I was there in the shadows when Capote changed....I watched him as he drifted among the pseudo-literatti of a small town in Southwestern Kansas.....I was a mere child of barely larger growth then and the Clutters had been killed on my youthful watch of growing up.....I was small and obscure, a mere freshman in a 6-3-3 system of Horace Mann's dream.....I was also outside the realm of the society that made Garden City, Kansas what it used to be......

But I remember the shock and awe that we all personally experienced when we heard the news and the outcries of "how could it happen to them" followed by the silences everywhere in the familiar bright golden sunlight of the days that followed the most gruesome of gruesome any of us had every heard of.....in school there were quiet bursts of weeping by students who didn't know them.....those that did stayed home being counseled by ministers, families, and friends.....the teachers weapt as though Nancy and
Kenyon had been one of their own students....one, Nancy's private clarinet teacher, stood before us in band and wept while he led us in a brief silent prayer for clarity and strength and hope that a future still existed for us.....my Latin teacher merely weapt silently into her real cotton hanky.....I sat almost as stunned by the weeping as I was by the news.....the Clutter's lived in another town, albeit not a tenth the size of G.C, a mere eight miles west of town....and the Clutter children went to the Holcomb H.S. not G.C.H.S ....... but still, the Clutters owned land, they were widely known as good people who contributed greatly to the local economy and benefitted just as greatly......they were the epitome of the small town American dream: a stable marriage, lovely
successful children, participants in the community, and early to bed and early to rise......if it could happen to them, those of worth thought, it could happen to any of us.......yet I knew the town would never weep for me or my kind if someone were to butcher us......

And everywhere there were silent pickups of groups of us after school by whoever could carry several kids and drop them off at their homes.....adults kept a lookout and would not let any children go off on their own.....save those of us who were poor and unimportant who would hastily make our own way home......now for the first time ever, keys were beginning to be used on front doors, car keys disappeared from ignitions and car doors got locked......in the evening phone trees accounted for the safeness of nearly everyone, including us.....

Capote had come to G.C. for his story, the reseach for a work of fiction which more than mimicked reality, one that was to break the bounds of traditional American literature significantly and forever......he came and stayed with the M/M Lange's in their gloriously large and opulent home overlooking a flat-planed sleepy hollow.....a place that had no bookstores, only a treasured three-story brick archive given us by Andrew Carnegie......a place with plenty who prided themselves in the Book Of The Month club and held weekly Great Books Discussion meetings......a place where my personal libraries consisted of every major magazine of the day handed down with small town generousity a month or two later than publication , the public library, and the rev's entire
theological library with it's phletora of C.S. Lewis and whatever had been written by William Sloan Coffin and those he had followed......and a place where their finest exports were wheat, beef, natural gas, and their children........

I was only a second hand observer most of the time (over and over) about who came to the parties the Lange's had for him, who said what and what did Mr. Capote say, and Capote becoming familiar with who indeed were these people who welcomed him into their circle of who's who in their William Allen White like town - the county attorney, the sheriff, the menschens of business and merchantile of this small town, and the KBI guys who came from Topeka and Kansas City for hands on experience and to exert their expertise in the matter, and assorted other law and criminal experts who descended onto the plains of Western Kansas, there
with Truman....

At the Congregational Church, there were rumours that he had attended a service or that he would.....I do not recall him there...my mother was the Langes' maid.......she served the parties in an imported black and white frock, did Capote's shirts and never heard a peep from him either of liking her work or not liking her work......I hung off in the shadows watching this man who was the newest and only contemporary rage that Garden City had ever hosted as his eyes bathed all that he saw and he soaked in all that
he heard into the wheels of his mind as he thought about how this place, these people, and how all this difference could exist on the planet he already knew......they all took him in tow wherever they went on their investigations.....wherever they met to discuss forensic matters.....wherever there was a press conference.......they all welcomed this little man who came seeking truth and sympathy for what had happened.....Truman was mostly quiet and generally sober, taking in every minute detail.....his work in Garden City only a fraction of what he was to learn later from the satans that had committed this atrocity upon which his fiction
would be based......

Most of all, he was there poised on change in the pursuit of a different reality of how out of mileau this act of carnage came to happen and stun not only this place but the far reaches of his urban universe and ultimately on how that reality was to alter the times to come......I think it very possible that little did he know just how much the pursuit of this experience would change him. Maybe he suspected as much.