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William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow

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William Maxwell So Long, See You Tomorrow

So Long, See You Tomorrow: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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This Orange Inheritance Edition of is published in association with the Orange Prize for Fiction. Books shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of the Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next generation and why. Ann Patchett chose . In rural Illinois, two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers — the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent’s misery — is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime’s regret. "The novel comes from a place so deep inside the human soul that I cannot imagine a time its wisdom would not feel fresh and applicable."-Ann Patchett

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The gap between my older brother and me was too great for me to emulate his pleasures or contribute to them, and I would have been glad for a brother nearer my own age, to defend me when I got in trouble, and to do things with. At about this time, one of my mother's friends, a woman I knew but not very well, invited me to come to her house after school on Friday and stay until Sunday afternoon. She had a son who was a year or two older than I was and everything a boy that age ought to be-open and easy with adults, bright in school, and beyond being pushed around by his contemporaries. I slept in the same room with him and I was with him all day Saturday and Sunday. Without any experience to go on, I tried to be a good guest. Most of the time he was friendly, and then suddenly he would mutter something under his breath that I could not quite hear and that I knew from a heaviness in my heart was the word "sissy." I ignored it, not knowing what else to do; not having enough experience of the world to take my toothbrush and pyjamas and go home, leaving him to explain to his mother why I wasn't there. At bedtime, standing by the wide-open window of his room, he had me do setting-up exercises with him. He was patient when I didn't do them right, and also funny, and it was so nice to be doing something with another boy for a change. But then he muttered that word under his breath that I wasn't supposed to be able to say that he had actually said. He was exactly the kind of boy I would have liked to be, and I was ready to imitate him in any way I could. One minute I was encouraged to do this and the next I felt — I was made to feel-that he despised me. Probably all it amounted to was that his mother had decided on this act of kindness without consulting him, and he was angry because my being there had spoiled his Saturday. In any case, the point I am trying to make is that it was a new experience for me to have the companionship of another boy day after day. Whatever I suggested doing we did. I never asked Cletus if there wasn't something he'd rather be doing, because he was always ready to do what I wanted to do. It occurs to me now that he was not very different from an imaginary playmate. When I was with him, if I said something the boys in the school yard would have jeered at, he let the opportunity pass and went on carefully teetering with one foot in front of the other, or at most, without glancing in my direction, which would have endangered his balance, nodded.

I supposed he must have liked me somewhat or he wouldn't have been there. And that he was glad for my companionship. He didn't act as if there was some other boy waiting for him to turn up. He must have understood that I was going to live in this house when it was finished, but it didn't occur to me to wonder where he lived.

When I was a child I told my mother everything. After she died I learned that it was better to keep some things to myself. My father represented authority, which meant — to me — that he could not also represent understanding. And because there was an element of cruelty in my older brother's teasing (as, of course, there is in all teasing) I didn't trust him, though I perfectly well could have, about larger matters. Anyway, I didn't tell Cletus about my shipwreck, as we sat looking down on the whole neighborhood, and he didn't tell me about his. When the look of the sky informed us that it was getting along toward suppertime, we climbed down and said "So long" and "See you tomorrow," and went our separate ways in the dusk. And one evening this casual parting turned out to be for the last time. We were separated by that pistol shot.

There was never any real doubt about who had killed Lloyd Wilson. The only person who had any reason to do it was Clarence Smith, Cletus's father. Among the things that Cletus failed to tell me was the fact that he had grown up in the country. He had only been living in town a few months. His mother had sued his father for a divorce, the grounds being extreme and repeated cruelty. His father then filed a cross bill charging her with infidelity and naming Lloyd Wilson, who lived on the adjoining farm, as corespondent.

The Lincoln Courier-Herald was, and is, a self-respecting small-town newspaper and it did not feel called upon to provide the salacious details, which are safely buried in the court records. I think it highly unlikely that Cletus was present at the divorce trial. How much did he know? Enough, probably. Enough so that it was preferable to play with a boy he hardly knew than with somebody he might be tempted to confide in — if there was any such person.

When the divorce proceedings went against him, Cletus's father sold his lease and gave up farming and moved in with Cletus's grandparents in town. He was depressed and given to fits of weeping. And he could not keep from talking about his troubles. Men who had known him for many years took to crossing over to the other side of the street when they saw him coming.

Lloyd Wilson confessed to his two brothers that he lived in fear of an attack on his life, and they told him he ought to leave town immediately. Like a figure in a dream, he took all the steps he should have taken, but in slow motion. He went to see the woman whose land he farmed and asked to be released from his contract, which did not expire until March. He consulted a lawyer.

On the morning that he was killed he left the barn door open wide so as to catch the morning light when it came. The light from his lantern must have fallen just short of the toe of the murderer's boot.

I assume that I knew all this once, since it was published in the evening paper and I was old enough to read. In the course of time the details of the murder passed from my mind, and what I thought happened was so different from what actually did happen that it might almost have been something I made up out of whole cloth. And I might have gone right on thinking that Cletus's father had come home unexpectedly and found Cletus's mother in bed with a man and killed them both, but one day, as if I had suddenly broken through a brick wall, I realized that there are always sources of information about the past other than one's own recollection, and that I didn't need to remain in total ignorance about something that interested me so deeply. I wrote to my stepcousin Tom Perry and asked him if he could dig up for me those issues of the Courier-Herald that had anything in them about the murder of Lloyd Wilson. He reported back to me that the Courier's file (the Herald was dropped a long time ago) did not go back to the year 1922 and that the public library had destroyed its file six months before and what I'd better do was apply to the Illinois State Historical Society in Springfield. It was as if I was inquiring into the funeral of Abraham Lincoln. But anyway, I did as he said, and the Historical Society sent me, from its microfilm library, photostatic copies, not always entirely legible, of eight issues of a newspaper once as familiar to me as the back of my hand. It was, of course, much more than I had asked for, a small segment of the past, remote and yet in perfect focus, like something seen through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars: ads for movies starring Norma Talmadge and Wallace Reid, good quality of men's suits at Griesheim's clothing store at $7, and many other things equally hard to believe.

I don't know where the office and printing plant of the Lincoln Courier is now; only that it isn't where it used to be, on North Kickapoo Street, half a block from the courthouse square.

Several of the pieces about the murder were written by the editor, whom I remember as a high-strung, dark-haired man with a green eyeshade and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His stories give the impression of being dashed off in the last minutes before the paper went to press; that is to say, they are repetitious and disordered and full of not very acute speculation. Also of cliches and reticences which the ideas of the period no doubt required. People are quoted as saying things 1 have trouble believing that they actually said, at least in those words. I am reasonably sure, for example, that Cletus's father did not say to a man he met on the street the day before the murder, "I am broken and a failure and I have nothing for which to live." Nobody I know in the Middle West has ever gone out of his way to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. But it isn't fair, in any case, to blame that overworked small-town newspaper editor for not writing as well as Roughead. Especially since I am indebted to him for any knowledge I have of what happened.

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