Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

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.

Here at the creek mouth the fields run on to the river, the mud deltaed and baring out of its rich alluvial harbored bones and dread waste, a wrack of cratewood and condoms and fruitrinds. Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox. A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and again the beached and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed and bluish or stale gray. Beyond in the dark the river flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas, running down out of the rain flattened corn and petty crops and riverloam gardens of upcountry land keepers, grating along like bonedust, afreight with the past, dreams dispersed in the water someway, nothing ever lost. Houseboats ride at their hawsers. The neap mud along the shore lies ribbed and slick like the cavernous flitch of some beast hugely foundered and beyond the country rolls away to the south and the mountains. 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 s...

The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing’s inside and can you guess his shape? Where he’s kept or what’s the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a timewarp, a carder of souls from the world’s nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his deadcart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just such wise that he’s invited in.

A curtain is rising on the western world. A fine rain of soot, dead beetles, anonymous small bones. The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted sockets of the interlocutor’s skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley. Fourfooted shapes go to and fro over the boards. Ruder forms survive.

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

Did you go over in town this morning? No, I never went. I been too poorly to go. What’s the matter? Lord I dont know. They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I’ll hug his neck. Well dont jump off the bridge. I wouldnt do it for nothin. They always seem to jump in hot weather. They’s worse weather to come, said the ragpicker. Hard weather. Be foretold. Did that girl come out to see you? Aint been nobody to see me. He was eating the beans from the tin with a brass spoon. I’ll talk to her again, said Suttree. Well. I wish ye’d get ye one of these here taters. Suttree rose. I’ve got to get on, he said. Dont rush off. Got to go. Come back. All right.

Death by drowning, the ticking of a dead man’s watch. The old tin clock on Grandfather’s table hammered like a foundry. Leaning to say goodbye in the little yellow room, reek of lilies and incense. 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.

There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.

From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I’ve salvaged not a word. In a dream I walked with my grandfather by a dark lake and the old man’s talk was filled with incertitude. I saw how all things false fall from the dead. We spoke easily and I was humbly honored to walk with him deep in that world where he was a man like all men.

If our dead kin are sainted we may rightly pray to them. Mother Church tells us so. She does not say that they’ll speak back, in dreams or out. Or in what tongue the stillborn might be spoken. More common visitor. Silent.

He in the limbo of the Christless righteous, I in a terrestrial hell.

know they dont like you, he doesnt. I dont blame you. It’s not your fault. I cant do anything.

Hey Suttree, they called. Goddamn, said J-Bone, surging from the bowels of the couch. He threw an arm around Suttree’s shoulders. Here’s my old buddy, he said. Where’s the whiskey? Give him a drink of that old crazy shit. How you doing, Jim? I’m doin everybody I can, where you been? Where’s the whiskey? Here ye go. Get ye a drink, Bud. What is it? Early Times. Best little old drink in the world. Get ye a drink, Sut. Suttree held it to the light. Small twigs, debris, matter, coiled in the oily liquid. He shook it. Smoke rose from the yellow floor of the bottle. Shit almighty, he said. Best little old drink in the world, sang out J-Bone. Have a drink, Bud. He unthreaded the cap, sniffed, shivered, drank. J-Bone hugged the drinking figure. Watch old Suttree take a drink, he called out. Suttree’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was holding the bottle out to whoever would take it. Goddamn. What is that shit? Early Times, called J-Bone. Best little old drink they is. Drink that and you wont feel a thing the next mornin. Or any morning. Whoo lord, give it here. Hello Early, come to your old daddy. Here, pour some of it in this cup and let me cut it with Coca-Cola. Cant do it, Bud. Why not? We done tried it. It eats the bottom out. Watch it Suttree. Dont spill none on your shoes.

Come in here, Worm, called J-Bone, Get ye a drink of this good whiskey. Hazelwood entered smiling and took the bottle. He tilted it and sniffed and gave it back. The last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out. I laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it, I had to burn my clothes. I had the dry heaves, the drizzlin shits, the cold shakes and the jakeleg. I can think about it now and feel bad. Hell Worm, this is good whusk. I pass.

Dim tavern, an alleymouth where ashcans gape and where in a dream I was stopped by a man I took to be my father, dark figure against the shadowed brick. I would go by but he has stayed me with his hand. I have been looking for you, he said. The wind was cold, dream winds are so, I had been hurrying. I would draw back from him and his bone grip. The knife he held severed the pallid lamplight like a thin blue fish and our footsteps amplified themselves in the emptiness of the streets to an echo of routed multitudes. Yet it was not my father but my son who accosted me with such rancorless intent.

High over the downriver land lightning quaked soundlessly and ceased. Far clouds rimlit. A brimstone light. Are there dragons in the wings of the world? The rain was falling harder, falling past him toward the river. Steep rain leaning in the lamplight, across the clock’s face. Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.

See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child’s heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of’s come to pass. Suttree began to cry nor could he stop it.

You smell like you been dipped in shit.

Boy why dont you get on down the road wherever you come from or was goin to one and leave me the son of a bitching hell alone?

He paused at some trash in a corner where a warfarined rat writhed. Small beast so occupied with the bad news in his belly. It must have been something you ate. Harrogate crouched on his heels and watched with interest. He prodded it gently with a curtainrod he’d found. From a doorway a girl watched him motionless and thin and unkempt. A crude doll dressed in rags with huge eyes darkly dished and guttering in her bird’s skull. Harrogate looked up and caught her watching him and she went all squirmy with her hands pulling at the raveled hem of her dress for a moment before her head snapped back and he could see a ropeveined claw clutched in her hair and the girl jerked backward and disappeared through an open door. He looked down at the rat again. It was moving one rear leg in slow circles as if to music. It must have felt some cold pneuma pass for it suddenly shivered and then it let out its feet slowly until they came to rest. Harrogate poked it with the curtainrod but the rat only rolled loosely in its skin. Fleas were running out at the lean gray face.

Hey boydove, you gettin any gravel for yo goose? Whoopla laughter scuttling after him and a gold tooth winksome, bawdy dogstar in the ordurous jaws of fellatio major.

He passed on. Eyes averted. Dark matrons at the upper windows in hot and airless dishabille, chocolate breasts leaning, Dusklovers. Ancillary disciples to the rise of night. He’d come from the dwellingstreets of whites to those of blacks and no gray middle folk did he see.

Charon

The black man now coalesced out of the semidark seemed to fill half the room. Where you from in the world, Youngblood, he said. Right here. Knoxville. Knoxville, he said. Old Knoxville town. She was clattering about in the back room. After a while she came from behind the curtain again and sat in her chair with her feet up.

On her broad face two intersecting circles, fairy ring or hagstrack, the crescent welts of flesh like a sacerdotal brand on some stone age matriarch.

insouciance.

said they was a rat the size of a housecat come out from under it just a shittin and a gettin it.

Trippin Through The Dew,

Gatemouth.

Gatemouth says a possum dont have a forked peter, Oceanfrog told the store. I never, said Gatemouth. I said he dont screw her in the nose. What’s his peter forked for then? Cause he’s a marsuperal, motherfucker. Oceanfrog laughed deep in the back of his throat. Shiny tombstone teeth, gums coral pink. Shit man, he said. You completely eat up with the dumb-ass. Ask Suttree. I dont know, said Suttree. He dont want the whole river to know what a fuckin dumb-ass you is, said Oceanfrog. He tipped the carton of milk and rifled a long drink down his dark throat. Who is that crazy motherfucker up in that house hollers at everbody? said Jabbo.

He sat in the corner and sipped a beer. Oceanfrog was sitting in for the house in a light poker game and Ab lay sleeping in the back room. Suttree heard him breathing in the dark when he went past his bedroom, going on to the cubicle behind the torn and stained plastic showercurtain, standing there half holding his breath, the boards in the reeking gloom splotched with a greenish phosphorescence, a sinister mold that glowed faintly. A section of galvanized gutterpipe sluiced the urine down to a rathole in the corner and out into the passing river. There was a small lizard of some kind wet and pale that clung to a naked stud and Suttree pissed on it and it wriggled out through a crack in the wall. He buttoned his trousers and spat into the trough. Reassessing the agility of germs in a sequence of them climbing falling water like salmon he wiped his mouth and selected a clean place on the wall and spat again. He sat with the back of his head against the board wall and his mind drifted. Moths crossed the mouth of the lamp in its scroll iron sconce above his head, the shape of the flame steadfast in the pietin reflector. On the ceiling black curds. Where insect shadows war. The reflection of the lamp’s glass chimney like a quaking egg, the zygote dividing. Giant spores addorsed and severing. Yawing toward separate destinies in their blind molecular schism. If a cell can be lefthanded may it not have a will? And a gauche will?

A preacher in shirtsleeves stood waistdeep in the water holding a young girl by the nose. He finished intoning his chant and tilted her over backwards into the river and held her there a moment and brought her up again all streaming and embarrassed and wiping the water from her eyes. The preacher was grinning. Suttree moved closer to watch. An old man nodded to him. Howdy. Howdy. The girl had nothing on beneath her thin dress and it clung wet and lascivious across her cold nipples and across her belly and thighs. You saved? said the old man. Suttree looked at the old man and the old man looked back with eyes smoky and opaque. No, he said. The old man unscrewed a jar of dark brown liquid he held in his lap and spat into it and put the lid back again and wiped his mouth. Say you aint? he said. No, Suttree said. He was watching the girl clamber out of the river. The old man nudged another near him. Here’s one aint saved. Says it hisself. This old man looked past the first one’s shoulder toward Suttree. Him? Aye. Been baptized? You been baptized? Just on the head. Just on the head, he says. That aint no good. It wont take if you dont get total nursin. That old sprinklin business wont get it, buddy boy.

You better get in that river is where you better get to, said the one in overalls. But Suttree knew the river well already and he turned his back to these malingerers and went on.

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

Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.

Well he come down from there and he said: See ary raincloud up there? and he said: Nary one. And he said: Better go on up there and look again, and he went on up there neighbors and he come back down again and he ast him again, said did he see ary sign of a raincloud and he told em no, said he’d not saw sign one, and he said: Well, better go on up there one more time, and he done it, went up there, and directly he come down again and he ast him, said: Is they ary raincloud up there now? and he said yes, said: They’s one up there about the size of ye hat, and he said: Well boy you better get off the mountain cause it’s a fixin to rain.

The driver smiled. He can lay it down, caint he. Suttree nodded. I like to hear old J Basil. He’s all the time sayin: Aint that right Mrs Mull. Old deep voice. And she’ll say: That’s right Mr Mull. You like to hear him? He’s all right, Suttree said.

Hello, he called. A voice that went from room to room and back again. Gods and fathers what has happened here, good friends where is there clemency?

They wait for the waterbearer to come but he does not come, and does not come. Suttree went out through the kitchen and through the ruined garden to the old road. Reprobate scion of doomed Saxon clans, out of a rainy day dream surmised. 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.

Is you prepared to compensate me for that there hog? Do what? Pay me. Pay ye. Now you got it right. Harrogate was still standing astraddle the deceased animal and now he unstood himself from over it and wiped his bloody hands down the side of his trouserlegs and looked up at the owner. How much? he said. Ten dollar. Ten dollar? It’d of brung ever cent of it. I aint got no ten dollars. Then I reckon you’ll have to work it out. Work it out? Work. It’s how most folks gets they livin. Them what aint prowlin other folks’ hogpens. What if I dont? I’ll law ye. Oh.

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

Child of darkness and familiar of small dooms. 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 hung by some cunning in a high corner from whence clicked and winked like bone chimes its incandescent teeth.

How surely are the dead beyond death. 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.

Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.

Jabbo pressed the bottle against his chest. Suttree raised his hand and gently put the bottle from him. The only sound in the store was the rusty creak of the damper swinging in the tin flue with the wind’s suck. It’s Thanksgiving man. Have a little drink. The bottle was at his chest again. You better get that bottle out of my face, Suttree said. You askin or tellin. I said get it out of my face. This aint Gay Street, motherfucker. I know what street I’m on. Maybe you better get off those red devils.

Suttree with his miles to go kept his eyes to the ground, maudlin and muttersome in the bitter chill, under the lonely lamplight.

Outside it had grown almost dark and a cat appeared at the clerestory window and whined. You caint get in that way, idjit, the old man called. You come to the door like everbody else. When I was young I didnt care for nothin, he continued. I was always easy in the world. Saw a right smart of it. Never cared to go just wherever. How did you happen to end up here? I aint ended yet. Used to hobo a right smart. Back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I’d been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue lookin and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees goin by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I’m goin to tell you you’ll think peculiar but it’s the god’s truth. That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont ...

The man with the floorbuffer washed up nearby. The buffer rose trembling above the crowd. It came down on no head but Suttree’s. He felt the vertebrae in his neck crack. The room and all in it turned white as noon. His eyes rolled up in his head and his bowels gave way. He distinctly heard his mother say his name. He was standing with his knees locked and his hands dangling and the blood pouring down into his eyes. He could not see.

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.

Jesus wept over Lazarus, said the goatman. It dont say it, but I reckon Lazarus might of wept back when he seen himself back in this vale of tears after he’d done been safe and dead four days. He must of been in heaven. Jesus wouldnt of brought one back from hell would he?