Jane Eyre : Popular Penguins

1 The Last to see Them Alive

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call 'out there'. Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is fiat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveller reaches them.

Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see – simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the centre by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced 'Arkan-sas') River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco-structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign – DANCE – but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Near by is another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking gold on a dirty window – HOLCOMB BANK. The bank failed in 1933, and its former counting-rooms have been converted into apartments. It is one of the town's two 'apartment houses', the second being a ramshackle mansion known, because a good part of the local school's faculty lives there, as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb's homes are one-storey frame affairs, with front porches.

Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots, presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself, with its peeling sulphur-coloured paint, is equally melancholy; the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day, but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No passenger trains do – only an occasional freight. Up on the highway, there are two filling stations, one of which doubles as a meagrely supplied grocery store, while the other does extra duty as a cafe – Hartman's Cafe, where Mrs Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee, soft drinks, and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of Kansas, is 'dry'.)

And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send their children to this modern and ably staffed 'consolidated' school – the grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses transports 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 of the 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 afterwards the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy recreating them over and again – those sombre explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbours 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 colour, 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 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 – Mr Taylor Jones, a neighbouring 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 Kansas Conference of Farm Organisations, and his name was everywhere respectfully recognised 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 Holcomb frequently. Indeed, she and her family were expected within the fortnight, for her parents planned a sizeable 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. 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 nealth. 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 Centre 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 but in her spine – it was physical, a matter of misplaced vertebrae. Of course, she must undergo an operation, and afterwards – 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 Vie Irsik's sons come and leave, for the previous evening, a Friday the thirteenth, had been a tiring one, though in part exhilarating. Bonnie had resurrected her 'old self'; as if serving up a preview of the normality, the regained vigour, 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 it, 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 hoop-skirted costume, she had asked if she might drive into 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, and had called to her, for though he was 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.

Mr Clutter liked Bobby, and considered him, for a boy his age, which was seventeen, most dependable and gentlemanly; however, in the three years she had 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 the present national adolescent custom to form couples, to 'go steady' and wear 'engagement rings', he disapproved, particularly since he had not long ago, 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 less than an abrupt severance later – for, as he reminded her, it was a parting that must eventually take place. The Rupp family were Roman Catholics, the Clutters, Methodist – a fact that should in itself be, sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and this boy might have of some day 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, 14 November, 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-storey, fourteen-room frame-and-brick structure. Though Mrs 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 Eveanna's former 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, lane-like 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-coloured 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 and Mrs 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. Mr 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 no 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 a,, might be supposed, for the centre 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 'harbouring 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. Autumns reward 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.

As Mr Clutter contemplated this superior specimen of the season, he was joined by a part-collie mongrel, and together they ambled off towards 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 – Westland sorghum – and one of them housed 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 middle-man between the government and the despondent farm ranchers; these men could well use the optimism and the educated instruction of a likeable 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 froTn 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 endeavour 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. Plant this. 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 laboured 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 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 favourite-an old fat workhorse who never objected to lumbering about with three and four children astride her broad back.

Mr 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 neighbours within half a mile. A long-faced man with long brown teeth, Stoecklein asked, 'Have you some particular work in mind today? Cause we got a sick-un. The baby. 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 southwards towards the fields, lion-coloured 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 cactus-like 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 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 fish-line. Mr Clutter seldom encountered trespassers on his property; a mile and a half 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, the dog, 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 valour 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 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 buckshot 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.