William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow

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. It would have been a further comfort to get up and go downstairs and make a pot of coffee, but then she would wake Aunt Jenny in the front room. Sometimes she dozed. When she let go completely it was always with a jerk that shook the bed and brought her wide awake.

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." So he locked her in her room, and she climbed out the window onto the roof of the back porch and slid down the drainpipe. He knew what was happening but didn't stir from his chair. When she got home, he was still sitting there and they had it out, at two o'clock in the morning.

Whether she would have accepted Clarence if she hadn't been sick with love for a man she couldn't have was a question she had never until now tried to answer. At all events, when Clarence turned up and began courting her there wasn't any shouting. Tom was polite to him but distant. And he said nothing whatever to her. He didn't need to. She knew that he prided himself on his ability to maneuver people around to the position he wanted them to take and usually he was successful, but not this time. Not with her. She came to the table with her face set, and the two of them ate in silence, unless Aunt Jenny said something, and even then they didn't always bother to answer. When she burst out, "What is it you have against him?" he wiped his mouth with his napkin and leaned back in his chair and looked at her. Then he said "Are you sure you want to hear it?" and she said "Yes."

Perhaps at another time in her life she might have listened to him and have considered the fact that nobody had ever understood her the way he did. But in the reckless mood she was in, it was his very understanding that drove her to act. She had to prove to him that he could be wrong too; that things were not necessarily always the way he thought.

At one point she interrupted him and he said, "Just let me finish. When you are picking a husband there are only two things that count — good blood and a good disposition. One day, on the courthouse square, before ever he turned up here, I saw him taking something out on his horses. I didn't enjoy it. And you wouldn't have, either." He sat looking at her for a moment and then he said, "I see I might as well have been addressing a fence post. Try to understand that other people are real and have feelings too. And some things, once they are done, can't be undone." And he got up and left the table.

When she announced that she and Clarence were going to be married and live on a farm in McLean County he said, "Very well, but don't expect me to give you my blessing or come to the wedding."

The wild geese were flying south.

The nights turned cold. They finished shucking the corn. And one day Victor and Clarence came out of the house and stood together talking. Victor was wearing the new suit, and he had an old leather satchel with him. Since Clarence had been cleaned out by the lawsuit and couldn't afford to pay him anything, he had offered to work for his keep. The offer was not accepted.

"I hope everything goes all right with you," he said now, shading his eyes from the direct light of the sun.

"I'll manage somehow, I guess," Clarence said, and they shook hands.

"You can always reach me through my sister in New Holland."

Victor picked up the satchel and started off down the lane, and that was the last the dog ever saw of him.

It turned warm again and there was a week of fine weather. Except for the oak trees, all the leaves had fallen. Otherwise it was like summer. With her paws resting on her nose, the dog followed the circling of a big horsefly, and when it zoomed off she closed her eyes and went to sleep, and dreamed that she was chasing a rabbit.

Instead of getting on a train and going to Iowa to look for good land, Lloyd Wilson temporized. He told himself he couldn't leave before the first of November, and then it was November and the days went by and there was always something that needed doing, and with one excuse and another he kept himself from facing the fact that what he was proposing to do was impossible. He had spent his whole life on this place and leave it he could not. Even though the things people were saying about Clarence made it sound like he was more than half crazy and capable of anything.

"You haven't given me much notice," Colonel Dowling said. "And I don't know that I can find somebody overnight."

He noticed that Clarence put his finger inside his collar, as if it were choking him, and that his hands were restless, and he stuttered. None of this was at all like him. But he was prepared to give his tenant a satisfactory character, as far as it went. An unqualified recommendation wouldn't have been right, in the circumstances. He just wasn't the man he used to be, before he dragged his wife into court and all that. But it ought to be possible to say something sufficiently commendatory so that Clarence could still manage to find a place. The praise shouldn't be of so specific a kind that, if there was trouble later on, the people that took him on as their tenant would feel that he, the Colonel, had been less than candid. One way or another, he would work it out. He was at his best with ambiguities of this kind.

To his surprise, Clarence didn't ask for any recommendation. Instead he shook hands and walked down the rickety wooden stairs and out onto the sidewalk, where he stood blinking in the harsh sunlight. He now had no wife, no family, and no farm, all through Lloyd Wilson's doing.

It snowed and then there were three or four days of soft weather, leaving the ground bare again. After that, the nights were very cold.

It was the time of year when the man usually sawed up fallen trees and split the logs and filled the woodshed with firewood. The dog took note of the fact that he didn't do any of these things. The woods were alive with quail and pheasant and he didn't go hunting.

The new tenant turned up with an acquaintance, a bald- headed older man whom he kept turning to for his opinion. They went through the house with Clarence, and then they walked around outside, inspecting the barns and the outbuildings, and asking a great many questions about yield and acreage. At one point all three men turned to look at the dog, and it didn't take any great intelligence on her part to know who it was they were discussing.

Cletus didn't feel like hanging around the schoolyard after school, watching boys he didn't know (and who showed no signs of wanting to know him) shoot baskets. So he came straight home, if you could call it that, even though there was nothing to do when he got there. He opened the door of the icebox and a female voice called from the front room, "Cletus, you'll spoil your supper," so he closed the door again — there wasn't anything he wanted anyway— and went outdoors and sat on the back steps, in the bleak sunshine.

The teacher, who was not young or pretty, had given each of them a map of South America and told them to fill in the names of the countries and rivers, but Cletus didn't feel like it. With a stick he drew crosses in the dirt, making life difficult for an ant who had business in that patch of bare ground. Though it had been going on for days, he was only now aware of a distant hammering: Pung, pung, pung, ka- pung, kapung, kapung, kapung. . Somebody must be building a new house.