So long, see you tomorrow

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide.

A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered.

After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again.

Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime's regret.