In Cold Blood - Truman Capote [34]
"Why, Myrt? Why won't he?" Mrs. Clare raised her voice. "BECAUSE HE'S DEAD. And Bonnie, too. And Nancy. And the boy. Somebody shot them." "Myrt - don't say things like that. Who shot them?" Without a pause in her postmarking activities, Mrs. Clare replied, "The man in the airplane. The one Herb sued for crashing into his fruit trees. If it wasn't him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It's the same the whole world over. You know that."
"I don't," said Mother Truitt, who put her hands over her ears. "I don't know any such thing."
"Varmints."
"I'm scared, Myrt."
"Of what? When your time comes, it comes. And tears won't save you." She had observed that her mother had begun to shed a few. "When Homer died, I used up all the fear I had in me, and all the grief, too. If there's somebody loose around here that wants to cut my throat, I wish him luck. What difference does it make? It's all the same in eternity. Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. So blow your nose."
The grim information, announced from church pulpits, distributed over telephone wires, publicized by Garden City 's radio station, KIUL ("A tragedy, unbelievable and shocking beyond words, struck four members of the Herb Clutter family late Saturday night or early today. Death, brutal and without apparent motive . . ."), produced in the average recipient a reaction nearer that of Mother Truitt than that of Mrs. Clare: amazement, shading into dismay; a shallow horror sensation that cold springs of personal fear swiftly deepened. Hartman 's Cafe, which contains four roughly made tables and a lunch counter, could accommodate but a fraction of the frightened gossips, mostly male, who wished to gather there. The owner, Mrs. Bess Hartman, a sparsely fleshed, un-foolish lady with bobbed gray-and-gold hair and bright, authoritative green eyes, is a cousin of Postmistress Clare, whose style of candor Mrs. Hartman can equal, perhaps surpass. "Some people say I'm a tough old bird, but the Clutter business sure took the fly out of me," she later said to a friend. "Imagine anybody pulling a stunt like that! Time I heard it, when everybody was pouring in here talking all kinds of wild-eyed stuff, my first thought was Bonnie. Course, it was silly, but we didn't know the facts, and a lot of people thought maybe - on account of her spells. Now we don't know what to think. It must have been a grudge killing. Done by somebody who knew the house inside out. But who hated the Clutters? I never heard a word against them; they were about as popular as a family can be, and if something like this could happen to them, then who's safe, I ask you? One old man sitting here that Sunday, he put his finger right on it, the reason nobody can sleep; he said, 'All we've got out here are our friends. There isn't anything else.' In a way, that's the worst part of the crime. What a terrible thing when neighbors can't look at each other without kind of wondering! Yes, it's a hard fact to live with, but if they ever do find out who done it, I'm sure it'll be a bigger surprise than the murders themselves." Mrs. Bob Johnson, the wife of the New York Life Insurance agent, is an excellent cook, but the Sunday dinner she had prepared was not eaten - at least, not while it was warm - for just as her husband was plunging a knife into the roast pheasant, he received a telephone call from a friend. "And that," he recalls, rather ruefully, "was the first I heard of what had happened in Holcomb. I didn 't believe it. I couldn't afford to. Lord, I had Clutter's check right here in my pocket. A piece of paper worth eighty