wonderful acting she did last night.
You were lovely, dear. Those white ribbons in your hair! And that part when you thought Tom Sawyer was dead—you had real tears in your eyes. Good as anything on TV.
But your daddy said it was time you got up; well, it is going on for nine. Now, what I wanted, dear—my little girl, my little Jolene, she’s just dying to bake a cherry pie, and, seeing how you’re a champion cherry-pie maker, always winning prizes, I wondered could I bring her over there this morning and you show her?” Normally, Nancy would willingly have taught Jolene to prepare an entire turkey dinner; she felt it her duty to be available when younger girls came to her wanting help with their cooking, their sewing, or their music lessons—or, as often happened, to confide. Where she found the time, and still managed to “practically run that big house” and be a straight-A student, the president of her class, a leader in the 4-H program and the Young Methodists League, a skilled rider, an excellent musician (piano, clarinet), an annual winner at the county fair (pastry, preserves, needlework, flower arrangement)—how a girl not yet seventeen could haul such a wagonload, and do so without “brag,” with, rather, merely a radiant jauntiness, was an enigma the community pondered, and solved by saying, “She’s got character. Gets it from her old man.” Certainly her strongest trait, the talent that gave support to all the others, derived from her father: a fine-honed sense of organization. Each moment was assigned; she knew precisely, at any hour, what she would be doing, how long it would require. And that was the trouble with today: she had overscheduled it.
She had committed herself to helping another neighbor’s child, Roxie Lee Smith, with a trumpet solo that Roxie Lee planned to play at a school concert; had promised to run three complicated errands for her mother; and had arranged to attend a 4-H meeting in Garden City with her father. And then there was lunch to make, and, after lunch, work to be done on the bridesmaids’ dresses for Beverly’s wedding, which she had designed and was sewing herself. As matters stood, there was no room for Jolene’s cherry-pie lesson. Unless something could be cancelled. Will you hold the line a moment, please?” She walked the length of the house to her father’s office. The office, which had an outside entrance for ordinary visitors, was separated from the living room by a sliding door; though Mr.
Clutter occasionally shared the office with Gerald Van Vleet, a young man who assisted him with the management of the farm, it was fundamentally his retreat—an orderly sanctuary, panelled in walnut veneer, where, surrounded by weather barometers, rain charts, a pair of binoculars, he sat like a captain in his cabin, a navigator piloting River Valley’s sometimes risky passage through the seasons. “Never mind,” he said, responding to Nancy’s problem. I’ll take Kenyon instead.” And so, lifting the office phone, Nancy told Mrs. Katz yes, fine, bring Jolene right on over. But she hung up with a frown. “It’s so peculiar,” she said as she looked around the room and saw in it her father helping Kenyon add a column of figures, and, at his desk by the window, Mr.
Van Vleet, who had a kind of brooding, rugged good looks that led her to call him Heathcliff behind his back. “But I keep smelling cigarette smoke.’ “On your breath?” inquired Kenyon. “No, funny one. Yours.” That quieted him, for Kenyon, as he knew she knew, did once in a while sneak a puff—but, then, so did Nancy. Clutter clapped his hands. This is an office.” Now, upstairs, she changed into faded Levis and a green sweater, and fastened round her wrist her third-most-valued belonging, a gold watch; her closest cat friend, Evinrude, ranked above it, and surmounting even Evinrude was Bobby’s signet ring, the cumbersome proof of her “going-steady” status, which she wore ( when she wore it; the least flareup and off it came) on a thumb, for even with the use of adhesive tape its man-size girth could not be made to fit a more suitable finger.
Nancy was a pretty girl, lean and boyishly agile, and the prettiest things about her were her short-bobbed, shining chestnut hair (brushed a hundred strokes each morning, the same number at night), and her soap-polished complexion, still faintly freckled and rose-brown from last summer’s sun. But it was her eyes, wide apart, darkly translucent, like ale held to the light, that made her immediately likable, that at once announced her lack of suspicion, her considered and yet so easily triggered kindliness. “Nancy!” Kenyon called.
“Susan on the phone.” Susan Kidwell, her confidante. Again she answered in the kitchen. “Tell,” said Susan, who invariably launched a telephone session with this command. “And, to begin, tell why you were flirting with Jerry Roth.” Like Bobby, Jerry Roth was a school basketball star. Good grief, I wasn’t flirting. You mean because we were holding hands?
He just came backstage during the show. And I was so nervous. So he held my hand. To give me courage.” “Very sweet. Then what?” “Bobby took me to the spook movie.
And we held hands.” “Was it scary? “He didn’t think so; he just laughed. But you know me. Boo!—and I fall off the seat.” “What are you eating?” “Nothing.” “I know—your fingernails,” said Susan, guessing correctly. Much as Nancy tried, she could not break the habit of nibbling her nails, and, whenever she was troubled, chewing them right to the quick.
Something wrong?” “No.” “Nancy. C’est moi.
” Susan was studying French. He’s been in an awful mood the last three weeks. At least, around me. And when I got home last night he started that again.” “That” needed no amplification; it was a subject that the two friends had discussed completely, and upon which they agreed.
Susan, summarizing the problem from Nancy’s viewpoint, had once said, “You love Bobby now, and you need him. But, deep down, even Bobby knows there isn’t any future in it. Later on, when we go off to Manhattan, everything will seem a new world.” Kansas State University is in Manhattan, and the two girls planned to enroll there as art students, and to room together. “Everything will change, whether you want it to or not. But you can’t change it now, living here in Holcomb, seeing Bobby every day, sitting in the same classes—and there’s no reason to. Because you and Bobby are a very happy thing. And it will be something happy to think back about—if you’re left alone.
Can’t you make your father understand that?” No, she could not. “Because,” as she explained it to Susan, “whenever I start to say something, he looks at me as though I must not love him.
Or as though I loved him less. And suddenly I’m tongue-tied; I just want to be his daughter, and do as he wishes.” To this Susan had no reply; it embodied emotions, a relationship, beyond her experience. She lived alone with her mother, who taught music at the Holcomb School, and she did not remember her own father very clearly, for years ago, in their native California, Mr. Kidwell had one day left home and not come back. “And, anyway,” Nancy continued now, “I’m not sure it’s me that’s making him grouchy. Something else—he’s really worried about something.” “Your mother?” No other friend of Nancy’s would have presumed to make such a suggestion.
Susan, however, was privileged. When she had first appeared in Holcomb, a melancholy, imaginative child, willowy and wan and sensitive, then eight, a year younger than Nancy, the Clutters had so ardently adopted her that the fatherless little girl from California soon came to seem a member of the family. For seven years, the two friends had been inseparable, each, by virtue of the rarity of similar and equal sensibilities, irreplaceable to the other. But then, this past September, Susan had transferred from the local school to the vaster, supposedly superior one in Garden City.
It was the usual procedure for Holcomb students who intended going on to college, but Mr. Clutter, a diehard community booster, considered such defections an affront to community spirit; the Holcomb School was good enough for his children, and there they would remain. Thus, the girls were no longer always together, and Nancy deeply felt the daytime absence of her friend, the one person with whom she need be neither brave nor reticent. But we’re all so happy about Mother—you heard the wonderful news.” Then Nancy said, “Listen,” and hesitated, as if summoning nerve to make an outrageous remark. “ Why do I keep smelling smoke?
Honestly, I think I’m losing my mind. I get into the car, I walk into a room, and it’s as though somebody had just been there, smoking a cigarette. It isn’t Mother, it can’t be Kenyon.
Kenyon wouldn’t dare.” Nor, very likely, would any visitor to the Clutter home, which was pointedly devoid of ashtrays. Slowly, Susan grasped the implication, but it was ludicrous. Regardless of what his private anxieties might be, she could not believe that Mr. Clutter was finding secret solace in tobacco. Before she could ask if this was really what Nancy meant, Nancy cut her off: “Sorry, Susie. I’ve got to go.
Katz is here.”. The two young men had little in common, but they did not realize it, for they shared a number of surface traits. Both, for example, were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of their fingernails. After their grease-monkey morning, they spent the better part of an hour sprucing up in the lavatory of the garage. Dick stripped to his briefs was not quite the same as Dick fully clothed. In the latter state, he seemed a flimsy dingy-blond youth of medium height, fleshless and perhaps sunken-chested; disrobing revealed that he was nothing of the sort but, rather, an athlete constructed on a welterweight scale. The tattooed face of a cat, blue and grinning, covered his right hand; on one shoulder a blue rose blossomed.
By midafternoon, the black Chevrolet had reached Emporia, Kansas—a large town, almost a city, and a safe place, so the occupants of the car had decided, to do a bit of shopping. They parked on a side street, then wandered about until a suitably crowded variety store presented itself. The first purchase was a pair of rubber gloves; these were for Perry, who, unlike Dick, had neglected to bring old gloves of his own. They moved on to a counter displaying women’s hosiery. After a spell of indecisive quibbling, Perry said, “I’m for it.” Dick was not. “What about my eye?
They’re all too light-colored to hide that.” “Miss,” said Perry, attracting a salesgirl’s attention. “You got any black stockings?” When she told him no, he proposed that they try another store. “Black’s foolproof.” But Dick had made up his mind: stockings of any shade were unnecessary, an encumbrance, a useless expense (“I’ve already invested enough money in this operation”), and, after all, anyone they encountered would not live to bear witness. “No witnesses,” he reminded Perry, for what seemed to Perry the millionth time. It rankled in him, the way Dick mouthed those two words, as though they solved every problem; it was stupid not to admit that there might be a witness they hadn’t seen.
“The ineffable happens, things do take a turn,” he said. But Dick, smiling boastfully, boyishly, did not agree: “Get the bubbles out of your blood. Nothing can go wrong.” No. Because the plan was Dick’s, and, from first footfall to final silence, flawlessly devised. Next, they were interested in rope. Perry studied the stock, tested it. Having once served in the merchant marine, he understood rope and was clever with knots.
He chose a white nylon cord, as strong as wire and not much thicker. They discussed how many yards of it they required. The question irritated Dick, for it was part of a greater quandary, and he could not, despite the alleged perfection of his over-all design, be certain of the answer. Eventually, he said, “Christ, how the hell should I know?” “You damn well better.” Dick tried. “There’s him. The kid and the girl. And maybe the other two.
But it’s Saturday. They might have guests. Let’s count on eight, or even twelve. The only sure thing is every one of them has got to go.” “Seems like a lot of it. To be so sure about.” “Ain’t that what I promised you, honey—plenty of hair on them-those walls?” Perry shrugged. “Then we’d better buy the whole roll.” It was a hundred yards long—quite enough for twelve.
Kenyon had built the chest himself: a mahogany hope chest, lined with cedar, which he intended to give Beverly as a wedding present. Now, working on it in the so-called den in the basement, he applied a last coat of varnish. The furniture in the den, a cement-floored room that ran the length of the house, consisted almost entirely of examples of his carpentry (shelves, tables, stools, a ping-pong table) and Nancy’s needlework (chintz slipcovers that rejuvenated a decrepit couch, curtains, pillows bearinglegends: “ happy?” and “ you don’t have to be crazy to live here but it helps”). Together Kenyon and Nancy had made a paint-splattered attempt to deprive the basement room of its unremovable dourness, and neither was aware of failure.
In fact, they both thought their den a triumph and a blessing—Nancy because it was a place where she could entertain “the gang” without disturbing her mother, and Kenyon because here he could be alone, free to bang, saw, and mess with his “inventions,” the newest of which was an electric deep-dish frying pan. Adjoining the den was a furnace room, which contained a tool-littered table piled with some of his other works-in-progress—an amplifying unit, an elderly wind-up Victrola that he was restoring to service. Kenyon resembled neither of his parents physically; his crew-cut hair was hemp-colored, and he was six feet tall and lanky, though hefty enough to have once rescued a pair of full-grown sheep by carrying them two miles through a blizzard—sturdy, strong, but cursed with a lanky boy’s lack of muscular coordination. This defect, aggravated by an inability to function without glasses, prevented him from taking more than a token part in those team sports (basketball, baseball) that were the main occupation of most of the boys who might have been his friends. He had only one close friend—Bob Jones, the son of Taylor Jones, whose ranch was a mile west of the Clutter home. Out in rural Kansas, boys start driving cars very young; Kenyon was eleven when his father allowed him to buy, with money he had earned raising sheep, an old truck with a Model A engine—the “coyote wagon,” he and Bob called it.
Not far from River Valley Farm there is a mysterious stretch of countryside known as the Sand Hills; it is like a beach without an ocean, and at night coyotes slink among the dunes, assembling in hordes to howl. On moonlit evenings, the boys would descend upon them, set them running, and try to outrace them in the wagon; they seldom did, for the scrawniest coyote can hit fifty miles an hour, whereas the wagon’s top speed was thirty-five, but it was a wild and beautiful kind of fun, the wagon skidding across the sand, the fleeing coyotes framed against the moon—as Bob said, it sure made your heart hurry. Richard (Dick) Hickock and Perry Smith, two ex-convicts on parole, hatched the idea for “the perfect score” after leaving prison. Equally intoxicating, and more profitable, were the rabbit roundups the two boys conducted. Kenyon was a good shot and his friend a better one, and between them they sometimes delivered half a hundred rabbits to the “rabbit factory”—a Garden City processing plant that paid ten cents a head for the animals, which were then quick-frozen and shipped to mink growers. But what meant most to Kenyon—and Bob, too—was their weekends, overnight hunting hikes along the shores of the river: wandering, wrapping up in blankets, listening at sunrise for the noise of wings, moving toward the sound on tiptoe, and then, sweetest of all, swaggering homeward with a dozen duck dinners swinging from their belts.
But lately things had changed between Kenyon and his friend. They hadn’t quarrelled, there had been no overt falling out, nothing had happened except that Bob, who was sixteen, had started “going with a girl,” which meant that Kenyon, a year younger and still very much the adolescent bachelor, could no longer count on his companionship. Bob told him, “When you’re my age, you’ll feel different. I used to think the same as you: Women—so what? But then you get to talking to some woman, and it’s mighty nice.
You’ll see.” Kenyon doubted it; he could not conceive of ever wanting to waste an hour on any girl that might he spent with guns, horses, tools, machinery, even a book. If Bob was unavailable, then he would rather be alone, for in temperament he was not the least Mr. Clutter’s son but rather Bonnie’s child, a sensitive and reticent boy.
His contemporaries thought him “standoffish,” yet forgave him, saying, “Oh, Kenyon. It’s just that he lives in a world of his own.” Leaving the varnish to dry, he went on to another chore—one that took him out-of-doors. He wanted to tidy up his mother’s flower garden, a treasured patch of dishevelled foliage that grew beneath her bedroom window. When he got there, he found one of the hired men loosening earth with a spade—Paul Helm, the husband of the housekeeper. “Seen that car? Yes, Kenyon had seen a car in the driveway—a gray Buick, standing outside the entrance to his father’s office. “Thought you might know who it was.” “Not unless it’s Mr.
Dad said he was expecting him.” Mr. Helm (the late Mr. Helm; he died of a stroke the following March) was a sombre man in his late fifties whose withdrawn manner veiled a nature keenly curious and watchful; he liked to know what was going on. “Which Johnson?” “The insurance fellow.” Mr. Helm grunted.
“Your dad must be laying in a stack of it. That car’s been here I’d say three hours.” The chill of oncoming dusk shivered through the air, and though the sky was still deep blue, lengthening shadows emanated from the garden’s tall chrysanthemum stalks; Nancy’s cat frolicked among them, catching its paws in the twine with which Kenyon and Mr. Helm were now tying plants. Suddenly, Nancy herself came jogging across the fields aboard fat Babe—Babe, returning from her Saturday treat, a bathe in the river.
Teddy, the dog, accompanied them, and all three were water-splashed and shining. “You’ll catch cold,” Mr.
Nancy laughed; she had never been ill—not once. Sliding off Babe, she sprawled on the grass at the edge of the garden and seized her cat, dangled him above her, and kissed his nose and whiskers. Kenyon was disgusted.
“ Kissing animals on the mouth.” “You used to kiss Skeeter,” she reminded him. “Skeeter was a horse.” A beautiful horse, a strawberry stallion he had raised from a foal.
How that Skeeter could take a fence! “You use a horse too hard,” his father had cautioned him. “One day you’ll ride the life out of Skeeter.” And he had; while Skeeter was streaking down a road with his master astride him, his heart failed, and he stumbled and was dead.
Now, a year later, Kenyon still mourned him, even though his father, taking pity on him, had promised him the pick of next spring’s foals. “Kenyon?” Nancy said. “Do you think Tracy will be able to talk? By Thanksgiving?” Tracy, not yet a year old, was her nephew, the son of Eveanna, the sister to whom she felt particularly close.
(Beverly was Kenyon’s favorite.) “It would thrill me to pieces to hear him say ‘Aunt Nancy.’ Or ‘Uncle Kenyon.’ Wouldn’t you like to hear him say that? I mean, don’t you love being an uncle? Good grief, why can’t you ever answer me? “ “Because you’re silly,” he said, tossing her the head of a flower, a wilted dahlia, which she jammed into her hair. Helm picked up his spade.
Crows cawed, sundown was near, but his home was not; the lane of Chinese elms had turned into a tunnel of darkening green, and he lived at the end of it, half a mile away. “Evening,” he said, and started his journey. But once he looked back. “And that,” he was to testify the next day, “was the last I seen them. The boy rooting around in the garden. Nancy leading old Babe off to the barn.
Like I said, nothing out of the ordinary.”.