The men worked from noon to dusk. When the time came to burn what they had collected, they piled it on a pickup truck and, with Stoecklein at the wheel, drove deep into the farm’s north field, a flat place full of color, though a single color — the shimmering tawny yellow of November wheat stubble. There they unloaded the truck and made a pyramid of Nancy’s [bloodstained] pillows, the bedclothes, the mattresses, the playroom couch; Stoecklein sprinkled it with kerosene and struck a match.

“Everything Herb had, he earned– with the help of God. He was a modest man but a proud man, as he had a right to be. He raised a fine family. He made something of his life.” But that life, and what he’d made of it– how could it happen, Erhart wondered as he watched the bonfire catch. How was it possible that such effort, such plain virtue, could overnight be reduced to this– smoke, thinning as it rose and was received by the big, annihilating sky?

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, p. 79