So Long, See You Tomorrow, Page 4

  Clarence Smith had sold his lease to a younger man named James Walker. After the bloodhounds were taken back to town, Walker came out of the farmhouse and walked out to the public road. A handful of men lingered by the entrance to the lane and, moved by a floating curiosity, they gathered around him while he pulled down the flap of the mailbox. What were they expecting? At most a letter or two that they would not be allowed to read and yesterday's Courier-Herald. In the mailbox was an object so startling that they all stepped back and waited. James Walker took the gold watch out of the mailbox and opened the case and found the initials "C.S." It could only be Clarence Smith's watch, but when was it left there and for what reason? James Walker drove in to town and turned it over to the sheriff, who considered the possibility that it was a plant, put there by someone other than Clarence Smith to make it appear that he was the murderer.

  That evening, the sheriff went to the house of Clarence Smith's parents and learned that they had no idea where their son was. Neither had anyone else. He was last seen leaving the Grand Theater at 10:45 on the night before Lloyd Wilson was killed. The State's attorney didn't issue a warrant charging Cletus's father with the murder. He was merely wanted for questioning. The description sent to the police throughout the state reads: "Age 40 years, height j feet 7 inches, weight 165 pounds, light brown hair slightly bald."

  Neighbors reported that they had seen a strange automobile waiting near the Wilson farm on the night before the murder. One of them said that the automobile waited in the lane just off the hard road for at least two hours. He saw it for the last time at about nine o'clock, just before he went to bed. Another neighbor said that the automobile was not in the lane but at the edge of the hard road, and that it was standing with the lights turned off. Since Clarence Smith did not own a car, this raised the question of whether he might have had an accomplice.

  There was a rumor that he was seen boarding the trolley car that ran between Peoria, Lincoln, and Springfield, on the day of the murder. Also that he had registered at a hotel in Springfield and that same night had received a long-distance telephone call there. Given the chance to believe something so interesting, people did, though the hotel denied that he had been there, and the person who saw him board the trolley never came forward. The rumor that he had a large sum of money on his person when he disappeared couldn't have been true either, since the money from the sale of his lease could all be accounted for.

  There was another angle to the case that the Courier felt obliged to consider. In the spring of the year before he was killed, Lloyd Wilson's wife left him, taking their four girls, the youngest of whom was a baby eleven months old, and moved to town. She did not divorce him but got a legal separation. By the terms of this agreement he had to pay her $9,000, which in 1921 was a lot of money. My father's new house only cost $12,000, including the land it was built on. The settlement Lloyd Wilson made on his wife may have represented all the money he had.

  I don't know what she looked like. Most farm women of her age were reduced by hard work and frequent child- bearing to a common denominator of plainness. I fancy, as people used to say when I was a child—I fancy that this was true of Lloyd Wilson's wife and that it was not true of Cletus's mother, but there is no warrant for my thinking this, and the simple truth is that though so much is made of the woman's beauty in love stories, passion does not require it. Plato's idea that lovers were originally one person, the two parts having become separated and desiring to be joined, is as good an explanation as any for what cannot in the mind of an outsider ever be convincingly accounted for.

  The names and ages of the Wilson children were printed in the paper. Probably through happenstance, the names and ages of Clarence Smith's were not.

  Cletus's mother had been an orphan and was brought up by an aunt and uncle, who lived in town. When she left Cletus's father she moved back to the house she grew up in. The Courier-Herald gives the address, and I asked my cousin to see if there was a house at that address now. He reported back that there was and that it was one of a row of frame houses opposite the fairgrounds. Somewhat down at the heels, he said, and painted white, and like a lot of other small houses in town.

  What the newspaper refers to as "the estrangement" occurred during the summer after Wilson's wife left him. "A year ago," the Courier-Herald goes on to say, "there were no better friends than Wilson and Smith. They were often in town together. If Smith bought a cigar for himself he also bought one for Wilson, who did the same. In an argument they stuck up for each other against all coiners, and people often spoke about what bosom friends they were. Smith is considered, by people who knew him, to be a quiet, reserved man."

  The only photograph I have ever seen of him, or of Lloyd Wilson, was printed on the front page of the Courier- Herald. Since it is a photostatic copy, black and white—or rather, brown and white—are reversed. Even so, they look enough alike to be taken for brothers. No doubt Cain and Abel loved each other, in their way, quite as much as, or even more than, David and Jonathan.

  There are many questions I did not find the answer to by reading those old newspapers. For example, from whom did Cletus's mother learn about the murder? And how soon? And what happened then—hysterics, in front of her two sons? And what about the six-year-old child who was sent to the barn to see what was keeping his father so long? Were he and his brother peering out through a lace curtain when the bloodhounds went baying across the fields in pursuit of the man who had killed their father? Or did the housekeeper draw them away from the window? She was a countrywoman, and you don't see such sights every day. Chances are that all three of them were peering out of the window, unless the little boys' mother had already come for them.

  For several days new details kept turning up: "It is said on high authority that Wilson and Mrs. Smith corresponded frequently since the Smith divorce last fall, and during the time that Smith was paying alimony to his former wife. It is believed that Smith knew of this alleged fact and brooded over the situation. Mrs. Smith is said to have been afraid of her former husband, and this fear is believed to have been communicated to Wilson. . . . Sheriff Ahrens called in a former farm hand of Smith's who had testified for him during the trial. This man had been working in the Coons- burg vicinity, had been regularly employed there, and had not seen Smith since a week ago Saturday night when he came out of the bathroom of the local barber shop and saw Smith waiting for a shave." And so on.

  James Walker told the reporter from the Courier-Herald that one day shortly after Clarence Smith left the farm and he took possession, he came out of the woodshed and saw Smith standing on the porch. Walker said he was all by himself at the time, and glad to have somebody to talk to. When Smith said, "Do you mind if I have a look around?" he said, "Go ahead, help yourself"—as anybody would under the circumstances. But when Smith came back again a few days later and spent a long time in the barn and then went into one shed after another, Walker grew uneasy. If Smith had lost something why didn't he say what it was? It turned out that Walker himself had lost something instead, a small anvil. He was positive he had brought it with him when he moved, and so far as he knew there was no way Clarence Smith could have carried it off with him, but neither could the anvil have walked off by itself.

  James Walker wrote to his wife and asked her to join him immediately, and after that Clarence Smith didn't come any more.

  The day after Walker found the watch he found Clarence Smith's overcoat, in a storm buggy. The deputy sheriff, searching the barns and outbuildings with a flashlight, had seen it and thought it belonged to the new tenant. Kept warm by the coat and some lap robes, Clarence Smith had spent the night before the murder on his own farm and in the morning concealed himself behind a haystack and waited for Lloyd Wilson's lantern to come bobbing across the pasture.

  Cletus's grandfather, when he was interviewed by that same reporter, said that if his son had committed the murder while mentally unbalanced from jealousy he wouldn't be found alive; he wouldn't want to live.
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  Cletus's mother, perhaps too distraught to be charitable, said, "I do not believe he killed himself. I think he carried out plans for his escape." What plans? There is no evidence that he had made any.

  Partly out of fear and partly to get away from curiosity- seekers, Walker and his wife moved into temporary quarters in town. The sheriff's office was kept busy answering calls from people who wanted to know if Clarence Smith had been found. Most of them had heard that he had drowned himself in the gravel pit. The Courier-Herald was at some pains to scotch this rumor also: "Deputy William Duffy, who conducted a thorough examination of the gravel pit the morning of the murder, does not believe that Smith or any other person drowned himself in the pit. The earth around it was soft, due to the thaw. On two sides the bank was steep and tracks would have shown clearly. At the point where it would have been possible to dive from a springboard, the water was shallow and a person would have had to wade out in the shallows before reaching deep water. Encircling the entire pit, looking for tracks in the soft earth, Mr. Duffy found absolutely nothing."

  On Friday, the third of February, fifteen days after Lloyd Wilson's body was found leaning against a partition in his barn, another body was fished up from the bottom of Deer Creek gravel pit, where the deputy sheriff said it couldn't be. It was lying face down across the dredging bucket. Cletus's father, not wanting to live, had shot himself through the head. Dangling from his right wrist, at the end of a shoe- string, was a .38 revolver with two empty chambers. A flashlight protruded from his coat pocket. A strand of baling wire was wound around his neck and waist. Until it was severed by the dredging bucket it had attached the body to whatever the heavy weight was that was holding it down. In going through the other pockets the undertaker found a razor still deeply stained with red, a bloody handkerchief, a watch chain, and several shotgun shells.

  At the coroner's inquest, the only witnesses were the sheriff and the three men who worked at the gravel pit. The jury returned the following verdict: "We, the undersigned jurors, do find that Clarence C. Smith came to his death by a gunshot wound inflicted by his own hand, with suicidal intent." There was no effort to establish a motive for the suicide and no mention of the murder of Lloyd Wilson. At the final hearing in the murder case, the verdict was "Death from a gunshot wound inflicted by an unknown hand."

  Several hundred people tried to get a look at Clarence Smith's body while it was at the undertaker's and were turned away. The funeral was in his father's house. "Reverend A. S. Hubbard, pastor of the First Baptist Church, was in charge of the services. A male quartet, standing on the stair landing, gave a number of selections. Pallbearers were Joseph McElhiney, John Holmes, Frank Mitchell, and Roy Anderson. Numerous floral tokens of sympathy were received by the family and the funeral was one of the largest held in Lincoln in some time."

  Cletus's father was not buried at the crossroads with a stake through his heart but in the cemetery along with everybody else. The day after the funeral a gunstock was found floating on the surface of the gravel pit. The following afternoon the dredging bucket brought up the rest of the gun. In the barrel was a defective shell. When the shotgun failed to go off, the shell jammed, and the ejector didn't remove it. And so Lloyd Wilson was killed with a revolver instead.

  Cletus's grandfather was summoned to the sheriff's office to identify the gun and said he knew his son had a shotgun but he didn't know what it looked like or remember having seen the gun among the things his son brought with him when he moved from the farm. The sheriff then asked if Clarence Smith's sons hunted with him. "Identification of the gun"—I am quoting from the Courier-Herald—'v/as made this afternoon by the oldest son of Clarence C. Smith, who recognized the manufacturer's mark. The boy has a bicycle of the same make." Between the time that Cletus and I climbed down from the scaffolding and went our separate ways and the moment when he was confronted with the broken gun in the sheriff's office, he must have crossed over the line into maturity, and though he is referred to as a boy, wasn't one any longer.

  Shortly after this his mother wrote to Lloyd Wilson's housekeeper asking that a photograph she had given him be returned to her. The Courier-Heraid got hold of this letter and published one sentence from it: "I am the most miserable woman in the world."

  IV

  IN THE SCHOOL CORRIDOR

  I have a hazy half-recollection, which I do not trust, of sitting and staring at Cletus's empty desk at school. Somebody—I think it was my grandmother—said his grandmother came and took him away. It cannot have been true; he had only one grandmother and she was living right there in town. What probably happened is that his mother kept him out of school, and when she left Lincoln he went with her.

  I didn't wonder what the evening paper meant precisely when it said that Cletus's father had accused his mother of having been intimate with the murdered man. I wouldn't at that age have been so innocent as to think it meant they were on friendly terms with each other. When I thought about the matter at all I thought about the ear, which was never found. I knew it was a most terrible thing that had happened to Cletus and that he would forever be singled out by it, but I didn't try to put myself in his place or even think that maybe I ought to find out where he lived and get on my bicycle and go see him. It was as if his father had shot and killed him too.

  The carpenters and plumbers and electricians finally stopped getting in each other's way and left the new house entirely to the painters. I came home with white paint on my clothes and my father suggested that I stay away from Park Place until the paint on the woodwork was dry. He was exasperated at the architect and at himself; if the concrete foundation had been sunk two or three feet lower into the ground, it wouldn't have required a great many loads of expensive topsoil to bring the lawn up to the necessary level. The day we moved in, Grace, overtired, dropped a bottle of iodine she was putting in the medicine cabinet of the upstairs bathroom and it fell into the washstand and broke. She and I spent our first evening in the new house scrubbing at what looked like bloodstains on the shining white wall.

  The house was too new to be comfortable. It was like having to spend a lot of time with a person you didn't know very well. And I missed the way it used to be when there was no roof yet and the underflooring was littered with shavings and bent nails and pieces of wood 1 could almost but not quite think what to do with. Now there was nothing on the floor but rugs and you couldn't do daring things because if you did you might leave a mark on the wallpaper.

  My father was always away during the middle of the week, my little brother spent two or three days at a time with my grandmother, who idolized him, and so Grace and I were often alone together. The people who lived in the houses all up and down the street were either related to her or her close friends. They were in and out of one another's houses all day long, and several afternoons a week they sat down to bridge tables. Expertly shuffling and reshuffling cards, they went to work. Auction, this was. Contract bridge hadn't yet supplanted it. Once, looking over Grace's shoulder, I saw her make a grand slam in clubs when the highest trump card in her hand was the nine. The women serenely doubled and redoubled each other's bids without ever losing their way in the intricacies of some piece of gossip, and the one who was adding up the score was still able to deplore, with the others, the shockingness of some new novel that they had all put their names down for at the library.

  Fourteen was when boys graduated into long trousers and since I hadn't yet arrived at that age I was still wearing corduroy knickerbockers. When I couldn't stop reading A Tale of Two Cities, I put my long black cotton stockings across the bottom of the bedroom door so my father wouldn't see the crack of light and come in and tell me to go to sleep. I had a one-tube radio set in my room, on the desk where I studied. Above it, on the wall, was a map of North America, with colored pins for all the radio stations I had picked up. The pin that gave me the most pleasure was stuck at Havana, Cuba, which I got only once. My ears hurt from the headphones and my feet were cold all winter long. My room
was on the northwest corner of the house and the hot-air registers didn't do what was expected of them. And once something happened that was so strange I couldn't get over it. I heard Eggy Rinehart, two blocks away, call his mother to the telephone. The radio set had picked up his voice out of the air, but how? From the telephone wires? Nobody could tell me.

  When I came home from Scout meeting, the aerial on the roof showed faintly against the stars. Before I walked into the house I left the front walk and went and peered through the crack of light between the drawn shade and the sill of the living-room window. I wanted to make sure that my father and Grace weren't having a "party." The word had undergone a sinister metamorphosis. Originally it meant ice cream in molds and other children arriving with presents for me, or if it was a grown-up party then the best linen tablecloth and place cards and little paper cups full of nuts and a centerpiece of cut flowers from the greenhouse. And more spoons and forks than usual. During Prohibition it came to mean people getting together for the purpose of drinking. Gossip made it sound worse than it was; there were limits. But I didn't know what they were and therefore assumed that there weren't any, and that if "parties" were not orgies exactly they were in that general area. Among Grace's friends were a handsome raven-haired woman who had a year or two before lost her husband and a humorous unmarried woman who worked at the bank. They were both at our house a good deal and my father referred to them jocosely as his harem. I knew that they weren't really, but what was I to think when I heard them laughing about how Lois went upstairs and took off all her clothes (at my mother's parties people didn't do such things) and came down wrapped in a bath towel and did the hootchie-kootchie dance? Anyway, I didn't want to blunder into something like that, so I looked before I walked into the house.