Suttree (Picador Collection)

by Cormac McCarthy

The steel leaks back the day’s heat, you can feel it through the floors of your shoes.

Down pavings rent with ruin, the slow cataclysm of neglect,

The audience sits webbed in dust.

He crossed the cabin and stretched himself out on the cot. Closing his eyes. A faint breeze from the window stirring his hair. The shantyboat trembled slightly in the river and one of the steel drums beneath the floor expanded in the heat with a melancholy bong. Eyes resting. This hushed and mazy Sunday. The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a water-drop. A dextrocardias said the smiling doctor. Your heart’s in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.

Buddy? He turned his head. His uncle was standing in the doorway. He looked back at the ceiling, blinked, sat up and swung his feet to the floor. Come in, John, he said. The uncle came through the door, looking about, hesitant. He stopped in the center of the room, arrested in the quadrate bar of dusty light davited between the window and its skewed replica on the far wall, a barren countenance cruelly lit, eyes watery and half closed with their slack pendules of flesh hanging down his cheeks. His hands moved slightly with the wooden smile he managed.

Suttree eased himself down on the arm of the sofa and sipped his beer. He patted J-Bone on the back. The voices seemed to fade. He waved away the whiskeybottle with a smile. In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. In the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.

Clockchime and belltoll lonely in the brooding sleepfast town.

The wind was cold, dreamwinds are so, I had been hurrying.

The trolleyrails gleam in their beds and a late car passes with a long slish of tires. In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life’s other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand.

She came with the coffee, setting it down with a click and the coffee tilting up the side of the pink plastic cup and flooding the saucer. He poured it back and sipped. Acridity of burnt socks.

High over the downriver land lightning quaked soundlessly and ceased. Far clouds rimlit. A brimstone light. Are there dragons in the wings of the world? The rain was falling harder, falling past him toward the river. Steep rain leaning in the lamplight, across the clock’s face. Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.

A sad and bitter season. Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. Suttree dreamed old dreams of fairgrounds where young girls with flowered hair and wide child’s eyes watched by flarelight sequined aerialists aloft. Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. To make you ache with want. In the afternoon the riggers came and set about taking down a spiderlike centrifuge and loading it on a float. As the prisoners shuffled over the grounds filling their crokersacks with bottles and trash the workers backhanded to them packs of cigarettes. Suttree was given a pack and passed it on to an old man with a goiter who took it without a word. The old man was a smokehound, a drinker of shaving lotion, stove fuel, cleaning fluid. Suttree watched him shuffle on. Scowling at the world from under his wild thatched brows. His thin and rimpled mouth working very faintly as he spoke with himself. He took up each paper, each bottle, with something like solicitude, looking about as if he would discover who had put it there. Suttree never heard him speak aloud, this elder child of sorrow. He crouched on the truck bench opposite going home, jostled and nodding. He saw Suttree watching him and lowered his eyes and fell to talking to himself with a kind of secretive viciousness.

Suttree looked at him. He was not lovable. This adenoidal leptosome that crouched above his bed like a wizened bird, his razorous shoulderblades jutting in the thin cloth of his striped shirt. Sly, ratfaced, a convicted pervert of a botanical bent. Who would do worse when in the world again. Bet on it. But something in him so transparent, something vulnerable. As he looked back at Suttree with his almost witless equanimity his naked face was suddenly taken away in darkness.

See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child’s heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of’s come to pass.

Suttree wandering among the stalls where little grandmothers offered flowers or berries or eggs. Rows of faded farmers hunched at the lunchcounters. This lazaret of comestibles and flora and maimed humanity. Every other face goitered, twisted, tubered with some excrescence. Teeth black with rot, eyes rheumed and vacuous. Dour and diminutive people framed by paper cones of blossoms, hawkers of esoteric wares, curious electuaries ordered up in jars and elixirs decocted in the moon’s dark.

Amorphous clots of fear that took the forms of nightshades, hags or dwarfs or seatrolls green and steaming that skulked down out of the coils of his poisoned brain with black candles and slow chant. He smiled to see these familiars. Not dread but only homologues of dread. They bore a dead child in a glass bier. Sinister abscission, did I see with my seed eyes his thin blue shape lifeless in the world before me? Who comes in dreams, mansized at times and how so? Do shades nurture? As I have seen my image twinned and blown in the smoked glass of a blind man’s spectacles I am, I am.

He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light.

Pieces of burnt foil sunburst in blue and yellow. Dredging charred relics from the ashy sleech. Melted glass that had reseized in the helical bowl of a bedspring like some vitreous chrysalis or chambered whelk from southern seas.

A row of bottles gone to the wall for stoning lay in brown and green and crystal ruin down a sunlit corridor and one upright severed cone of yellow glass rose from the paving like a flame.

A lank black slattern stood hipshot in a doorframe. Hey boydove, you gettin any gravel for yo goose? Whoopla laughter scuttling after him and a gold tooth winksome, bawdy dogstar in the ordurous jaws of fellatio major.

Flies clove the air like comets.

Dusklovers. Ancillary disciples to the rise of night.

She was clattering about in the back room. After a while she came from behind the curtain again and sat in her chair with her feet up. She was instantly asleep, the blind eye half open like a drowsing cat’s, her mouth agape. Toes peered from the mules like little clusters of dark mice. On her broad face two intersecting circles, fairy ring or hagstrack, the crescent welts of flesh like a sacerdotal brand on some stone age matriarch. Annular treponema. Read here why he falls in the streets. Another Jena, another time.

He sat with the back of his head against the board wall and his mind drifted. Moths crossed the mouth of the lamp in its scroll iron sconce above his head, the shape of the flame steadfast in the pietin reflector. On the ceiling black curds. Where insect shadows war. The reflection of the lamp’s glass chimney like a quaking egg, the zygote dividing. Giant spores addorsed and severing. Yawing toward separate destinies in their blind molecular schism.

Cold eyes bored at him out of the cowled coverlet. The congenitally disaffected.

He looked up at the old woman. She gazed at the photograph through her delicately wired eyeglasses with that constrained serenity of the aged remembering and nothing more. Let me fix some tea, she said.

He lifted the slice of cake and bit into it and turned the page. The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.

Some curious person in the past with a penchant for deathbed studies has remembered to us this old man upreared among his stained coverlets, stale smell of death, wild arms and acrimony, addressing as he did kin long parted in a fevered apostrophe of invective. The nurse swore they spoke back. He listened, no ranting fool. ...

That’s Elizabeth again, said the old lady. That’s as old a picture as there is, I reckon. Between the mad hag’s face and this young girl a vague stellar drift, the wheeling of planets on their ether trunnions. Likenesses of lost souls haunt us from old chromos and tintypes brown with age. Bloodless skull and dry white hair, matriarchal meat drawn lean and dry on frail bone, a bitter refund ashen among silk and lilies by candlelight in a cold hall, black lacquered bier on sawhorses wound with crepe. I would not cry. My sisters cried.

Suttree turned up a tinted photograph of a satin lined wicker-bound casket with flower surrounds. In the casket a fat dead baby, garishly painted, bright fuchsia cheeks. Never ask whose. He closed the cover on this picturebook of the afflicted. A soft yellow dust bloomed. Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.

He came out on the bluff and went on up the hill toward the house. Came through the weeds upon a walkway of herringboned brick all but overgrown. Past cracked urns bedight with concrete flora, broad steps, tall fluted columns with their shattered paint. The immense and stark facade seemed to recoil before his footfalls.

Across the river, the rainy hodden landscape, he could see traffic going along the boulevard, locked in another age of which some dread vision had afforded him this lonely cognizance.

He emerged from the narrow back stairwell and came up the hall with slow tread over the weathersprung parquetry, past great doors of solid cherry split open in long fibrous cracks and plundered of their knobs and hardware. Into this drawing room with high plaster frieze and foliate scrollwork. Prolapsed and waterstained ceiling, the sagging coffers. He turned, a vain figure in the ruins. Blind parget cherubs watched from the high corners. Hello, he called. A voice that went from room to room and back again.

He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man’s flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, nightsoil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?

He moved along the hall toward the dining room. Paint on these old paneled doors crazed and yellowed like old porcelain. Something more than time has passed here. In this banquet hall. Scene of old heraldic feasts. Suttree in silent recognition of the somewhat illustrious dead.

It had grown cold in the night but he was numb with other weathers. An equinox in the heart, ill change, unluck. Suttree held his face in his hands. Child of darkness and familiar of small dooms. He himself used to wake in terror to find whole congregations of the uninvited attending his bed, protean figures slouched among the room’s dark corners in all multiplicity of shapes, gibbons and gargoyles, arachnoids of outrageous size, a batshaped creature hung by some cunning in a high corner from whence clicked and winked like bone chimes its incandescent teeth.

Suttree’s abandoned wife. She came down the steps slowly, madonna bereaved, so grief-stunned and wooden pieta of perpetual dawn, the birds were hushed in the presence of this gravity and the derelict that she had taken for the son of light himself was consumed in shame like a torch. She touched him as a blind person might. Deep in the floor of her welling eyes dead leaves scudding. Please go away, she said.

He sat in the dappled light among the stones. A bird sang. Some leaves were falling. He sat with his hands palm up on the grass beside him like a stricken puppet and he thought no thoughts at all.

The mother cried out and sank to the ground and was lifted up and helped away wailing. Stabat Mater Dolorosa. Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.

Richard, he said. Gray head goggling fowlwise on a scarious neck, turning. The soapfilled eyesockets. Hey Suttree. How you doin? Okay. How are you. Other’n bein froze I caint complain. The blind man cracked a squaloid smile all full of toothblack and breakfast scraps. Are you holding anything? Smile draining. Aye, gape those barren lightshorn eyeballs. What did you need, Sut? Let me have a dime. Richard sought about in a gray pocket. Here you go. Thanks Richard.

He moved down the counter to an empty stool and ordered coffee. Steaming cup of morning purgative. Ponderous white chipped cup with the sandy rim. Spectra winking, pinlets of oil atop impotable tarleachings. He brimmed the cup with cream. Beyond the steambleared windowpanes warped figures shrouded up in overcoats went wobbling past. He sipped the coffee.

The lightwires slung past in shallow convections pole to pole and the loneliness rode in his stomach like an egg.

Bell ching. This archaic craft grinding to a halt. People shuffling out through the folding door. A wet pneumatic hiss, clanking into motion once again. Your face among the brown bags old lady. Waiting to cross. Blinking at the transit of these half empty frames slapping past. Beyond in a yellowlit housewindow two faces fixed aspectant and forever in some domestic vagary. Rapid his progress who petrifies these innocents into stony history.

I give up on the newspapers, he said. Why’s that? I never read one but what somebody aint been murdered or shot or somethin such as that. I never knowed such a place for meanness. Was it ever any different? How’s that? I said was it ever any different. No. I reckon not. Well it’s always been in the papers hasnt it? Yes. I just give up on it is all. I get older I dont want to hear about it. People are funny. They dont want to hear about how nice everthing is. No no. They aint somebody murdered in the papers their day is a waste of time. I give it up myself. Seen it all. It’s all the same. Train wrecks of course. Natural catastrophe. A train wreck’ll make ye think about things.

Who the fuck are we fighting? said Suttree. Who the fuck cares? If he aint from McAnally bust him. And they are whelmed in dark riot, the smoking hall a no man’s land filled with lethal looking drunks reeling about with bleeding eyes and reeking of homemade whiskey. A scuffling of feet, fists thudding. Long endless crash of glass and chairs and overhead the intermittent whoosh of whiskey bottles crossing the room like mortar shells to explode on the block walls. A wave of bodies swept over Suttree. He struggled up. In the midst of it all he found Kenneth Tipton seemingly encased in a nimbus of peace, holding his wrist and working his hand open and shut. I’ve fucked up my hand, he said. Then he was swept away.

The emergency room was filled with people bleeding. Grumous battlers with misshapen heads. All watched over by hordes of police. They wheeled Suttree on. Bearing his pained bones in their boat of flesh. To where the deadcarriage waits in the dark. Perhaps the wrath of God after all.

Come on honey, the goatman said to the nanny that stood sleeping in the traces. She opened one eye, a cracked agate filled with sly goat sapience. The goatman patted her rump where bones reared up beneath the hide that you could hang a hat on. A puff of dust. She moved. They passed the policeman in a sedate trundling.

Take these, he said. Suttree took the cards. The cards were old but the goatman by the fire was not changed from him that posed upon them. Okay, said Suttree. Aint no need to rush off. What makes you think I was rushing off? I dont know. But you welcome to stay. I’d better get on. The goatman watched him. He was trudging out across the field with his chin down so that withdrawing in the firelight he looked like a headless revenant turned away from the warmth of men’s gatherings. Say, called the goatman. Suttree turned. You know if you had you a goat or two down here they’d be good company. You never would be lonely. What makes you think I’m lonely? said Suttree. The goatman smiled. I dont know, he said. I aint wrong.

You’d better bring some of this for Jones, he said. What’s got with him? He got beat up pretty bad down at the jail last week. I guess that’s why he wants to see you. He dont care nothin about that. He want to kill his enemies is what he want. Kill his enemies? Suttree had his head bent forward to let the water drip. Mm-hmm. Which enemies? Standing there by the chair where he sat her eyes were level with his. She looked at him. A face wherein lay everything and nothing. A visage hacked from cold black wax. She gestured with one hand, extending her arm and suggesting the world that stood beyond the thin board walls and beyond the locust forest, a gesture both grave and gracious that acknowledged endless armies of the unbending pale. That was all. She put a finger in her mouth to adjust her teeth.

It was late afternoon when he returned. He sat on the porch and watched the river pass. Before dark fell he rose and went up the river to Ab Jones’s. Two white men were drinking beer in the corner and Doll was frying hamburgers on the little burner in the galley. He went through the room and pushed back the curtain. The bed was empty. He pushed back the plastic shower curtain on the other side. Jones was standing at the urinal, bracing himself up with one hand against the wall. He was wearing a pair of khaki undershorts and even in the dim light from the small window, on the river Suttree saw such galaxies of scars and old rendings mended and slick and livid suture marks as made him gasp. He looked like some dusky movie monster patched up out of graveyard parts and stitched by an indifferent hand.