When she did leave, six weeks later, he had no premonition of it.
He was informed, through the mail, by her lawyer, that any attempt to get in touch with her or with their children except through him could be considered as constituting harassment, and that whatever steps were necessary to protect her from it would be taken.
The next thing that happened was a notice from the county clerk's office: she was suing him for a divorce.
Shortly thereafter, Fern Smith sat in her lawyer's office discussing a notice she had received from Clarence's lawyer. It was out of their hands now. They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.
The divorce proceedings and the cross bill were tried as a single case in the fall term of court. In the jury box and in the visitors' part of the courtroom were men Clarence Smith knew, and, averting his eyes from them, he had to sit and hear his most intimate life laid bare. He did not recognize the description of himself, and he wondered how Fern's lawyer could utter with such a ring of sincerity statements he must know had no foundation in truth. Or how she could sit there looking like a victim when it was she who had made it all come about. Her lawyer had found half a dozen witnesses who were pleased to testify to his bad temper—which surprised him. He had not known that he had any enemies. He had only one witness for his side, but he was counting on that one witness to establish the falsehood of everything that was said.
All but unrecognizable in a new suit and shaved by the barber, the hired man testified to "intimacies." He used other words that had been put in his mouth by Clarence's lawyer. On various occasions, he said, he had come upon the plaintiff and Wilson in an embrace or kissing, or with his hand inside her blouse. When his employer was off the property, Wilson would come to the house and the shade in the upstairs bedroom would be drawn and it would be an hour or more sometimes before he reappeared.
Pacing back and forth in front of the jury box, Fern Smith's lawyer spoke eloquently of the close ties that bound the two households together, and in particular of the friendship of the two men. Was it not a fact, was it not an incontrovertible fact that over a period of many years before the present discord arose, and with Clarence Smith's full knowledge and approval, Lloyd Wilson had frequently gone to the Smiths' house when Smith was off the premises? Before proceeding with the cross-examination, he would like to offer, as evidence bearing on the reliability of the witness's testimony, the fact that he was seldom without the smell of liquor on his breath, and that he had spent the night of July 4th in jail in an inebriated condition.
Clarence's lawyer leapt to his feet and exclaimed, "Your Honor, I object," and the judge said sourly, "Objection overruled."
Victor was easily trapped into saying things he did not mean, and that could not be true, and his confusion was such that the courtroom was moved to laughter again and again. After that, Clarence was called to the witness stand and placed under oath, and heard acts of his described that he could not truthfully deny. What Fern's lawyer did not tell the gentlemen of the jury was the provocation that led up to this violent behavior. And when Clarence tried to, he was instructed by the judge to confine his remarks to answering the questions put to him by counsel.
Nobody said, in court, that Clarence Smith was pierced to the heart by his wife's failure to love him, and it wouldn't have made any difference if they had.
The evening paper reported that Mrs. Fern Smith was granted a decree of divorce against her husband, on the grounds of extreme and repeated cruelty, the charges in his cross bill not being substantiated in the eyes of the jury. He was ordered to pay fifty dollars a month alimony, and she was granted custody of the children.
The ringing of the locusts wore itself out and stopped, only to start up again in the treetops. With Aunt Jenny standing over him telling him what to do next, Cletus carried load after load of junk up the outside cellar stairs and on out to the alley. Cans of long-dried paint and varnish. Jars of preserve that had gone bad or were too old to be trusted. Empty medicine bottles. Bundles of old magazines and newspapers. An iron bedstead. A chair with a cane seat that had given way. A sheet-iron stove with one leg missing. A ten- gallon milk can with a hole in the bottom. Screens so eaten with rust that you could put your finger through them. Occasionally she would decide that something—a bamboo picture frame with its glass broken or a silk dress that was stained under the arms—was too good to throw away, and it was put aside until she could recollect somebody who would be glad to have it. Going through a box of old letters, she came upon a canceled bankbook and turned the pages thoughtfully. "I have a little money," she remarked. (Why did she say that? It was the one thing she meant to tell nobody. . . .) "Tom had a life insurance policy that was all paid up when he died. I may not be in the same class with John D. Rockefeller, but you'd find that five thousand dollars was a lot of money if you tried to save it. . . . It'll go to your mother when I die. I just wanted you to know how things are." Which wasn't exactly the truth; what she really wanted was for him to say something—to be surprised by this cat she had inadvertently let out of the bag. "I mean you won't starve," she said.
It took both of them to carry the horsehair mattress spotted with mildew. As they were coming back from the alley, she said, "That's enough for today. There's a storeroom that needs cleaning out but it can wait." He closed the cellar door, she gave him the padlock, which had been in her apron pocket, and they went into the house by way of the back porch. She wanted to say / don't like the way things have turned out any better than you do, and was afraid to say it lest Cletus think she wasn't glad to have them under her roof.
She made him wash his hands at the kitchen sink and gave him a glass of cold milk and a large piece of gooseberry pie.
Leaning against the sink, he took a swallow of milk and then said, "When Victor and Pa come in from the fields, who gets their meals?"
"Nobody, so far as I know. It isn't easy for them, I'm sure, but any man knows how to fry bacon and eggs and make coffee."
"They're used to eating more than that."
"He may have to get somebody to keep house for him, like Mr. Wilson," she said, and could have bit her tongue out.
"You'll have Sunday dinner with us, won't you?" his mother said. "Come right from church, so we can have a good visit."
There was no way Clarence could say no or he would have. He didn't tell her that he had stopped going to church.
When they sat down to the table, he saw that his mother had cooked all his favorite dishes, and he tried to eat, though he had no appetite. From his father's uneasiness and from the careful absence of any expression on her face, he knew that her feelings were hurt. She had expected him to tell them everything he couldn't tell the judge and the jury, and when he didn't she thought it was because he didn't trust them.
"We've been expecting the boys to pay us a visit," she said, "but so far they haven't. I dare say Fern won't allow it."
"I don't imagine she would do that," he said, avoiding her glance.
His mother and father were the only two people on earth he trusted at this point, but where to begin? With the fact that he was having trouble scraping together the money to pay his ex-wife's alimony? There wasn't anything he could tell them that wouldn't make them grieve, and anyway, he couldn't bear to talk about it.
He knew what had been done to him but not what he had done to deserve it.
It would have been a help if at some time some Baptist preacher, resting his forearms on the pulpit and hunching his shoulders, had said People neither get what they deserve nor deserve what they get. The gentle and the trusting are trampled on. The rich man usually forces his way through the eye of the needle, and there is little or no point in putting your faith in Divine Providence. . . . On the other hand, how could any preacher, Baptist or otherwise, say this?
Fern was advised by her attorney that it would be better if she and Lloyd Wilson
didn't see each other for a time. When they wrote to each other, they were careful to post the letters themselves. Her letters were very long, his short. It was not natural to him to put his feelings on paper. But as she read and reread his letters, the words that were not there were put there by her imagination, until she was satisfied that he really did love her as much as she loved him.
The dog waited every afternoon by the mailbox. She knew when it was time to round up the cows, but the boy might come and not find her there. So she went on waiting, and when she saw the man coming toward her she ran off into a cornfield, but only a little ways. She didn't really try to escape the beating she knew he was going to give her.
Cletus started to ride out to the farm on his bicycle and his mother said, "Where are you going?" and he told her and she said, "I'd rather you didn't." When he asked why not, she looked unhappy and said, "Please don't argue with me,
Cletus. If your father wants to see you, he'll say so."
It was only a hairline hesitation that kept her from telling him everything. Eventually, when he was grown, she would sit down with him some day and tell him the whole story from the beginning, and he would appreciate all she had been through, and forgive her. Your father wouldn't give me my freedom, she would say, and so I had to go to court and get it that way. ... In these imaginary conversations it did not occur to her that he might not forgive her. If Lloyd hadn't been in love with me, she imagined herself saying. Or if he had loved his wife, I guess I would have gone on being married to your father, ill-suited to each other though we were... .
At the memory of Lloyd Wilson's hands resting on her shoulders as he bent down and kissed her, she shuddered with happiness.
By staring at her fixedly, Wayne made the acquaintance of a little girl named Patsy, who lived four or five houses down the street from Aunt Jenny's house. She had a tricycle, which they rode up and down the cement sidewalk, and only now and then did they quarrel about whose turn it was. He went to Patsy's house early in the morning, and when lunchtime came and Patsy's mother asked him if he would like to stay and eat with them, he always said yes. When she said, "Don't you think it would be a good idea if you ran home and told your mother?" he said, "She won't mind."
Patsy's mother thought it would be nice if Wayne's mother said, "Thank you for being so nice to my little boy," or something of that kind, instead of not even bothering to look up when she was passing the house. And her name in the paper and all.
In a town the size of Lincoln there are no well-kept secrets. Somebody told somebody who told somebody who told somebody who told Clarence about the fat letters with no return address that Fern dropped in the big green box in front of the post office after dark. It didn't even take very long for this to happen. Or for Fern to find out that Clarence knew.
Only now, after the long battle had been won, did she become frightened. She found herself thinking, for the first time, about Clarence. About what she had done to him. And what he might be capable of. She hadn't wanted to take the fifty dollars a month alimony. It was the lawyer's idea. She found herself reliving the moment when Clarence picked up the poker and started for her. And other moments like it.
The dog came racing down the lane and threw herself upon Cletus, and he let the bicycle fall and buried his face in her fur. But after that, nothing was the way he thought it would be. He had expected to follow his father around, helping him with whatever he was doing, and instead they sat in the house all afternoon, trying to think of things to say.
"Thou shalt not bear false witness," the Bible said—but why not, if the jury couldn't tell the difference between the truth and a pack of lies and neither could the judge? Dressed in black and wearing a veil as if she was in mourning for him, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief, she fooled them all. The Bible also said, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," and he was ordered to pay them fifty dollars a month. That was their reward, for breaking the Ten Commandments.
How was he to explain this to a half-grown boy? Also he was ashamed—ashamed and embarrassed at all his son had been put through. He knew that Cletus would have preferred to stay out here with him and he couldn't even manage that.
As a result of that humiliating day in court Clarence Smith's sense of cause and effect suffered a permanent distortion. His mind was filled with thoughts that, taken one by one, were perfectly reasonable but in sequence did not quite make sense.
He had no idea how long some of his silences were.
At last the hands of the clock allowed him to say, "It's time you were starting back to town."
"Can't I stay and help with the milking?"
"You don't want to be on the road on a bicycle after dark."
"I could get out of the way if a car comes."
"You better go now. Your mother will worry about you."
He waved goodbye to his father, who was standing on the porch steps, and kicked the standard of his bicycle up into the catch on the rear mudguard and said, "No, Trixie. Don't look at me like that. You can't go with me. . . . No . . . No, do you hear? No!"
On the following Saturday he asked his mother if he could ride out to the farm and again she said, "I'd rather you didn't."
She couldn't bear to tell him that his father had sent word by a neighbor that she was not to let him come any more.
Whether they are part of home or home is part of them is not a question children are prepared to answer. Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen—the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of washday, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Of ashes. Of soup simmering on the stove. Take away the patient old horse waiting by the pasture fence. Take away the chores that kept him busy from the time he got home from school until they sat down to supper. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the treetops.
His work clothes are still hanging on a nail beside the door of his room, but nobody puts them on or takes them off. Nobody sleeps in his bed. Or reads the broken-backed copy of Tom Swift and His Flying Machine. Take that away too, while you are at it.
Take away the pitcher and bowl, both of them dry and dusty. Take away the cow barn where the cats, sitting all in a row, wait with their mouths wide open for somebody to squirt milk down their throats. Take away the horse barn too—the smell of hay and dust and horse piss and old sweat- stained leather, and the rain beating down on the plowed field beyond the open door. Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.
Just when she had about given up hoping, the widow met Lloyd Wilson's wife and was much taken with her.
Fingering a list of things that only she knew where to put her hands on, in chests and dresser drawers and cardboard boxes pushed back under the eaves in the attic, Marie Wilson made polite conversation. She could hardly believe the disorder and filth that met her eyes everywhere she looked. The windows were so thickly coated with dust and cobwebs you could hardly see out of them. The table runner on the parlor table had ink stains on it, and somebody had burned a hole in the big rag rug that it had taken her all one winter to make. She knew without having to look that no broom ever went searching for lint under the beds. The place hadn't been aired for weeks, and the whole house but especially the downstairs bedroom stank of kerosene and sweaty clothing and stale human breath. Clapping her hands together she caught a clothes moth.
What the widow was waiting for as she talked on and on was a sign that the approval was reciprocated. Sitting on the edge of her chair, Marie Wilson said, "That's quite true," and "I know what you mean," and "I'm sure you're right," and finally, reaching the end of her patience, she said, "I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me, I have things to do." Still talking, the widow followed her up the attic stairs.
But it was the little boys that upset her most. They were thin and pale and answered her questions listlessly, as if they were a
ddressing a stranger. She said, "You know that your father wouldn't let me take you with me?" and they nodded. She brushed the hair out of their eyes, and kissed them, and touched them on the cheek and on the shoulder as she talked to them, and the strangeness wore off eventually. After that they wouldn't let her out of their sight. As she bent down to say goodbye to them they both started to cry.
Lloyd had driven in to town to get her and when she had gathered up what she wanted he drove her back. She did not criticize the widow's housekeeping. It was his business who he got to look after him. They had sat in an uncomfortable silence all the way out to the farm, but now he began to talk about the possibility of his finding a place somewhere in Iowa—which would mean that she would never see the boys at all. She asked him to bring them in to town now and then to spend the night with her and he answered, "It would only make it worse for them." After which they both relapsed into silence. He could feel that there was something on the tip of her tongue which for some reason she kept deciding not to say. When he stopped in front of the boarding house where she was now living she started to get out of the buggy and then turned to him and said, "I know you don't care in the least about me, or your daughters, but I don't see how you could do that to Clarence."