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, 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. 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 1048 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-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. 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 or 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 totaling 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 un-censoring
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 out-doors 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, sheepslaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even
crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheat stalks 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 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 — 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-percent 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 Finny County conservatives watched with show-us amusement — oldtimers 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 slight 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 do-main
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, Milo 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
favorite — 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
