So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

  My father found most old things oppressive, but especially old houses with high ceilings and odd-shaped rooms that opened one out of another, offering a pleasant vista that required a great deal of coal to heat in the harsh Illinois winters. Intending to escape all this by building, he bought a double lot in Park Place, a subdivision so recently laid out that the trees were only five feet tall and had to be staked against the north wind. All but two of the existing houses were on the right-hand side of the street, facing a cow pasture that I think has not been built on to this day. The building lots were narrow and the houses much closer together than they were in the old part of town, but there was an ornamental brick gateway leading into the street and a grass plot down the center, and it was fashionable. In present-day Lincoln it is fashionable to live clear out in the country, surrounded by cornfields.

  My father and my stepmother had seen a stucco house in Bloomington that they liked, and they got an architect to copy the exterior and then the three of them fiddled with the interior plans until they were satisfactory. I was shown on the blueprints where my room was going to be. In a short time the cement foundation was formed and the framing was up and you could see the actual size and shape of the rooms. I used to go there after school and watch the carpenters hammering: pung, pung, pung, kapung, kapung, kapung, kapung. . . . They may have guessed that I was waiting for them to pick up their tools and go home so I could climb around on the scaffolding but they didn’t tell me I couldn’t do this, or in fact pay any attention to me at all. And I had the agreeable feeling, as I went from one room to the next by walking through the wall instead of a doorway, or looked up and saw blue sky through the rafters, that I had found a way to get around the way things were.

  When, wandering through the Museum of Modern Art, I come upon the piece of sculpture by Alberto Giacometti with the title “Palace at 4 A.M.,” I always stand and look at it—partly because it reminds me of my father’s new house in its unfinished state and partly because it is so beautiful. It is about thirty inches high and sufficiently well known that I probably don’t need to describe it. But anyway, it is made of wood, and there are no solid walls, only thin uprights and horizontal beams. There is the suggestion of a classic pediment and of a tower. Flying around in a room at the top of the palace there is a queer-looking creature with the head of a monkey wrench. A bird? a cross between a male ballet dancer and a pterodactyl? Below it, in a kind of freestanding closet, the backbone of some animal. To the left, backed by three off-white parallelograms, what could be an imposing female figure or one of the more important pieces of a chess set. And, in about the position a basketball ring would occupy, a vertical, hollowed-out spatulate shape with a ball in front of it.

  It is all terribly spare and strange, but no stranger than the artist’s account of how it came into being. “This object took shape little by little in the late summer of 1932; it revealed itself to me slowly, the various parts taking their exact form and their precise place within the whole. By autumn it had attained such reality that its actual execution in space took no more than one day. It is related without any doubt to a period in my life that had come to an end a year before, when for six whole months hour after hour was passed in the company of a woman who, concentrating all life in herself, magically transformed my every moment. We used to construct a fantastic palace at night—days and nights had the same color, as if everything happened just before daybreak; throughout the whole time I never saw the sun—a very fragile palace of matchsticks. At the slightest false move a whole section of this tiny construction would collapse. We would always begin it over again. I don’t know why it came to be inhabited by a spinal column in a cage—the spinal column this woman sold me one of the very first nights I met her on the street—and by one of the skeleton birds that she saw the very night before the morning in which our life together collapsed—the skeleton birds that flutter with cries of joy at four o’clock in the morning very high above the pool of clear, green water where the extremely fine, white skeletons of fish float in the great unroofed hall. In the middle there rises the scaffolding of a tower, perhaps unfinished or, since its top has collapsed, perhaps also broken. On the other side there appeared the statue of a woman, in which I recognize my mother, just as she appears in my earliest memories. The mystery of her long black dress touching the floor troubled me; it seemed to me like a part of her body, and aroused in me a feeling of fear and confusion….”

  I seem to remember that I went to the new house one winter day and saw snow descending through the attic to the upstairs bedrooms. It could also be that I never did any such thing, for I am fairly certain that in a snapshot album I have lost track of there was a picture of the house taken in the circumstances I have just described, and it is possible that I am remembering that rather than an actual experience. What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

  Before the stairway was in, there was a gaping hole in the center of the house and you had to use the carpenters’ rickety ladder to get to the second floor. One day I looked down through this hole and saw Cletus Smith standing on a pile of lumber looking at me. I suppose I said, “Come on up.” Anyway, he did. We stood looking out at the unlit streetlamp, through a square opening that was someday going to be a window, and then we climbed up another ladder and walked along horizontal two-by-sixes with our arms outstretched, teetering like circus acrobats on the high wire. We could have fallen all the way through to the basement and broken an arm or a leg but we didn’t.

  Boys don’t need much of an excuse to get on well together, if they get on at all. I was glad for his company, and pleased when he turned up the next day. If I saw him now the way he was then, I don’t know that I would recognize him. I seem to remember his smile, and that he had large hands and feet for a boy of thirteen. And Cletus Smith isn’t his real name.

  Did I know him because he was in my room at school? I try to picture him standing at the blackboard and can’t. It is so long ago. Were we in the same Boy Scout troop, which would have meant that at some time during that fall we had studied the Scout manual together and practiced tying reef knots and clove hitches and running bowlines, and considered what merit badges we would try for next? I don’t know the answer. I only know that I knew him. From somewhere. And that we played together in that unfinished house day after day, risking our necks and breathing in the rancid odor of sawdust and shavings and fresh-cut lumber.

  Ninth Street was an extension of home, and perfectly safe. Nobody ever picked on me there. When I passed beyond Ninth Street, it could be rough going. The boys in the eighth grade dominated the school yard before school and at recess time. They were, by turns, good-natured in a patronizing way, or mean, or foulmouthed about girls, or single-mindedly bent on improving their proficiency in some sport. Sometimes they would go to the trouble of twisting a younger boy’s arm behind his back or put a foot out and trip him as he ran past, and if he fell and hurt himself they were happy for a whole quarter of an hour afterward, but their attention seldom settled on any one boy for very long.

  Looking back, it seems clear enough that I brought my difficulties on myself. To begin with, I was as thin as a stick. In any kind of competitive game, my mind froze and I became half-paralyzed. The baseball could be counted on to slip through my overanxious fingers. Nobody wanted me on their team. I was a character. I also had the unfortunate habit, when called on in class, of coming up with the right answer. It won me a smile of approval from the teacher, and it was nice to see my name on the Honor Roll. It was not nice to be chased home f
rom school by two coal miners’ sons who were in the same room with me but only because they could not escape from the truant officer. Nowhere was I safe against them—neither in the classroom, where their eyes were always on me, or in the school yard, where they danced around me, pushing me off balance and trying to get me to fight back so they could clean up on me.

  All this took place in plain sight of everybody, all the boys I had grown up with, and no hand was ever raised in my defense, nobody ever came to my rescue—I expect partly because they had their own vulnerabilities and did not want to be singled out for attack, but obviously there was something in me that invited it. Since I did not know what it was, I couldn’t do anything to change it, and any emotion I felt—physical inadequacy, fear, humiliation, the whole repertoire of the adolescent—showed in my face. I was such easy game that I wonder that their pleasure in tormenting me lasted as long as it did. When they were fourteen they dropped out of school and I never saw them again. Where else could they have gone but down in the mine with their fathers? If somebody told me they had contracted black lung I don’t know that I could manage to be sorry.

  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 us
ed 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.

  The sheriff was on the point of taking some prisoners to the courthouse for trial when the undertaker called him. The deputy sheriff and the coroner went out to the Wilson farm and Fred Wilson showed them the stall Lloyd Wilson was in, the pail that had only a little milk in it, the milking stool, the gloves that he always wore when he was milking and that were still on his hands when they found him. Near the door of the cow barn the two men from town saw some footprints, which they covered with boards so they would stay fresh. All morning, search parties beat over the muddy fields and along the banks of a creek that ran through both farms. The bloodhounds arrived from Springfield, by train, and were taken to the scene of the crime. Two hundred people were there waiting for them. The footprints were uncovered and the dogs were led to the cow barn and unleashed. Sniffing, they circled an implement shed and a haystack and returned to the barn and then they jumped a barbed-wire fence and took off, with a pack of excited men running after them. Just before the dogs got to the farmhouse Clarence Smith had recently moved out of, they turned aside, at a gate, and followed the lane out to the public road. After pausing at the mailbox they crossed over to the other side of the road and lost the scent. Twice they were led back to the cow barn and let loose. The first time, they went into the yard of the Smith farm and up onto the porch. The second time, they turned aside again, into a cornfield, and followed a trail of footprints until they ended up on the hard road, a quarter of a mile west of the lane.