Christmas carols were in the air; they issued from the radio of the four women and mixed strangely with Miami’s sunshine and the cries of the querulous, never thoroughly silent seagulls. “Oh, come let us adore Him, Oh, come let us adore Him”: a cathedral choir, an exalted music that moved Perry to tears—which refused to stop, even after the music did. And as was not uncommon when he was thus afflicted, he dwelt upon a possibility that had for him “tremendous fascination”: suicide. As a child he had often thought of killing himself, but those were sentimental reveries born of a wish to punish his father and mother and other enemies. From young manhood onward, however, the prospect of ending his life had more and more lost its fantastic quality. That, he must remember, was Jimmy’s “solution,” and Fern’s, too. And lately it had come to seem not just an alternative but the specific death awaiting him.
Anyway, he couldn’t see that he had “a lot to live for.” Hot islands and buried gold, diving deep in fire-blue seas toward sunken treasure—such dreams were gone. Gone, too, was “Perry O’Parsons,” the name invented for the singing sensation of stage and screen that he’d half-seriously hoped some day to be. Perry O’Parsons had died without having ever lived. What was there to look forward to? He and Dick were “running a race without a finish line”—that was how it struck him. And now, after not quite a week in Miami, the long ride was to resume. Dick, who had worked one day at the ABC auto-service company for sixty-five cents an hour, had told him, “Miami’s worse than Mexico. Sixty-five cents! Not me. I’m white.” So tomorrow, with only twenty-seven dollars left of the money raised in Kansas City, they were heading west again, to Texas, to Nevada—“nowhere definite.”
Dick, who had waded into the surf, returned. He fell, wet and breathless, face down on the sticky sand.
“How was the water?”
“Wonderful.”
The closeness of Christmas to Nancy Clutter’s birthday, which was right after New Year’s, had always created problems for her boy friend, Bobby Rupp. It had strained his imagination to think of two suitable gifts in such quick succession. But each year, with money made working summers on his father’s sugar-beet farm, he had done the best he could, and on Christmas morning he had always hurried to the Clutter house carrying a package that his sisters had helped him wrap and that he hoped would surprise Nancy and delight her. Last year he had given her a small heart-shaped gold locket. This year, as forehanded as ever, he’d been wavering between the imported perfumes on sale at Norris Drugs and a pair of riding boots. But then Nancy had died.
On Christmas morning, instead of racing off to River Valley Farm, he remained at home, and later in the day he shared with his family the splendid dinner his mother had been a week preparing. Everybody—his parents and every one of his seven brothers and sisters—had treated him gently since the tragedy. All the same, at mealtimes he was told again and again that he must please eat. No one comprehended that really he was ill, that grief had made him so, that grief had drawn a circle around him he could not escape from and others could not enter—except possibly Sue. Until Nancy’s death he had not appreciated Sue, never felt altogether comfortable with her. She was too different—took seriously things that even girls ought not to take very seriously: paintings, poems, the music she played on the piano. And, of course, he was jealous of her; her position in Nancy’s esteem, though of another order, had been at least equal to his. But that was why she was able to understand his loss. Without Sue, without her almost constant presence, how could he have withstood such an avalanche of shocks—the crime itself, his interviews with Mr. Dewey, the pathetic irony of being for a while the principal suspect?
Then, after about a month, the friendship waned. Bobby went less frequently to sit in the Kidwells’ tiny, cozy parlor, and when he did go, Sue seemed not as welcoming. The trouble was that they were forcing each other to mourn and remember what in fact they wanted to forget. Sometimes Bobby could when he was playing basketball or driving his car over country roads at eighty miles an hour, or when, as part of a self-imposed athletic program (his ambition was to be a high-school gymnastics instructor), he took long-distance jog-trots across flat yellow fields. And now, after helping clear the dining table of all its holiday dishes, that was what he decided to do—put on a sweatshirt and go for a run.
The weather was remarkable. Even for western Kansas, renowned for the longevity of its Indian summers, the current sample seemed far-fetched—dry air, bold sun, azure sky. Optimistic ranchers were predicting an “open winter”—a season so bland that cattle could graze during the whole of it. Such winters are rare, but Bobby could remember one—the year he had started to court Nancy. They were both twelve, and after school he used to carry her book satchel the mile separating the Holcomb schoolhouse from her father’s farm ranch. Often, if the day was warm and sun-kindled, they stopped along the way and sat by the river, a snaky, slow-moving, brown piece of the Arkansas.
Once Nancy had said to him, “One summer, when we were in Colorado, I saw where the Arkansas begins. The exact place. You wouldn’t believe it, though. That it was our river. It’s not the same color. But pure as drinking water. And fast. And full of rocks. Whirlpools. Daddy caught a trout.” It had stayed with Bobby, her memory of the river’s source, and since her death . . . Well, he couldn’t explain it, but whenever he looked at the Arkansas, it was for an instant transformed, and what he saw was not a muddy stream meandering across the Kansas plains, but what Nancy had described—a Colorado torrent, a chilly, crystal trout river speeding down a mountain valley. That was how Nancy had been: like young water—energetic, joyous.
Usually, though, western Kansas winters are imprisoning, and usually frost on the fields and razory winds have altered the climate before Christmas. Some years back snow had fallen on Christmas Eve and continued falling, and when Bobby set out the next morning for the Clutter property, a three-mile walk, he had had to fight through deep drifts. It was worth it, for though he was numbed and scarlet, the welcome he got thawed him thoroughly. Nancy was amazed and proud, and her mother, often so timid and distant, had hugged and kissed him, insisting that he wrap up in a quilt and sit close to the parlor fire. While the women worked in the kitchen, he and Kenyon and Mr. Clutter had sat around the fire cracking walnuts and pecans, and Mr. Clutter said he was reminded of another Christmas, when he was Kenyon’s age: “There were seven of us. Mother, my father, the two girls, and us three boys. We lived on a farm a good ways from town. For that reason it was the custom to do our Christmas buying in a bunch—make the trip once and do it all together. The year I’m thinking of, the morning we were supposed to go, the snow was high as today, higher, and still coming down—flakes like saucers. Looked like we were in for a snowbound Christmas with no presents under the tree. Mother and the girls were heartbroken. Then I had an idea.” He would saddle their huskiest plow horse, ride into town, and shop for everybody. The family agreed. All of them gave him their Christmas savings and a list of the things they wished him to buy: four yards of calico, a football, a pincushion, shotgun shells—an assortment of orders that took until nightfall to fill. Heading homeward, the purchases secure inside a tarpaulin sack, he was grateful that his father had forced him to carry a lantern, and glad, too, that the horse’s harness was strung with bells, for both their jaunty racket and the careening light of the kerosene lantern were a comfort to him.
“The ride in, that was easy, a piece of cake. But now the road was gone, and every landmark.” Earth and air—all was snow. The horse, up to his haunches in it, slipped sidewise. “I dropped our lamp. We were lost in the night. It was just a question of time before we fell asleep and froze. Yes, I was afraid. But I prayed. And I felt God’s presence . . .” Dogs howled. He followed the noise until he saw the windows of a neighboring farmhouse. “I ought to have stopped there. But I thought of the family—imagined my mother in tears, Dad and the boys getting up a search party, and I pushed on. So, naturally, I wasn’t too happy when finally I reached home and found t
he house dark. Doors locked. Found everybody had gone to bed and plain forgot me. None of them could understand why I was so put out. Dad said, ‘We were sure you’d stay the night in town. Good grief, boy! Who’d have thought you hadn’t better sense than to start home in a perfect blizzard?’ ”
The cider-tart odor of spoiling apples. Apple trees and pear trees, peach and cherry: Mr. Clutter’s orchard, the treasured assembly of fruit trees he had planted. Bobby, running mindlessly, had not meant to come here, or to any other part of River Valley Farm. It was inexplicable, and he turned to leave, but he turned again and wandered toward the house—white and solid and spacious. He had always been impressed by it, and pleased to think that his girl friend lived there. But now that it was deprived of the late owner’s dedicated attention, the first threads of decay’s cobweb were being spun. A gravel rake lay rusting in the driveway; the lawn was parched and shabby. That fateful Sunday, when the sheriff summoned ambulances to remove the murdered family, the ambulances had driven across the grass straight to the front door, and the tire tracks were still visible.
The hired man’s house was empty, too; he had found new quarters for his family nearer Holcomb—to no one’s surprise, for nowadays, though the weather was glittering, the Clutter place seemed shadowed, and hushed, and motionless. But as Bobby passed a storage barn and, beyond that, a livestock corral, he heard a horse’s tail swish. It was Nancy’s Babe, the obedient old dappled mare with flaxen mane and dark-purple eyes like magnificent pansy blossoms. Clutching her mane, Bobby rubbed his cheek along Babe’s neck—something Nancy used to do. And Babe whinnied. Last Sunday, the last time he had visited the Kidwells, Sue’s mother had mentioned Babe. Mrs. Kidwell, a fanciful woman, had been standing at a window watching dusk tint the outdoors, the sprawling prairie. And out of the blue she had said, “Susan? You know what I keep seeing? Nancy. On Babe. Coming this way.”
Perry noticed them first—hitchhikers, a boy and an old man, both carrying homemade knapsacks, and despite the blowy weather, a gritty and bitter Texas wind, wearing only overalls and a thin denim shirt. “Let’s give them a lift,” Perry said. Dick was reluctant; he had no objection to assisting hitchhikers, provided they looked as if they could pay their way—at least “chip in a couple of gallons of gas.” But Perry, little old big-hearted Perry, was always pestering Dick to pick up the damnedest, sorriest-looking people. Finally Dick agreed, and stopped the car.
The boy—a stocky, sharp-eyed, talkative towhead of about twelve—was exuberantly grateful, but the old man, whose face was seamed and yellow, feebly crawled into the back seat and slumped there silently. The boy said, “We sure do appreciate this. Johnny was ready to drop. We ain’t had a ride since Galveston.”
Perry and Dick had left that port city an hour earlier, having spent a morning there applying at various shipping offices for jobs as able-bodied seamen. One company offered them immediate work on a tanker bound for Brazil, and, indeed, the two would now have been at sea if their prospective employer had not discovered that neither man possessed union papers or a passport. Strangely, Dick’s disappointment exceeded Perry’s: “Brazil! That’s where they’re building a whole new capital city. Right from scratch. Imagine getting in on the ground floor of something like that! Any fool could make a fortune.”
“Where you headed?” Perry asked the boy.
“Sweetwater.”
“Where’s Sweetwater?”
“Well, it’s along in this direction somewhere. It’s somewhere in Texas. Johnny, here, he’s my gramp. And he’s got a sister lives in Sweetwater. Least, I sure Jesus hope she does. We thought she lived in Jasper, Texas. But when we got to Jasper, folks told us her and her people moved to Galveston. But she wasn’t in Galveston—lady there said she was gone to Sweetwater. I sure Jesus hope we find her. Johnny,” he said, rubbing the old man’s hands, as if to thaw them, “you hear me, Johnny? We’re riding in a nice warm Chevrolet—’56 model.”
The old man coughed, rolled his head slightly, opened and closed his eyes, and coughed again.
Dick said, “Hey, listen. What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s the change,” the boy said. “And the walking. We been walking since before Christmas. Seems to me we covered the better part of Texas.” In the most matter-of-fact voice, and while continuing to massage the old man’s hands, the boy told them that up to the start of the present journey he and his grandfather and an aunt had lived alone on a farm near Shreveport, Louisiana. Not long ago the aunt had died. “Johnny’s been poorly about a year, and Auntie had all the work to do. With only me to help. We were chopping firewood. Chopping up a stump. Right in the middle of it, Auntie said she was wore out. Ever seen a horse just lay down and never get up? I have. And that’s like what Auntie did.” A few days before Christmas the man from whom his grandfather rented the farm “turned us off the place,” the boy continued. “That’s how come we started out for Texas. Looking to find Mrs. Jackson. I never seen her, but she’s Johnny’s own blood sister. And somebody’s got to take us in. Leastways, him. He can’t go a lot more. Last night it rained on us.”
The car stopped. Perry asked Dick why he had stopped it.
“That man’s very sick,” Dick said.
“Well? What do you want to do? Put him out?”
“Use your head. Just for once.”
“You really are a mean bastard.”
“Suppose he dies?”
The boy said, “He won’t die. We’ve got this far, he’ll wait now.”
Dick persisted. “Suppose he dies? Think of what could happen. The questions.”
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn. You want to put them out? Then by all means.” Perry looked at the invalid, still somnolent, dazed, deaf, and he looked at the boy, who returned his gaze calmly, not begging, not “asking for anything,” and Perry remembered himself at that age, his own wanderings with an old man. “Go ahead. Put them out. But I’ll be getting out, too.”
“O.K. O.K. O.K. Only don’t forget,” said Dick. “It’s your damn fault.”
Dick shifted gears. Suddenly, as the car began to move again, the boy hollered, “Hold it!” Hopping out, he hurried along the edge of the road, stopped, stooped, picked up one, two, three, four empty Coca-Cola bottles, ran back, and hopped in, happy and grinning. “There’s plenty of money in bottles,” he said to Dick. “Why, mister, if you was to drive kind of slow, I guarantee you we can pick us up a big piece of change. That’s what me and Johnny been eating off. Refund money.”
Dick was amused, but he was also interested, and when next the boy commanded him to halt, he at once obeyed. The commands came so frequently that it took them an hour to travel five miles, but it was worth it. The kid had an “honest-to-God genius” for spotting, amid the roadside rocks and grassy rubble, and the brown glow of thrown-away beer bottles, the emerald daubs that had once held 7-Up and Canada Dry. Perry soon developed his own personal gift for spying out bottles. At first he merely indicated to the boy the whereabouts of his finds; he thought it too undignified to scurry about collecting them himself. It was all “pretty silly,” just “kid stuff.” Nevertheless, the game generated a treasure-hunt excitement, and presently he, too, succumbed to the fun, the fervor of this quest for refundable empties. Dick, too, but Dick was in dead earnest. Screwy as it seemed, maybe this was a way to make some money—or, at any rate, a few bucks. Lord knows, he and Perry could use them; their combined finances amounted at the moment to less than five dollars.
Now all three—Dick and the boy and Perry—were piling out of the car and shamelessly, though amiably, competing with one another. Once Dick located a cache of wine and whiskey bottles at the bottom of a ditch, and was chagrined to learn that his discovery was valueless. “They don’t give no refund on liquor empties,” the boy informed him. “Even some of the beers ain’t no good. I don’t mess with them usually. Just stick with the surefire things. Dr. Pepper. Pepsi. Coke. White Rock. Nehi.”
Dick said, “What’s your name?”
&
nbsp; “Bill,” the boy said.
“Well, Bill. You’re a regular education.”
Nightfall came, and forced the hunters to quit—that, and lack of space, for they had amassed as many bottles as the car could contain. The trunk was filled, the back seat seemed a glittering dump heap; unnoticed, unmentioned by even his grandson, the ailing old man was all but hidden under the shifting, dangerously chiming cargo.
Dick said, “Be funny if we had a smash-up.”
A bunch of lights publicized the New Motel, which proved to be, as the travelers neared it, an impressive compound consisting of bungalows, a garage, a restaurant, and a cocktail lounge. Taking charge, the boy said to Dick, “Pull in there. Maybe we can make a deal. Only let me talk. I’ve had the experience. Sometimes they try to cheat.” Perry could not imagine “anyone smart enough to cheat that kid,” he said later. “It didn’t shame him a bit going in there with all those bottles. Me, I never could’ve, I’d have felt so ashamed. But the people at the motel were nice about it; they just laughed. Turned out the bottles were worth twelve dollars and sixty cents.”
The boy divided the money evenly, giving half to himself, the rest to his partners, and said, “Know what? I’m gonna blow me and Johnny to a good feed. Ain’t you fellows hungry?”
As always, Dick was. And after so much activity, even Perry felt starved. As he later told about it, “We carted the old man into the restaurant and propped him up at a table. He looked exactly the same—thanatoid. And he never said one word. But you should have seen him shovel it in. The kid ordered him pancakes; he said that was what Johnny liked best. I swear he ate something like thirty pancakes. With maybe two pounds of butter, and a quart of syrup. The kid could put it down himself. Potato chips and ice cream, that was all he wanted, but he sure ate a lot of them. I wonder it didn’t make him sick.”