Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

motewenned

abbatoir.

billikin

third year on the river

slaverous

unpawled

young thighs and dingy drawers.

Faulkners compson girl

Bildad

The trees fell and fell down the lightly clouded summer sky.

Imagery. Moving Clouds

brailboat’s

The beer was cold and slightly bitter and very good.

Hemingway

What did you break in for?

Boy is a ficelle

cotyloid

ratchel

gorget.

She watched the snake, the tip of her thumb between her teeth.

A sole star to the north pale and constant, the old wanderer’s beacon burning like a molten spike that tethered fast the Small Bear to the turning firmament.

banjaxed

Unkempt baron, he ekes neither tariff nor toll.

See if you can cipher the names under the table, Richard. Richard looked at Suttree or almost at him. Names? he said. Under the table. He tapped with his knuckle. Richard ran a yellow hand beneath the marble slab, up among the twobyfours in which it sat. It’s a gravestone, he said.

William Callahan.

In the act is wedded the interior man and the man as seen.

he poured the coffee and stirred in milk from a can and sipped and blew and read of wildness and violence across the cup’s rim. As it was then, is now and ever shall.

hotjowled

Combo

reck

Archaic

he blew her a kiss and hunched his shoulders to say that it was cold and went up the steps. Now at noon each day he wakes to the gray light

Tense switch

Gatlinburg

Newfound Gap

Cumberland Avenue

Forest Avenue

claggy sleech

There were flowers in the dooryard, yellow jonquils tottering up through the cinders and loam.

And she was growing fatter.

They drove to Asheville North Carolina and spent four days at the Grove Park Inn,

they drove down to Concord,

On Simm’s hill they stood looking down at the lights of the city.

Glass flowers

See glass flowers in stella maris or the passenger

A beetle kept crashing into the windowscreen and dropping to the deck below to whirr and rise and crash again.

What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

He saw what was so how his sisters came down the steps in their black patentleather shoes and he rode in the car with his mouth on the molding of the rear window

See final scenes of Siddhartha. Faces.

Clayton said you better put that thing up.

Who is this

the little girl fell with it and it rolled on the floor and

Dead baby? His son?

Little Robert would kill Tarzan Quinn.

McKellar, Suttree said. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and pushed the paper back. She opened a ledger and held a pencil above it. Your name, she said. Suttree. Cornelius Suttree.

What, she said. A nephew? Yes. Nephew.

Aunt Alice?

I’m Buddy.

Grace’s son. Suttree smiled, son of Grace.

Does Mother come? Why she died in twenty-seven. Does Grace come to see you? Or Helen? Oh well. She shook her head and smiled. No. They dont come a whole lot. Does Martha? No. John comes much as anybody. He took me out. He took me out in his motorcar.

Sometimes I dont know what people’s lives are for. She looked at Suttree.