Shakespeare called death “the undiscovered country.” Although death remains the biggest mystery of life, perhaps a bigger mystery is suggested in the very last paragraph of Truman Capote’s 1966 masterpiece, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. The biggest mystery is that life continues to go as usual even though such a terrible event happened – the brutal and senseless murder of a mother, father, son and daughter in the Kansas heartland that made headlines in 1959.
The final paragraph begins with the word “And”. As most high school English teachers drill into their students, one is never supposed to start a sentence with a conjunction like “but” or “and.” However, Capote chooses to begin this final paragraph with a conjunction. It is almost as if he is saying, “In spite of everything that has happened in the previous 300-plus pages, it all comes down to this final thought.” This paragraph is tagged on like a bright sticker on a piece of paper. Since it begins in the way sentences are not supposed to begin, just the word “And” serves to make the last paragraph stand out even more in the eyes of the reader.
In the setting of the final paragraph, one of the characters that the reader has met, investigator Alvin Dewy, Jr (Mr. Dewey) is talking to a friend of the murdered Clutter family at the graveyard. Dewey later claimed that the final paragraph never happened, but whether or not it really happened is immaterial. The final paragraph is where Capote comes out of his mask as a reporter and makes a personal statement. It is Capote’s reaction to the horrible story that he recounted. How do we know? Mr. Dewey’s name is never mentioned in the last paragraph. The speaker is only referred to as “he”.
“And nice to have seen you, too, Sue. Good luck,” says Mr. Dewey/ Truman Capote. Whoever he is, he is saying goodbye to all of the survivors of this terrible crime. In the paragraph, the survivor is Susan Kidwell (known by the familiar nickname “Sue” in this paragraph), the best friend of the murdered young daughter, Nancy Clutter. Sue is then described as disappearing “down the path” which suggests the path of life, or away from Mr. Dewey/ Truman Capote. She is wished good luck as she continues down the path of her life, which may or may not come to a gruesome end such as Nancy Clutter’s did.
Sue is further described as “a pretty girl in a hurry”. She is seen as moving quickly away from the graves of the Clutter family and her best friend, as if she wanted to leave the memories of their tragic fate behind as she was now leaving the buried corpses. Perhaps Sue also wanted to leave behind the thought that but for a twist of fate, it would have been she in the grave with Nancy Clutter as “a pretty girl in a hurry”.
Later in the same sentence, Capote paints Sue’s portrait in words as “her smooth hair, swinging, shining”. She is the picture of health while Nancy is the polar opposite, dead in the ground. Sue has her life to look forward to while Nancy does not. Capote even makes the comparison even more blatant by ending the sentence with “just such a young woman as Nancy might have been.”
Being a murder victim was not supposed to have been Nancy Clutter’s fate, or the fate of her other family members, for that matter. According to the town’s sensibilities and the national perception as described earlier in the book, the senseless murder of an entire family just did not happen in a little Kansas rural town. The Clutter family was well liked. They were not exceptionally rich. A pitiful amount of money was stolen from the home as well as a transistor radio. As Capote would chronicle earlier in the book, the two murderers of the Clutter family killed them by mistake. They were convinced that there was a fortune hidden in a safe inside of the home, based on nothing more than an assumption by a previous cellmate of one of the killer who had once worked briefly on the Clutter farm. There was no such safe and no fortune to be stolen. The family was basically killed for nothing.
So how does the world and Capote himself react to this tragedy? In the last sentence of the book, he explains. “Then, starting home,” he begins, meaning that he is going to leave the story at the final period and go down the path of his own life, “he walked toward the trees, and under them”. Capote does not say how tall the trees were, but most people at least have to bow their heads when walking under trees. This is Capote’s final bow to the reader and to the murder victims.
Capote continues, “leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.” That’s where the story ends. Let’s take a closer look at what Capote and the readers leave behind.
First, “the big sky”. Capote starts from up above the earth, supposedly in the realm of Heaven, and then moves down to the wind and the wheat fields that were such an ever-present part of the Kansas landscape. What else does “the big sky” connote? Blue skies suggest the home of God, Who supposedly knows all things and just watches. God allowed these four horrible murders to happen. He just sat back and watched as if the Earth was just another television screen. Televisions in the 1960s were commonly black and white. Although color television did exist in America in the 1960s, it was usually priced well out of the range of most Americans. Back in the 1960s, television stations did not broadcast 24 hours a day. They usually signed off around midnight. Often the National Anthem was played and a waving flag shown, and then the screen would turn fuzzy, sometimes emitting a bluish gray pixilated haze to a background of static. God in His Heaven has stopped watching the broadcast of the Clutter story and now is switching over to another channel. Whether the Clutters themselves were in Heaven watching their program with God is not hinted at in Capote’s final paragraph.
The trees and the “wind-whipped” wheat stand like people or the readers themselves as a final tribute to the Clutter family and their story. God is in the wind and makes the wheat bow just as “he” bows when travelling under the trees. All around the graveyard is the presence of life going on as usual, not altered in any way by the four terrible deaths. The mourners, Capote, God, Nature and the readers just go one with their lives as if nothing terrible had ever happened. When a human tragedy occurs, it can be sobering and saddening for those left alive to see that the Universe just keeps on ticking away as it normally does. What individuals do or have done to them makes no impression on Nature and the Universe.
Why is the last word “wheat”? Wheat comes up constantly in In Cold Blood and not just because the story is set in Kansas. Wheat is a symbol of Nature and the Universe itself. The cycle of its growth and harvest seems never-ending. No matter what happens to humans, the wheat grows from the ground under the sky and the whipping of the wind. It grows, is harvested and disappears in a kind of death during the winter. People are like that. Each person grows and is harvested and disappears. A new generation grows in the spring and then it is harvested and dies. People are God’s wheat.
Now that is something substantial that Capote lets himself and his readers chew on long after the final “THE END.”
Works Cited
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House, 1966. Print.
