So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

One day during the first week or so of school as I was hurrying along a corridor that was lined with metal lockers I saw Cletus Smith coming toward me. It was as if he had risen from the dead. He didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. We just kept on walking until we had passed each other. And after that, there was no way that I could not have done it. Why didn’t I speak to him? I guess because I was so surprised. And because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what was polite in the circumstances.

In Greek tragedies, the Chorus never attempts to console the innocent bystander but instead, sticking to broad generalities, grieves over the fate of mankind, whose mistake was to have been born in the first place.

I didn’t know (how could anybody know, how many times has such a thing happened to a thirteen-year-old boy?) what he had been through.

Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.

I think if I had turned and walked along beside him and not said anything, it might have been the right thing to do. But that’s what I think now.

If I knew where Cletus Smith is right this minute, I would go and explain. Or try to.

The lightning rods on the roof of the house and both barns are his idea. It is right, of course, to put your trust in the Lord. But in moderation. Things that people can manage without His help He shouldn’t be asked to take care of.

Dressing for church Clarence Smith puts on a clean white shirt and discovers that Fern hasn’t washed his collars. And is angry with her. He has his duties to perform and she has hers, one of which is to see that he has clean clothes to put on. The small country church is packed with his neighbors, all of whom are wearing clean collars.

She had moved the lamp to a shelf higher than her head and the light fell on the nape of her neck, the place that in women and small children always seemed to express their vulnerability. Looking at the soft blond hairs that had escaped from the comb, he thought of all those people who, because of their religion, had knelt down in great perturbation of mind and had their heads chopped off. His heart was flooded with love for her and he lost the thread of what Clarence was saying.

Riding into town with him, Clarence said, “Fern’s as cross as a bear this morning.” “Yes,” he said, trying to seem no more interested than if Clarence had said he had to replace some part in the manure spreader. “I wish I knew what’s eating her.” “Maybe nothing. Maybe she’s just tired or doesn’t feel well.” “Maybe.” “In any case, I doubt if she’s the only woman in Logan County that’s as cross as a bear this morning.”

“There’s no pleasing her sometimes,” Clarence said, and there the conversation ended. But it had opened up vistas of hope...

one day when he walked into the kitchen and asked, “Where’s Clarence?” and she said coldly, “Why do you keep up this pretense of friendship any longer when you don’t like us the way you used to?”

If he didn’t say what was on his heart now he might as well crawl into a hole somewhere and die. His life wouldn’t be worth living.… Out it came. Everything. Pouring out of him. He expected to be driven from the house and instead she looked at him the way she looked at her children when they were upset over something—as if, as a human being, he had a right to his feelings, whatever they were. When he took her in his arms she neither accepted his kiss nor resisted it. Instinct told him that it would end badly.

His father was already there, milking Flossie. Victor should have been milking the cow on the other side of him but he had gone off on a bender, even though it wasn’t a national holiday. Cletus picked up a milk bucket and stool and sat down. He tried to adjust the rhythm of his squirt-squirt to his father’s.

Do you want to move into town with her?” “You know I don’t. But you shouldn’t have said you wouldn’t let her do it. If you tell her she can’t do something, then she has to do it.” “Why, you little fucker!” The heavy hand shot out and sent him sprawling. What the boy had said was true, but a lot of difference that made. The bucket was overturned, a pool of milk began to spread along the barn floor. With his right ear roaring with pain and one whole side of his face gone numb, he picked himself up and drew the stool out from between the cow’s legs and put the bucket under her. He managed not to cry, but his hands shook, and the milk squirted unevenly into the pail.

Clarence was fastening the pasture gate with a loop of wire when it came over him that she was gone. He broke into a run. In his mind he saw the note propped against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. When he flung the door open she was standing at the stove, her hair damp with steam, stirring the clothes in the big copper boiler. They stared at each other a moment and then she said, “No, I’m still here.” When she did leave, six weeks later, he had no premonition of it.

What Fern’s lawyer did not tell the gentlemen of the jury was the provocation that led up to this violent behavior.

Nobody said, in court, that Clarence Smith was pierced to the heart by his wife’s failure to love him, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had.

The evening paper reported that Mrs. Fern Smith was granted a decree of divorce against her husband, on the grounds of extreme and repeated cruelty, the charges in his cross bill not being substantiated in the eyes of the jury.

Fern was advised by her attorney that it would be better if she and Lloyd Wilson didn’t see each other for a time. When they wrote to each other, they were careful to post the letters themselves. Her letters were very long, his short. It was not natural to him to put his feelings on paper. But as she read and reread his letters, the words that were not there were put there by her imagination, until she was satisfied that he really did love her as much as she loved him.

Only now, after the long battle had been won, did she become frightened. She found herself thinking, for the first time, about Clarence. About what she had done to him. And what he might be capable of.

The dog came racing down the lane and threw herself upon Cletus, and he let the bicycle fall and buried his face in her fur.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness,” the Bible said—but why not, if the jury couldn’t tell the difference between the truth and a pack of lies and neither could the judge? Dressed in black and wearing a veil as if she was in mourning for him, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief, she fooled them all. The Bible also said, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” and he was ordered to pay them fifty dollars a month. That was their reward, for breaking the Ten Commandments.

As a result of that humiliating day in court Clarence Smith’s sense of cause and effect suffered a permanent distortion.

Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer.

Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

She said, “You know that your father wouldn’t let me take you with me?” and they nodded. She brushed the hair out of their eyes, and kissed them, and touched them on the cheek and on the shoulder as she talked to them, and the strangeness wore off eventually. After that they wouldn’t let her out of their sight. As she bent down to say goodbye to them they both started to cry.

now he began to talk about the possibility of his finding a place somewhere in Iowa—which would mean that she would never see the boys at all. She asked him to bring them in to town now and then to spend the night with her and he answered, “It would only make it worse for them.”

“I know you don’t care in the least about me, or your daughters, but I don’t see how you could do that to Clarence.”

The lawyer who had presented Clarence’s case in court so badly sent him a much larger bill than he had expected.

Lloyd Wilson went to see his wife and asked her once more to divorce him so that he and Fern could marry. She listened to what he had to say and then replied that she would think about it. From her tone of voice he knew what her answer would be. She was not going to divorce him, and he had no grounds for divorcing her.

Her eyelids were closed but Fern wasn’t asleep. She knew that she slept sometimes, because she passed in and out of dreaming. Daybreak was a comfort. The birds. A rooster crowing. It meant that time existed. At night everything stood still. The milkman, clinking his bottles. People went about their rounds, things happened that had nothing to do with her divorce—this she needed to be reminded of.

As if she were watching a play she relived the time Tom locked her in her room. How old was she? Eighteen? Nineteen? “You’re too young to know your own mind,” he said. On the other hand she wasn’t too young to have fallen in love with a man with a wife and two children. “I won’t have you breaking up somebody’s home!” he shouted. And she said—even as the words came out of her mouth she regretted them—she said, “You’re not my father and I won’t have you or anybody else telling me what I can or can’t do.”

The wild geese were flying south. The nights turned cold. They finished shucking the corn.