Today’s book starts with a murder in a small Illinois town. The narrator is young, too young to understand the shock and scandal whirling through little Lincoln, Illinois.

He’s got pain of his own. His mother died of the Spanish flu and he lives with his brother and his mourning father as though they “had inadvertently walked through a door that [they]shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place [they] hadn’t meant to leave.”

When his father perks up and marries again, the boy is “drawn, willy-nilly into my father’s new life.” They leave the family home and build a new house on the edge of town.

He has one small comfort: a new friend named Cletus. As the carpenters hammer the new house together, the narrator visits every day after school to watch them work. Cletus rides by on his bicycle and, curious, wanders onto the scene. The two of them “played in that unfinished house day after day, risking our necks and breathing in the rancid odor of sawdust . . .”

Then, that pistol shot goes off on a neighboring farm, and the boy never comes again. (I’m spoiling nothing when I tell you that, no, he wasn’t shot and, no, he wasn’t the shooter.)

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell is about remembering and making sense of days long past. The narrator, now an old man, wonders whatever happened to Cletus.

Life in Lincoln may roll along at the slow pace of a wagon ride, but Maxwell steadily cranks up the tension in this beautiful story. And the moral of it all is: If you know you shouldn’t, DON’T.

One cow patty section.

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