Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

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.

The uncle narrowed his eyes at Suttree. No need to get on your high horse with me, he said. At least I was never in the goddamned penitentiary. Suttree smiled. The workhouse, John. It’s a little different. But I am what I am.

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.

This is the house where the dead lived. It is gone, lost and gone.

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.

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.

Why did Jesus weep? said Suttree. Eh? He pointed up at the sign. Why did Jesus weep? Dont know scriptures? Some. He wept over folks workin on Sundays. Suttree smiled.

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.

Everywhere hung portraits of blacks, strange family groups where the faces watched gravely from out of their paper past. Hanging in the dark like galleries of condemned.

Recurrences of dreams he’d had in the mountains came and went and the second night he woke from uneasy sleep and lay in the world alone.

The girls emerged in their carboncopy dresses and the boy came out of the woods stiffly and looking churlish and sullen and strange, like a child pervert.

Suttree stalked off to find the boy. I just come from there, the boy said. Well get your ass up cause you’re going again. They aint no need to cuss about it, the boy said. It Sunday and all.

He found Reese asleep in a wrecked car behind the cabins. Suttree shook him gently awake into a world he wanted no part of. The old man fought it.

You’re not the only one that’s right. The ragman looked up warily. We’re all right, said Suttree. We’re all fucked, said the ragman.

It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain. He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so.

The roar of the pistol in his face chopped it off and the size of the silence that followed was enormous.

He had been shot through the head with a .32 caliber pistol and he was twenty-one years old forever.

He was shot in a fracas of some kind. Long fore he married. Come near dyin. So I always wondered about that, had he died none of us would never have been at all and I never could … Well, that’s a funny thing to think. Maybe we would have just been somebody else.

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.

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.