chapter 3

Mr. Taylor Jones, a neighboring rancher. He

was, however, the community’s most widely known citizen,

prominent both there and inGarden 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 Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations, 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 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 ten

months old, lived in northern Illinois but visited Holcombfrequently. 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 traveling

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. 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, 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 lastdecreed, was not in her head but in her spine—it was

physical, a matter of misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she

must ...

continued ~

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