Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

the far shore

The father drives the cart, the dog runs after. Strapped to the tailboard the rotting boxes stained with earth that hold the bones of the elders.

See faulkner as i lay dying

A dry dust sifts from the seams in the boards as they jostle up the road

Intruder in the dust

His little grotto glowed with a hellish red from the lanterns and he reclined on the mattress and scratched himself and picked his teeth with a long yellow fingernail.

Cannery row

He ushered in his guest expansively. How you like it, Sut?

Dont pint ye fanger ye’ll scare him. You pointed. Thatn’s eyes was shut. Hush now.

What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman.

cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am.

the wrath he suckled at his heart has wasted more than years.

nameless who arrived home in wooden boxes

We could not believe he was inside. Cold and dry it was, our shoes cried in the snow all the way home.

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.

Are you still fishin? Yep. You want a job? Nope. Clayton shook the ice in his glass. You’re a funny son of a bitch,

a gout of foam

the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life.

The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?

The master wipes his fingers in his hair and his rising says that the feast is done.

Hates father

Reprobate scion of doomed Saxon clans, out of a rainy day dream surmised.

Only Sut remains

an old sign said dimly to keep out. Someone must have turned it around because it posted the outer world. He went on anyway.

blue flame and a hot crackle of burnt feathers

Electrocuting pigeons

Another day pigs.

The great pig chase

The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him.

Abrupt tense change

In the trees small victims struggle, toad or shrewlet among the thorns where they have been impaled and the shrike who put them there trills from a nearby lightwire and it has begun to rain again.

The hawk that failed. Weak talons. Brains evolve. Neanderthal loses out to sapiens

I aint no infidel. Dont pay no mind to what they say. No. I always figured they was a God. Yes. I just never did like him.

Who’s dead, Jim? He didnt look up. Your little boy, he said.

polewires sewing tirelessly the night beyond the cold windowglass.

Wires give movement. Several examples of this. In othet books as well.

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

See alicias hallucinations stella maris. The horde.

The gray steel trusses of a bridge went past, went past, went past.

Remorse lodged in his gorge like a great salt cinder.

The dread in his heart was a thing he’d not felt since he feared his father in the aftermath of some child’s transgression.

the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

Stabat Mater Dolorosa.

The sorrowful mother was standing.

Someone touched his shoulder. When he looked up there was no one there.

sank it into the loose dirt and hefted it and sent a load of clods rattling over the little coffin.

Fills his dead sons grave by himself

I’ve got two daughters, oldest fourteen, and I’d see them both in hell fore I’d send them up to that university. I’m damned if I wouldnt.

Does sut teach there?

The stripling on the stool beside him with his heron’s legs dangling smelled like a smoked jockstrap. Even the waitress’s eyes went a little funny when she passed and she herself no rosegarden.

these half addled aged and rumsoaked dotards

loneliness rode in his stomach like an egg.

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.

Images again. See stella maris re images before language. Dreams. Prehistory. Unconscious subconscious.

Long leatherpadded kneebenches underfoot. Where rows of hemorrhoidal dwarfs convene by night.

???

alchimia

lampions.

In the sculptor’s art there always remains something unsaid,

dracular

deathreek

skippers.

athanasia

I’ve seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death.

Harrogate began to tunnel toward the vaults underground where the city’s wealth was kept.

spelaean