Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.

Manifesting their destiny, you could say

The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea?

He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face.

He lay there in his yellow socks with the flies crawling on the blanket and one hand stretched out on the grass. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist as some folks do or used to and as Suttree passed he noticed with a feeling he could not name that the dead man’s watch was still running.

They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I’ll hug his neck.

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies.

He arched his neck to tell to me some thing. I never heard. He wheezed my name, his grip belied the frailty of him. His caved and wasted face. The dead would take the living with them if they could, I pulled away.

But I’m not like you. I’m not like him. I’m not like Carl. I’m like me. Dont tell me who I’m like.

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.

The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will.

Ah hell nah not the moonlight melonmounter sobbb

The child buried within him walked here one summer

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

Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?

Something more than time has passed here. In this banquet hall.

Old paint on an old sign said dimly to keep out. Someone must have turned it around because it posted the outer world. He went on anyway. He said that he was only passing through.

I always figured they was a God. Yes. I just never did like him.

Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

That’s where you’re wrong my friend. Everything’s important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important.

What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering?

Uneasy sleeper you will live to see the city of your birth pulled down to the last stone.

What’s your name? said Suttree. The Indian turned and looked back. Michael, he said. Is that what they call you? He turned again. No, he said. They call me Tonto or Wahoo or Chief. But my name is Michael.

The wick toppled and dropped with a thin hiss and dark closed over him so absolute that he became without boundary to himself, as large as all the universe and small as anything that was.

A dark hand had scooped the spirit from his breast and a cold wind circled in the hollow there.

He was seized with a thing he’d never known, a sudden understanding of the mathematical certainty of death. He felt his heart pumping down there under the palm of his hand. Who tells it so? Could a whole man not author his own death with a thought? Shut down the ventricle like the closing of an eye?

He closed his eyes and opened them and looked again. He was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it sudden love.

He heard the mother calling out. Oh God, she cried. Suttree heard it with sickness at heart, this calling on. She meant for God to answer.

Did you ever know anybody to be so bad about luck? Suttree said he had. He said that things would get better. The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I’m satisfied they caint get no worse, he said. But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so.

looking out on a wild white upland world as old as any thing that was and not unlike it might have looked a million years ago.

He could see an old man washing at a sink, pale arms and a small paunch hung in his undershirt. Suttree toasted him a mute toast, a shrug of the glass, a gesture indifferent and almost cynical that as he made it caused him something close to shame.

He surveyed the face in the mirror, letting the jaw go slack, eyes vacant. How would he look in death? For there were days this man so wanted for some end to things that he’d have taken up his membership among the dead, all souls that ever were, eyes bound with night.

What happened to your cat? said Suttree. Shit if I know. Seems like when the shit hits the fan they all clear out. Even the goddamn cat.