Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis. Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years.

The buildings stamped against the night are like a rampart to a farther world forsaken, old purposes forgot. Countrymen come for miles with the earth clinging to their shoes and sit all day like mutes in the marketplace. This city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad. A carnival of shapes upreared on the river plain that has dried up the sap of the earth for miles about.

Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just such wise that he’s invited in.

Are you still fishin? Yeah. What made you take that up? I dont know, Suttree said. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

In my father’s last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.

Believing this ghastly circus reconvened elsewhere for alltime. He in the limbo of the Christless righteous, I in a terrestrial hell.

It’s him. I hope it is. I’d hate to think of there bein two of em.

Harrogate grinned uneasily. They tried to get me for beast, beast … Bestiality? Yeah. But my lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast. He was a smart son of a bitch. Oh boy, said Suttree.

Sly, rat-faced, a convicted pervert of a botanical bent. Who would do worse when in the world again.

Maggeson was already on the river when he set forth, standing like some latterday Charon skulling through the fog. With a long pole he hooked condoms aboard and into a pail of soapy water.

I goin to slap his head sideways he dont get off of me. He hollers at everbody. I aint everbody. He’s a cripple. He’ll be crippled.

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.

Your old man called me, he said. He wanted you to call home. People in hell want ice water.

No one cares. It’s not important. That’s where you’re wrong my friend. Everything’s important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he’s a small town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted out bum. You might even understand that some day. I dont say you will. You might.

Suttree’s abandoned child dies and a family friend drives him out of town.

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.

What’s happening? he said. We’re waiting on that five oclock beer. The fucking car’s on fire. We’re tryin to get warm, Cabbage, said J-Bone.

I had three and it was three too many. He squinted his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. The good book says that there’ll be seven women for every man. Well somebody else can have my other four what about you?

I got hit by a bus. Again? Smokehouse nodded, looking down at the floor, sweeping futilely at the trash. Doesnt it hurt? said Suttree. Some.

Some people aint worth a shit rich or poor and that’s all you can say about em. But I never knowed a man that had it all but what he didnt forget where he come from.

You see a man, he scratchin to make it. Think once he got it made everthing be all right. But you dont never have it made. Dont care who you are. Look up one mornin and you a old man. You aint got nothin to say to your brother. Dont know no more’n when you started.

Well, that’s what it’s for. I dont care to tell you because they aint nobody else but me could figure out the rest of it. I’m sure that’s true, the chemist said.

Bats had begun to drop everywhere from the heavens. Little leatherwinged creatures struggling in the river. Harrogate oaring among them.

Gene harrowgate beings air feeding bats strychnine in order to fraudulently cash in on rabid bats.

Mr Harrogate, the city is offering a reward for any dead bats found in the streets. We have what could become a critical situation here with rabies. That’s the purpose of the reward. We have not authorized the wholesale slaughter of bats.

What would you say to him? Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: What’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together. Suttree smiled. What do you think he’ll say? The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer.

You should of come alone, she said. She still had her eyes shut and Suttree thought that she was talking to Jones but when she opened them she was looking at him.

Date is real and the fortune teller draws a bade fate for Jones and Suttree.

Give over, Graymalkin, there are horsemen on the road with horns of fire, with withy roods. He ran among the crowds dodging and veering. The jar of his heels on the pavement kept stopping the fans that spun above the shop doors.

He made a fire beneath a shelf of rock and watched a storm close over the valley down there, ragged hot wires of lightning quaking in the dusk like voltage in some mad chemist’s chambers. Rain fell, leaves fell, slantwise and wild, a silver storm blowing down the eaves of the world.

That night he did not even make a fire. He crouched like an ape in the dark under the eaves of a slate bluff and watched the lightning. Down there in the wood the birchtrunks shone palely and troops of ghost cavalry clashed in an outraged sky, old spectral revenants armed with rusted tools of war colliding parallactically upon each other like figures from a mass grave shorn up and girdled and cast with dread import across the clanging night and down remoter slopes between the dark and darkness yet to come.

Suttree’s fever dream in GSMNP

The storm moved off to the north. Suttree heard laughter and sounds of carnival. He saw with a madman’s clarity the perishability of his flesh. Illbedowered harlots were calling from small porches in the night, in their gaudy rags like dolls panoplied out of a dirty dream. And along the little ways in the rain and lightning came a troupe of squalid merrymakers bearing a caged wivern on shoulderpoles and other alchemical game, chimeras and cacodemons skewered up on boarspears and a pharmacopoeia of hellish condiments adorning a trestle and toted by trolls with an eldern gnome for guidon who shouted foul oaths from his mouthhole and a piper who piped a pipe of ploverbone and wore on his hip a glass flasket of some smoking fuel that yawed within viscid as quicksilver.

With the change he bought a candy bar and he sat alone on a bench in the empty waiting room in his blanket eating the candy in micesized bites and reading from a black leatherette copy of the Book of Mormon he found in a pamphlet rack. The candy he managed to get down but the words of the book swam off the page eerily and he thought he’d never read a stranger tale.

You the only man I ever saw could sleep standing up. An enormous set of teeth appeared and a strong black hand gripped his forearm. Hey fish man. Naw you wrong. Black man taught it to the mule. You think I could learn it? You might if they wouldnt let you set down nowheres.

I just wondered. Gene says you’re real smart. Who, Harrogate? Yeah. Well. Some people are smarter than others.

The last word came out lie. The roar of the pistol in his face chopped it off and the size of the silence that followed was enormous.

Callahan dies

When’s he comin back? I dont know. I had a letter from him said he was working as an assembler. He said every morning he assembles his ass in a corner and watches the proceedings for eight hours.

Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight? They’d listen to my death. No final word? Last words are only words. You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell. I’d say I was not unhappy.

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.

Hey Bud. Hey. It is my old J-Bone and no other.

J bone returns and saves suttree

Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees. I was drunk, cried Suttree.

They’re tearing everything down, Suttree said. Yeah. Expressway.

The driver closed the door and motioned with his hand and the ambulance pulled away. The boys watched them go. Shit, one said. Old Suttree aint dead.

The boy smiled and stepped back. A car had stopped for Suttree, he’d not lifted a hand. Let’s go, said the driver.

An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood. Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.