chapter 2

the grades go from kindergarten

through senior high, and a fleet of buses transport the

students, of which there are usually around three hundred

and sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away—are, in

general, a prosperous people. Farm ranchers, most of

them, they are outdoor folk of very varied stock—German,

Irish, Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise cattle and

sheep, grow wheat, milo, grass seed, and sugar beets.

Farming is always a chancy business, but in western

Kansas its practitioners consider themselves “born

gamblers,” for they must contend with an extremely shallow

precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and

anguishing irrigation problems. However, the last seven

years have been years of droughtless beneficence. The

farm ranchers in Finney County, of which Holcomb is a part,

have done well; money has been made not from farming

alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural-gas

resources, and its acquisition is reflected in the new school,

the comfortable interiors of the farmhouses, the steep and

swollen grain elevators.

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few

Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of

Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on

the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the

Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional

happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants ofthe village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were

satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside

ordinary life—to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend

school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club.

But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November,

a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the

normal nightly Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of

coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing,

receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul

in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that,

all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the

townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other

to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-

creating them over and again—those somber explosions

that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many

old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as

strangers.

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, hissquare-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued

youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained and strong enough to

shatter walnuts, were still intact. He weighed a hundred and

fifty-four—the same as he had the day he graduated from

Kansas State University, where he had majored in

agriculture. He was not as rich as the richest man in

Holcomb—

continued ~

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***