“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’”

-Truman Capote

I turned off the radio when I made the Colorado-to-Kansas changeover, somewhere between Holly and Coolidge. Drove the seventy miles east to Holcomb, listening to the sound of the Hyundai’s tires spinning over US Route 400 and lines from In Cold Blood looping verbatim in my mind.

It’s how I travel.

I read something that’s set somewhere real and roadtrippable. I devour the book, underlining anything location-related. I inscribe prized passages into a notebook, one runty enough to slip inside the pocket of the battered denim jacket I wear religiously. I leave blank pages to be filled with my own observations related to that particular place. Then, as soon as my schedule and bank account allow, I get into my car and go.

I go alone because I don’t have to explain myself.

I’ve tried explaining. Most humans want to be seen, heard, know they matter, at least on some level. I’m no exception. But why is a question too vast for me to answer quick and clean, which is how most askers want their answers served.

The parts of my past sprawl out in a thousand directions like tributaries veining from a river. Down an assortment of streams lay pieces of a puzzle that, if properly assembled, could possibly provide an answer.

I used to try to give the inquirers something, even if it wasn’t everything. But they always pick apart whatever amount of explanation I provide.

Their whys don’t seem to quit. So I just quit explaining.

***

There isn’t much difference between eastern Colorado and Kansas. I always pictured the whole of Colorado looking the way it does in the western half. The part you see pictures of. Once you pass the Vail/Breckenridge tourist traps, the Denver/Fort Collins metros, and the outskirts of the Rockies, things get flat and countrified quick.

I stopped once on my drive. In Kansas, outside the town of Syracuse. Pissed in a field and took pictures of The Dead Trees in Western Kansas. Are they cottonwoods? Elms? No fucking clue. I can’t seem to put the right word combination into Google to coerce a definite answer. Whatever their species, they refused to sit unseen.

The spring 2020 silence of small west Kansas towns sitting empty as pandemic-panicked people bunkered down in their homes added additional eeriness to an already unsettling drive. Visiting a murder sight should always feel unsettling. Anyone with empathy should feel unsettled in a place where a family of four was slit open/shot cold in the dead of night.

***

My car dropped down to five miles an hour to accommodate the washboard road leading to the back of the Clutter farmhouse, toward “the long, lanelike driveway shaded by rows of Chinese elms,” as Capote described it. I dropped the speed down to four miles an hour, down to three, down to two. I couldn’t slow enough to keep the bumps’ intensity less than violent.

This was the same road Perry Smith and Dick Hitchcock drove down before they slaughtered everyone inside that house. Nearly everyone who’d ever hurt me seemed to know what they knew: If you’re gonna harm a human, harm inside the home. Between the walls. Behind the doors. Inside the hush-hush humdrum that people pass habitually, never stopping, never seeing.

He told me to say nothing. Good Southern girls abide.

***

I don’t know if it’s fair for me to compare. Like everyone else still here living, I don’t know which is a worser hell: to be outright killed or left alive to stomach all the after.

***

I drove to Garden City, parked next to Valley View Cemetery. It was surrounded by high wheat plains, umbrellaed by verdant timber I was certain would one day wane, eventually transforming into The Dead Trees in Western Kansas. With age, fear fades. And once-covered things begin to refuse to sit unseen.

The graveyard’s grass was mostly green, but every few steps a bare patch would leave pale tan earth vulnerably exposed. Back when I was almost four, I spent a lot of time in the aftermath sitting in dirt like this. I could always see his house from where I sat.

I didn’t speak. He’d told me not to. But I beheaded a dust-covered garter snake with a spoon once. Something about the shape of it rubbed me wrong. I had to stop it, and I could, so I did.

The other kids screamed when they saw. The colossal, slothful woman my parents paid to keep me safe while they worked waddled her way outside. She glared down, asked why. But why was a question too vast for a kid to answer quick and clean.

So I was pulled inside her home. Spanked hard until I screamed. Spanked for disobedience, for not abiding, not explaining.

She went back to her weekday soap. I went back outside. Found solitary, snakeless dirt to sit on. Proceeded, soft-pedaled as I could. His house stood, disquieting. Shrouded in silent shadows.

***

I walked to the back corner of Valley View Cemetery, searched around until I found them. Sat down on the ground in front of Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, Kenyon, all tucked in tight together under a single gray headstone bearing the Clutter family name. Listened to the hallowed whisper of the prairie wind until I could contribute.

I’m sorry y’all weren’t safe inside your home, I pretty much prayed to their grave.

It was all I knew to say. Almost juvenile in its simplicity, but it was all I had to offer. It made sense that it was juvenile, childlike.

It wasn’t the strong woman, the independent woman, the badass woman now known in her assorted social circles for road tripping alone speaking to the Clutters that afternoon underneath the slitty shade of The (Soon-to-Be) Dead Trees in Western Kansas.

It was the soft North Carolina child, the one who dwells. The girl who never learned first-hand that feeling safe inside a home was a thing some people had. She only talks to me and ghosts now, believing they can’t hurt her. Not the way grown men’s nicotine-stained hands can, anyway. It was she who whispered that fading afternoon as the sun plunged toward gold-ablaze Kansas plains; she who will haunt lonesome place after lonesome place, pray-pining to strike the safe.

*