Truman Capote Excerpts
November 30, 2004
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Winter Woods
Morning.
Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as
hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter
woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Soon, by
the edge of knee-deep, rapid-running water, we have to abandon the buggy.
Queenie wades the stream first, paddles across barking complaints at the
swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making coldness of it. We follow,
holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A
mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our clothes; of
rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here,
there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the
birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and
pitch vine tunnels. Another creek to cross: a disturbed armada of speckled
trout froths the water round us, and frogs the size of plates practice belly
flops; beaver workmen are building a dam. On the farther shore, Queenie shakes
herself and trembles. My friend shivers, too: not with cold but enthusiasm. One
of her hat's ragged roses sheds a petal as she lifts her head and inhales the
pine-heavy air. ''We're almost there; can you smell it, Buddy?'' she says, as
though we were approaching an ocean.
And,
indeed, it is a kind of ocean. Scented acres of holiday trees, pricklyleafed
holly. Red berries shiny as Chinese bells: black crows swoop upon them
screaming. Having stuffed our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to
garland a dozen windows, we set about choosing a tree.
From ''A Christmas Memory.''
Four Shotgun Blasts
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 of
the village, numbering 270, 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 Holcolmb 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 recreating 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.
From ''In Cold Blood.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/books/review/1205books-capote-excerpts.html?sq=A
Christmas Memory, by Truman Capote book
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