Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

I’d hate to get to heaven and then get recalled what about you? I guess so. You can bet I intend to ask him when I see him. Ask who? Jesus. You’re going to ask Jesus about Lazarus? Sure. Wouldnt you? Oh I intend to have some questions for him. I’m goin to be talkin to hi...

Say, called the goatman. Suttree turned. You know if you had you a goat or two down here they’d be good company. You never would be lonely. What makes you think I’m lonely? said Suttree. The goatman smiled. I dont know, he said. I aint wrong.

Hey Sut, he called. Suttree raised up in his bunk and looked out. He saw a hand from the river holding onto the houseboat deck. He rolled out and went to the door and around and stood there in his shorts looking down at the city rat. Slick aint it? said Harrogate. Can you swim? This time tomorrow you will be talkin to a wealthy man. Or a drowned one. Where the hell did you get that thing? Made it. Me and old drunk Harvey. Good God, said Suttree. What do you think of it? I think you’re fucking crazy. You want to go for a ride? No. Come on, I’ll ride ye. Gene, I wouldnt get in that thing and it on dry land.

Suttree sat up in his folding chair. Bats had begun to drop everywhere from the heavens. Little leatherwinged creatures struggling in the river. Harrogate oaring among them.

Here a sallow plaster Christ. Agonized beneath his muricate crown. Spiked palms and riven belly, there beneath the stark ribs the cleanlipped spear-wound. His caved haunches loosely girdled, feet crossed and fastened by a single nail. To the left his mother. Mater alchimia in skyblue robes, she treads a snake with her chipped and naked feet. Before her on the altar gutter two small licks of flame in burgundy lampions. In the sculptor’s art there always remains something unsaid, something waiting. This statuary will pass. This kingdom of fear and ashes. Like the child that sat in these selfsame bones so many black Fridays in terror of his sins. Viceridden child, heart rotten with fear. Listening to the slide shoot back in the confessional, waiting his turn. Light pierced, light fell from the pieced and leaded glass of the windows in the western wall, light moteless and oblique, wine colors, rose magenta, leached cobalt, cinnabar and delicate citrine. The stainedglass saints lay broken in their panes of light among the pews and in the summer afternoon quietude a smell of old varnish and the distant cries of children in a playground. Memories of May processions, a priest in a black biretta rising from his carved oak faldstool to shuffle heavyfooted down the aisle attended by churlish and acnefaced striplings. The censer swings in chains, clinks back and forth, at the apex of each arc coughing up a quick gout of smoke. The priest dips the aspergillum in a gold bucket. He casts...

Suttree looked up at the ceiling where a patriarchal deity in robes and beard lurched across the cracking plaster. Attended by thunder, by fat infants with dovewings grown from their shoulderbones. He lowered his head to his chest. He slept. A priest shook him gently. He looked up into a bland scented face. Were you waiting for confession? No. The priest looked at him. Do I know you? he said. Suttree placed one hand on the pew in front of him. An old woman was going along the altar rail with a dusting rag. He struggled to his feet. No, he said. You dont know me. The priest stepped back, inspecting his clothes, his fishstained shoes. I just fell asleep a minute. I was resting. The priest gave a little smile, lightly touched with censure, remonstrance gentled. God’s house is not exactly the place to take a nap, he said. It’s not God’s house. I beg your pardon? It’s not God’s house. Oh? Suttree waved his hand vaguely and stepped past the priest and went down the aisle. The priest watched him. He smiled sadly, but a smile for that.

I’ve seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death. He might hear you, Suttree said. I wisht he would, said the ragpicker. He glared out across the river with his redrimmed eyes at the town where dusk was settling in. As if death might be hiding in that quarter. No one wants to die. Shit, said the ragpicker. Here’s one that’s sick of livin. Would you give all you own? The ragman eyed him suspiciously but he did not smile. It wont be long, he said. An old man’s days are hours. And what happens then? When? After you’re dead. Dont nothin happen. You’re dead. You told me once you believed in God. The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could. 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.

The matches that he struck periodically to test the air burned with an acetylene blue and he’d watch the flame draw down the matchstem and wink out and the darkness would hood him almost audibly. Sitting there with his thumb on the button of the flashlight and listening until the terror rose up in his throat and then pushing the button and creating again the filthy basilica in which he sat, the batclotted arches, the high amorphous convolutions of limestone from which scum dripped. Gray sewage percolating down through faults and bedding planes. Dark leachings from the city’s undersides and speleothems accresced out of some grim slime quietly oozing in the dark.

Dynamite,

Little girls in flowered frocks went tripping out through stiles of sunlight and their destination was darkness as is each soul’s.

Have you seen Harrogate?

The city mouse?

I got a old dog stobbed up in my slopbarrel, said Rufus.

He crouched in the smallest cup of light with his hands joined at the back of the flame as if he would gather it to him. Hot oil ran on the stones. 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.

He searched the underground until he thought it must be evening and when he emerged again at the foot of the cistern he was surprised to find the day hardly half spent.

He looked like something that might leap up and scurry off down a hole. Suttree squatted in front of him and looked him over. How about gettin that light out of my eyes, said Harrogate.

These things lay shapen still and final upon the black damask and the dark gospeler of their constellation who would in moments now postulate the denial of the old lie that beholder and beheld are ever more than one, this dusky fugitive of the pyre with whom they trafficked studied the figures briefly and looked away.

The jar of his heels on the pavement kept stopping the fans that spun above the shop doors.

mucronate

When they were building the highway through the mountains a horseman came this way along the river, the gravel peppering the water behind the horse’s heels and the horse lined out lean and flat and the rider wide-eyed with the reins clutched. Two boys fishing from the bridge watched him clatter down and pass beneath. They crossed to the other side of the bridge to see him go but the horse was downriver with the stirrups kicking out loose and it ran riderless out on the gravel bar and into the river in an explosion of steam. A pale breadth of buckskin flank turning in the cold green pool. The rider did not appear. They found him dangling by his skull from a steel rod that jutted from the new masonry, swinging slightly, his hands at his sides and his eyes slightly crossed as if he would see what was the nature of this thing that had skewered his brains.

The spruce trees stood black and bereaved of dimension in the shadow of the high cloven draws, against the sky processional and nunlike ascending in the dusk.

One day in the full light of autumn noon he saw an elvish apparition come from the woods and go down the trail before him half ajog and worried of aspect.

The water sang in his head like wine. He sat up. A green and reeling wall of laurel and the stark trees rising. Articulating in the slight lift of the forest wind some arboreal mute’s alphabet. Pins of light near blue were coming off the stones. Suttree felt a deep and chilling lassitude go by nape and shoulderblades. He slumped and crossed his wrists in his lap. He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth’s core sucking his bones, a moment’s giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus. His fingers clutched up wet handfuls from the bar, polished lozenges of slate, small cold and mascled granite teardrops. He let them fall through his fingers in a smooth clatter. He could feel the oilless turning of the earth beneath him and the cup of water lay in his stomach as cold as when he drank it.

drop of rain sang on a stone. Bell loud in the wild silence.

In these silent sunless galleries he’d come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who’d been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he’d be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever.

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. A vision in lightning and smoke more palpable than wortled bone or plate or pauldron shelled with rot. 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. A mesosaur followed above on a string like a fourlegged garfish heliumfilled. A tattered gonfalon embroide...

Begone I say, said Suttree, shucking the tattered blanket at him. Why you dipshit idjit if anybody begones anywhere it’ll be you with a arrowbolt up your skinny ass. Suttree batted his eyes. Are you real? he said. Damned if you aint beyond the bend in a queer road. Where’d you up from anyways? From over the mountain. What are you, a yankee or somethin? I’ll tell you what I’m not. What’s that? A figment. I’m not a figment. A what? A figment. A frigging figment. He crooned a weird laugh. The hunter stared at him.

In his darker heart a nether self hulked above cruets of ratsbane, a crumbling old grimoire to hand, androleptic vengeances afoot for the wrongs of the world.

Bryson City North Carolina.

The old bird’s eyes honed by past injustices to a glint just between suspicion and outrage swept over him and to the wall.

The imago does not eat, he told the plate mutteringly. Fuck it. He let the fork fall and looked up at the waitress.

Could a whole man not author his own death with a thought?

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.

Where’s your stick? said Hoghead. You caint go around lookin like that and no stick to beat the women off with.

Through old classrooms, the dusty clutter of desks. On the blackboards scrawled obscenities. A derelict school for lechers. Suttree had been sitting at his old desk for some time before he noticed the figure standing in the door. This old bedroom in this old house where he’d been taught a sort of christian witchcraft had two doors and Suttree rose and went out the other one. He descended the front steps and went to the fireplace where he lifted back the iron mask and on one knee reached up the chimney throat and took down a small billikin carved from some soft wood and detailed with a child’s crayon. When he came past the stairway the priest was mounted on the first landing like a piece of statuary. A catatonic shaman who spoke no word at all.

Suttree went out the way that he’d come in, crossing the grass toward the lights of the street. When he looked back he could see the shape of the priest in the baywindow watching like a paper priest in a pulpit or a prophet sealed in glass.

Cornelius.

Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death.

He spent his days in the poorer quarters of the town seeking out some place with steam heat where he could winter cheaply.

In the gray dawn he felt alien and not unhappy

Anybody seeing him all that forewinter long going about the sadder verges of the city might have rightly wondered what his trade was, this refugee reprieved from the river and its fishes.

and past old brick apartments where in upper windowcorners a white hand might wipe the glass and glazed in the sash a painted face appear, some wizened whoreclown, will you come up, do you dare? He never. Maybe once.

Newsboys were putting forth with wagons through the murk, old feral fathers wading in the surf of older dawns to launch their tarred boats on some dark and ropy shoal.

One evening coming out of May’s cafe and heading toward the B&J he passed two women sailing along in the other direction. He turned around and followed them back in. They spoke with yankee accents a jivy kind of talk he thought he’d listen to and he took the booth behind them and ordered a beer. Before he’d taken a sip of it one of them turned and fixed him with an up and down look of brazen appraisal. What’s happening in this town? she said. Suttree hung his arm over the back of the booth and looked at them. Not much, he said. Where you all from? Chicago.

We’re hustlers, she said. But we wont hustle you.

Her hot spiced tongue fat in his mouth and her hands all over him like the very witch of fuck.

Ah he’s back, God spare his blackened soul, another hero home from the whores. Come to cool his heels in the river with the rest of the sewage. Sunday means nothing to him. Infidel. Back for the fishing are ye? God himself dont look too close at what lies on that river bottom. Fit enough for the likes of you. Ay. He knows it’s Sunday for he’s drunker than normal. It’ll take more than helping old blind men cross the street to save you from the hell you’ll soon inhabit. Suttree went on toward the street with his fingers in his ears.

He entered a scene of old memories and new desolations.

an uneasy peace came over him, a strange kind of contentment.

A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him: