So Long, See You Tomorrow

Fern and the children move in with Aunt Jenny. Clarence receives a notice from Fern’s lawyer that he is being sued for divorce. During the court proceedings, Clarence is shocked at his depiction as an abusive husband. Victor is called as a witness and testifies about his knowledge of Fern’s affair with Lloyd. But during cross-examination, Fern’s lawyer questions Victor’s reliability in light of his well-known public drunkenness. Fern is granted a divorce and custody of the children. Clarence is ordered to pay $50 a month in alimony.

Cletus helps Aunt Jenny clean out her cellar. She wants to talk to him about the distressing family situation, but she can’t directly broach that subject. Cletus wonders who will feed his father and Victor.

Clarence visits his parents for Sunday dinner, but he has no appetite. His mother wonders why her grandsons haven’t visited, and Clarence speculates that Fern won’t let them. He wants to talk to his parents but is in too much pain to speak.

On the advice of her lawyer, Fern and Lloyd have been staying away from each other. They correspond through the mail.

Cletus’s dog Trixie still waits for him after school not understanding that he is now living elsewhere. Clarence has been beating the dog.

Cletus wants to visit his father, but his mother asks him not to. She momentarily considers telling him everything. She decides that she’ll explain it all when he’s older and he will forgive her.

Wayne, the younger brother, befriends a girl named Patsy and starts spending time at her house. Patsy’s mother thinks that Fern should thank her for looking after her son so often.

Through community gossip, Fern learns that Clarence knows she and Lloyd are corresponding. She thinks about what has been done to Clarence and starts to fear him. She dwells on memories of Clarence violently threatening her.

Cletus rides his bike to the farm and is greeted by Trixie. During the visit with his father, Cletus and Clarence sit in silence all afternoon. When he leaves, Trixie tries to follow him, but Cletus tells her to stay. Afterward, Clarence tells Fern to not let Cletus visit again.

The narrator considers how children’s identities are tied to their homes. He imagines the many small facets of home life that have been taken away from Cletus and concludes that the scale of the loss must have transformed him into a different person.

Marie Wilson comes back to the farmhouse to retrieve some items. She is sad to see her sons treating her like a stranger. When she says goodbye, the boys break into tears. Lloyd drives her back to town in silence. She tells him she can’t understand how he could have betrayed his best friend. Lloyd does not reply.

Trixie is still waiting for Cletus to come home. Clarence sometimes forgets to feed her. He continues to beat and abuse her.

Lloyd asks Marie for a divorce so he can marry Fern, but Marie refuses.

Fern has trouble sleeping and drifts in and out of dreams. She recalls a time when she was a young woman and had an affair with a married man. Tom Evans locked her in her room to stop her from seeing him. While she was still in love with the married man, Clarence began courting her. Tom objected to her plans to marry Clarence because he had seen Clarence beating his horse in town. She married Clarence anyway. Tom did not attend the wedding.

After the fall harvest, Clarence quits farming and Victor moves away. Lloyd is still considering moving to Iowa, but he’s putting it off. Trixie notices that Clarence is not doing any of the normal winter chores. The new tenant comes to visit the property and Trixie observes them discussing her. She watches in confusion as Clarence and his father move out of the house. She is locked in the barn during an estate auction and barks incessantly as the farm animals are sold.

Clarence ties Trixie to a tree and leaves. She waits patiently but grows more concerned and begins to howl. Lloyd arrives and tries to take her home with him, but she refuses to go. The next day she follows Lloyd home and is greeted by Mrs. B. and the boys.

The new tenant, James Walker, arrives at the Smith’s former house. Trixie goes with James and is pleased to have cows to round up again.

Clarence is living with his parents and has entered a state of deep depression.

Fern and Aunt Jenny prepare a traditional Christmas celebration. Cletus waits all day for his father to arrive. He never comes. Cletus pretends not to care. Clarence, meanwhile, is in town muttering to a stranger, unaware that it is Christmas day.

Trixie is still looking for the Smiths. She runs away to find them and eventually shows up at the house where Clarence is staying. His mother offers to let Trixie stay. Instead, Clarence brings her back to James at the farm. Clarence returns to the farm a few more times after that, apparently searching for something. Trixie keeps running away. Fern tells Cletus that Clarence had Trixie put down.

Fern writes to Lloyd that she is scared of what Clarence might do. She visits her divorce lawyer and tells him her fears about Clarence. The lawyer says that unless Clarence has made specific threats, there’s nothing the police can do about it.

The narrator, in the present day, describes visiting Lincoln as an old man. He stands outside of his old house and notes the changes in the neighborhood. He sometimes dreams about the way Lincoln was in his childhood. In one dream, he stands outside of his first childhood home and knows that his mother is inside.

The narrator relates an experience from years before when, while talking to his therapist about his mother’s death, he began weeping uncontrollably.

He imagines a dreamlike location he calls the “Palace at 4 A.M.” (named for the Giacometti sculpture he described in Chapter 3) where the past and present are permeable. He encounters Cletus Smith there. The narrator sees Cletus lying on his bed in the fetal position. Lloyd has been murdered but Clarence hasn’t been found yet. Cletus asks Aunt Jenny what she would do if Clarence came to the house and Aunt Jenny says she doesn’t know. It’s time for school, but Cletus knows he can never go back there again.

The narrator says that he keeps reliving the moment when he encountered Cletus in the school hallway and walked by without speaking to him. The memory still causes him to wince. Once, while feeling guilty, he searched through an old yearbook but couldn’t find a picture of Cletus. He thinks that he will always feel guilty and continue to wonder what happened to Cletus. His final hope for Cletus is that, over time, the memories of the murder “began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed” (135). He hopes that he was able to move on from a tragedy that was not his fault. In the final words of the novel, he hopes that Cletus was able to grow up “undestroyed by what was not his doing” (135).