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 co-ordination. 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.
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 weekend, 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 on their belts.
But lately things had changed between Kenyon and his friend. They had not quarreled, there had been no over 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 be 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 in the least Mr. Clutter’s son but rather Bonnie’s child, a sensitive and reticent boy. His contemporaries thought him “stand-offish,” 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 disheveled 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?” Mr. Helm asked.
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. Johnson. Dad said he was expecting him.”
Mr. Helm (the late Mr. Helm; he died of a stroke the following March) was a somber 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 the old man 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. Helm said.
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? Kenyon? 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.
Mr. 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. Nancy leading old Babe off to the barn. Like I said, nothing out of the ordinary.”
The black Chevrolet was again parked, this time in front of a Catholic hospital on the outskirts of Emporia. Under continued needling (“That’s your trouble. You think there’s only one right way -Dick’s way”), Dick had surrendered. While Perry waited in the car, he had gone into the hospital to try and buy a pair of black stockings from a nun. This rather unorthodox method of obtaining them had been Perry’s inspiration; nuns, he had argued, were certain to have a supply.
The notion presented one drawback, of course: nuns, and anything pertaining to them, were bad luck, and Perry was most respectful of his superstitions. (Some others were the number 15, red hair, white flowers, priests crossing a road, snakes appearing in a dream.) Still, it couldn’t be helped. The compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate; that was the case with Perry.
He was here, and embarked on the present errand, not because he wished to be but because fate had arranged the matter; he could prove it – though he had no intention of doing so, at least within Dick’s hearing, for the proof would involve his confessing the true and secret motive behind his return to Kansas, a piece of parole violation he had decided upon for a reason quite unrelated to Dick’s “score” or Dick’s summoning letter. The reason was that several weeks earlier he had learned that on Thursday, November 12, another of his former cellmates was being released from Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, and “more than anything in the world,” he desired a reunion with this man, his “real and only friend,” the “brilliant” Willie-Jay.
During the first of his three years in prison, Perry had observed Willie-Jay from a distance, with interest but with apprehension; if one wished to be thought a tough specimen, intimacy with Willie-Jay seemed unwise. He was the chaplain’s clerk, a slender Irishman with prematurely gray hair and gray, melancholy eyes. His tenor voice was the glory of the prison’s choir. Even Perry, though he was contemptuous of any exhibition of piety, felt “upset” when he heard Willie-Jay sing “The Lord’s Prayer”; the hymn’s grave language sung in so credulous a spirit moved him, made him wonder a little at the justice of his contempt. Eventually, prodded by a slightly alerted religious curiosity, he approached Willie-Jay, and the chaplain’s clerk, at once responsive, thought he divined in the cripple-legged body builder with the misty gaze and the prim, smoky voice “a poet, something rare and savable.”
An ambition to “bring this boy
