Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

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. You have nothing. It may be the last shall be first. Do you believe that? No. What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. 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. Suttree’s cameo visage in the black glass watched him across his lamplit shoulder. He leaned and blew away the flame, his double, the image overhead. The river spooled past dark and silent. A truck droned on the bridge. All that season on the river he had warrant to remember in the toils of his trade old days of rain on the window and warmth in the bed with her body and how her eyes rolled back in her head like a turkish beggar’s with just the bluish whites shining under the slotted lids and her tongue protruding while she seized her knees and cried out and fell back. Lying there on the drenched sheets like a suicide. Till she could flutter back to life and slur sweet lies into his...

Suttree tapped at the dosshouse door.

Did you really remember me? I couldnt remember my bear’s name. He had corduroy feet. My mother used to sew him up. She gave you sandwiches and apples. Gypsies used to come to the door. We were afraid of them. My sisters’ bears were Mischa and Bruin. I cant remember mine. I tried but I cant.

The keeper of this brief vigil said that he’d guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sandbags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.

Did you ask? About the crapgame? What are you doing in bed with your shoes on?

You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.

I can walk, said Suttree. You can walk, she said. But you caint see where you goin. Can you? To know what will come is the same as to make it so.

Crooning a low threnody to her pawky trade. She said: Aint no common fire can cruciate a groundpuppy.

Ye’ll shit through the eye of a needle at thirty paces.

He felt a laying on of hands, dry claws divesting him. A clammy fear clogged his heart. Unknowing if his eyes saw or saw not. They seemed lidless and opened or closed beheld things all the same. His own hand put out to save him seemed to sink in a nameless mucilage and he lay like a moth in a web. Dust fell from her, her eyes rolled wetly in the red glow from the fireplace. A dried black and hairless figure rose from her fallen rags, the black and shriveled leather teats like empty purses hanging, the thin and razorous palings of the ribs wherein hung a heart yet darker, parchment cloven to the bones, spindleshanked and bulbed of joint. Black faltress, portress of hell-gate. None so ready as she. Her long fiat nipples swung above him. Black and crepey skin of her neck, the plaguey mouth upon him. A gray and handstitched scar flickered in the light. Where she’d survived some murder. Tin figures, the toadstone, dragged on his chest where they hung from her neck by plaited horsehair strands. In the yard he heard a bird scream. They are not rooks in those obsidian winter trees but stranger fowl, pale lean and salamandrine birds that move by night unburnt through the moon’s blue crucible. Suttree craned his neck to breathe. Dead reek of aged female flesh, a stale aridity. Dry wattled nether lips hung from out the side of her torn stained drawers. Her thighs spread with a sound of rending ligaments, dry bones dragging in their sockets. Her shriveled cunt puckered open like a mou...

bier

he was lifted in his father’s arms to see how quietly the dead lay.

Suddenly Suttree sat upright. He saw in a small alcove among flowers the sleeping doll, the white bonnet, the lace, the candlelight. Come upon in their wanderings through the vast funeral hall. And the little girl took the thing from its cradle and held it and rocked it in her arms and Clayton said you better put that thing up. She took it through the halls crooning it a lullaby, the long lace burial dress trailing behind her to the floor and Suttree following and a woman saw them pass in the hall and called softly upon God before she ran from the room and someone cried out: You bring that thing here. And they ran down the hall and the little girl fell with it and it rolled on the floor and a man came out and took it away and the little girl was crying and she said that it was just lying in there by itself and the little boy was much afraid.

In the madhouse the walls reek with the odors of filth and terminal ills they’ve soaked up these hundred years.

He felt himself being drawn into modes for which he had neither aptitude nor will. They were both watching him. The tears were gone. Their eyes seemed filled with expectation and he’d nothing to give. He’d come to take. He pulled away from them and they leaned toward him with their veined old hands groping at the emptiness.

the black had begun to come erect with a strength and grace contrived out of absolute nothingness and Suttree said: Ab, and the black said: Go on.

Gnostic workmen who would have down this shabby shapeshow that masks the higher world of form. And left at eventide these cutaway elevations, little cubicles giving onto space, an iron bedstead, a freestanding stairwell to nowhere.

Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears.

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.