I: THE LAST TO SEE THEM ALIVE

I

THE LAST TO SEE THEM ALIVE

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of

western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call

“out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado

border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-

clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West

than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie

twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of

them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-

heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the

views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a

white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek

temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that

there is much to see—simply an aimless congregation of

buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the

Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the

south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced “Ar-

kan-sas”) River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and

on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields.

After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed,

unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the

direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark oldstucco

structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign —DANCE—

but the dancing has ceased and the

advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is

another building with an irrelevant sign, this one in flaking

gold on a dirty window—HOLCOMB BANK. The bank closed in

1933, and its former counting rooms have been converted

into apartments. It is one of the town’s two “apartment

houses,” the second being a ramshackle mansion known,

because a good part of the local school’s faculty lives there,

as the Teacherage. But the majority of Holcomb’s homes

are one-story frame affairs, with front porches.

Down by the depot, the postmistress, a gaunt woman who

wears a rawhide jacket and denims and cowboy boots,

presides over a falling-apart post office. The depot itself,

with its peeling sulphur-colored paint, is equally melancholy;

the Chief, the Super-Chief, the El Capitan go by every day,

but these celebrated expresses never pause there. No

passenger trains do—only an occasional freight. Up on the

highway, there are two filling stations, one of which doubles

as a meagerly supplied grocery store, while the other does

extra duty as a café—Hartman’s Café, where Mrs.

Hartman, the proprietress, dispenses sandwiches, coffee,

soft drinks, and 3.2 beer. (Holcomb, like all the rest of

Kansas, is “dry.”)

And that, really, is all. Unless you include, as one must, the

Holcomb School, a good-looking establishment, which

reveals a circumstance that the appearance of thecommunity

otherwise camouflages: that the parents who

send their children to this modern and ably staffed

“consolidated” school—the grades go from kindergarten

through senior high, and a fleet of buses transport the

students, of which there are usually around three hundred

and sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away—are, in

general, a prosperous people. Farm ranchers, most of

them, they are outdoor folk of very varied stock—German,

Irish, Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise cattle and

sheep, grow wheat, milo, grass seed, and sugar beets.

Farming is always a chancy business, but in western

Kansas its practitioners consider themselves “born

gamblers,” for they must contend with an extremely shallow

precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and

anguishing irrigation problems. However, the last seven

years have been years of droughtless beneficence. The

farm ranchers in Finney County, of which Holcomb is a part,

have done well; money has been made not from farming

alone but also from the exploitation of plentiful natural-gas

resources, and its acquisition is reflected in the new school,

the comfortable interiors of the farmhouses, the steep and

swollen grain elevators.

Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few

Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of

Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on

the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the

Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional

happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants ofthe village,

numbering two hundred and seventy, were

satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside

ordinary life—to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend

school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club.

But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November,

a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the

normal nightly Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of

coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing,

receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul

in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that,

all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the

townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other

to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-

creating them over and again—those somber explosions

that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many

old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as

strangers.

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