So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

  He looked down at his hands, with the reins looped through his fingers, and didn't answer.

  It rained and rained, and when the sky cleared there was a light frost. The leaves started falling, and the dog could see stars shining in the tops of the trees. Having run away and been whipped for it until she could hardly stand, she stayed on the property. If she went looking for the boy it was never farther than the foot of the lane. Sometimes Clarence forgot to feed her and she had to remind him. What he put in her pan was not at all like the scraps the woman used to give her.

  The lawyer who had presented Clarence's case in court so badly sent him a much larger bill than he had expected. Though there was plenty of work that needed doing outside, he sat in the house brooding. The dog came and stood looking in at him through the screen door, and he burst out at her in a rage and she crept away.

  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. 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 bo
ys 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.

  Twisting the heel of his shoe he erased the lines he had drawn in the dirt and, with them, the ant. Then he got up and went toward the hole in the back fence.

  When the man and the old man started bringing things out of the house, the dog couldn't imagine what had got into them. Bedsteads, mattresses, chairs. Tables, kitchen utensils, tools. Boxes of this and that. All out on the grass where they would get rained on.

  The old man said, "Are you sure you want to get rid of this nice set of encyclopedia?"

  "If you want it, put it in the car, Dad," Clarence said.

  The farmyard began to fill up with people and he shut her up in the woodshed, though she wasn't meaning to do anything unless called upon. All she could see was the light that came through the cracks between the boards, but she could hear perfectly. More and more buggies and wagons kept arriving, and a person with a very loud voice kept shouting, "Wullabulla, wullabulla," and pounding on a table with a wooden mallet in such a way that it hurt her ears, and the animals seemed to be leaving! First the cows, that she had the privilege of rounding up every evening of her life. And then the sheep. She could hear them baaing with fright. Then the hogs. Then the chickens and turkeys. And finally the horses, which was too much. How was the man going to plow without them? It must be the work of the loud voice, and if the man had only opened the door of the woodshed the dog would have helped him drive that person clean off the property. To remind him that she was there, able and willing, she barked and barked.

  When he finally did let her out, the shouting had stopped and all the things that had been standing about on the grass were either gone or in somebody's buggy or wagon, and the few people who were left were going, and the sun was already down behind the hill.

  Clarence got a length of rope and tied the dog to a tree, which she didn't understand any more than she understood why he felt it was necessary to shut her up in the shed. Then he brought some more things out of the house—a suitcase, fishing poles, a flashlight, an axe, an umbrella—and put them in the car. The old man pointed to the doghouse, and Clarence said, "That stays here."

  While his father waited in the car, Clarence walked through all the empty rooms one last time. Then he locked the kitchen door and put the key under the mat. "I'm glad this day is over," he said and, taking a firm stance in front of the car radiator, he gave the crank half a dozen quick heaves and then ran around and climbed into the driver's seat. The roar of the engine diminished as he adjusted the spark.

  The old man saw the dog looking at them expectantly and said, "What if that fella doesn't come?"

  "He'll come," Clarence said. "He told me it might be dark before he got here, but he promised me he'd come today."

  The borrowed Model T drove off down the lane and the dog was tied up, with night coming on, and no lights in the house, and no smoke going up the chimney.

  She waited a long long time, trying not to worry. Trying to be good—trying to be especially good. And telling herself that they had only gone in to town and were coming right back, even though it was perfectly obvious that this wasn't true. Not the way they acted. Eventually, in spite of her, the howls broke out. Sitting on her haunches, with her muzzle raised to the night sky, she howled and howled. And it wasn't just the dog howling, it was all the dogs she was descended from, clear back to some wolf or other.

  She heard footsteps and was sure it was the boy: He had heard her howling and come from wherever it was he had been all this time and was going to rescue her

  It turned out to be the man's friend from over the way. He put his lantern on the ground and untied her and talked to her and stroked her ears, and for a minute or two everything was all right. But then she remembered how they didn't tell her to get in the car with them but drove off without even a backward look, and she let out another despairing howl.

  Lloyd Wilson tried to get her to go home with him but she couldn't. If she did that, who would be on hand here to guard the property?

  In a little while he was back with some scraps for her, which she swallowed so fast that she didn't know afterward what it was she'd eaten. He filled the bowl with water from the pump and left it by the door of her house. Then he called to her and whistled, but she wouldn't budge. "Have it your own way, but I doubt if anybody's going to get a wink of sleep," he said cheerfully, and went off into the darkness.

  She howled at intervals all night, and set the other dogs in the neighborhood to barking. The next day when the man's friend came to see how she was getting on, she went halfway to meet him, wagging her behind.

  The widow fed her, and the little boys put their arms around her and kissed her on the top of her head, and she felt some better.

  That night at supper, with the dog sitting beside his chair and listening as if the story was about her, Lloyd Wilson said, "You never had to tell him anything. When he died, I swore I'd never have another...."

  The dog raised her head suddenly. Then she got up and went to the door: a wagon or a cart had turned into the lane at her place. She whined softly, but nobody paid any attention until there were footsteps outside and she started barking. "Be quiet, Trixie," Lloyd Wilson said and pushed his chair back from the table. In the light from the open door he saw a young man who looked as if he were about ready to start running.

  "Name's Walker," he said. "I'm your new neighbor. I told Mr. Smith I'd be here two days ago but my wife took sick and we had to put off coming. She's still in Mechanics- burg, where I left her. . . . No thanks, that's very nice of you. On my way through town I stopped and got something to eat at the cafe. You haven't seen anything of my dog, have you?"

  Seeing the rope dangling from the tree, James Walker kept the dog tied up for the next two days, though he had been assured it wasn't necessary. But he also fed her and saw that her pan had water in it and talked to her sometimes. And when night came there was a light in the kitchen window, and the dog smelled wood smoke. Things could have been worse. From time to time she wanted to howl, and managed not to. The day after that, trucks came, bringing cattle and hogs and farm machinery and furniture. And that evening the young man untied the rope and said, "Come on, old girl, I need you to help me round up the cows." She understood what he said all right, but she wasn't his old girl, and she lit off down the road as fast as lightning.

  Clarence spent much of the time in his room with the door closed. He had dark circles under his eyes. His clothes hung on him. When his mother called him he came to the table, but throughout the meal he looked at his plate rather than at them, and they had to ask him two or three times before he understood that they wanted him to pass something.

  His mother tried to get him to see a doctor, but he wouldn't. "There's nothing wrong with my health," he said, in such a way that she was afraid to pursue the matter.

  Cletus was sure that his father would come to see them on Christmas morning, bringing presents. Ice skates was what he wanted. A rifle would be even better but you couldn't use it in town, and anyway it would be too expensive. Wayne still believed in Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, when they undressed, their empty stockings were hanging from the foot of the bed, and they saw by the streetlamp that
it was snowing. When they woke up in the morning their stockings were full, and there were more presents waiting for them downstairs. Aunt Jenny had got out her best tablecloth and roasted a capon, and there was a small artificial Christmas tree in the center of the table. They ate till they were stuffed. When they pushed their chairs back, his mother started to clear the table and Aunt Jenny said, "Leave all that till we've had a chance to digest our dinner."

  Cletus still wasn't worried. His father had never not given them anything for Christmas.

  Wayne wanted to play Old Maid. As Cletus sorted out his cards he listened for the sound of footsteps on the porch. After a while Aunt Jenny got up and began to stir around in the kitchen.

  "I find it very strange of your father not to make any effort about your Christmas," Fern Smith said. What she found even stranger was that Cletus didn't seem to care. Maybe it was a stage he was going through, but he seemed so indifferent these days. About everything.

  The decorated tree on the courthouse lawn was much too large to go in any house. On Christmas Eve people had sung carols around it, but now the square was deserted, except for two men standing in front of the drugstore. One of them was a traveling salesman who hated Christmas. The other was Clarence. Though he was looking straight at the big Christmas tree, he didn't know it was there. Or what day it was. Or why the courthouse square was so deserted.

  "I thought the world of him," he said to the traveling salesman, "till he broke up my home...."