Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

He woke in the logy heat of full summer noon with the sun beating on the tin roof above him and raising a sour smell out of the old wood of the cabin. He could hear the howl of the saws in the lumbermill across the river and he could hear the intermittent scream of swine come under the knacker’s hand at the packing company. He turned his face to the wall and opened one eye. Watched through a split in the sunriven boards the slow brown neap of the passing river. After a while he struggled up, blinking in the dusty slats of sunlight that sliced through the hot murk. He tottered erect onto the floor in the trousers he’d slept in and made his way to the door and stepped out, scratching his naked belly, watching the boards for stray fish hooks as he went barefoot toward the rail.

It is little more than dawn when the general comes down Front Street slumped on the box of his coalwagon, the horse named Golgotha hung between the trees and stumbling along in the cold with his doublejointed knees and his feet clopping and the bright worn quoits winking feebly among the clattering spokes. In the whipsocket rides a bent cane. There is a gap in the iron of one tire and above the meaningless grumbling of the wagon it clicks, clicks, with a clocklike persistence that tolls progress, purpose, the passage of time.

They come trundling and slowly aclatter up the empty street, pass under the bridge and take the bitter and frozen fields toward the river. In the hoarcolored dawn they seem to be drifting, closed away in the cold smoke until just the general’s shoulders and the slouched back of him with his hat perched on the shoulders of his clothes and the hat the horse wore float over the cold gray void like transient artifacts from a polar dream.

Suttree cleared a small window in the frosted glass and peered out at the few figures receding along the walks. Fellow citizens in this bewintered city. A passing rack of hot neon washed his own sad countenance from the glass. He leaned his head against the cold pane, watching pedestrians toil from pool to pool of lamplight, trailing wisps of vapor, bent figures, homebound.

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. Well it’s always been in the papers hasnt it? Yes. I just give up on it is all. I get older I dont want to hear about it. People are funny. They dont want to hear about how nice everthing is. No no. They aint somebody murdered in the papers their day is a waste of time.

Jones wiped his mouth. Let me tell you about some people, he said. 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. I dont know what it does. I had a friend in this town I stood up for him when he got married. I’d give him money when he was comin up. Used to take him to the wrestlin matches, he was just a kid. He’s a big man now. Drives a Cadillac. He dont know me. I got no use for a man piss backwards on his friends.

There was no one in the Huddle save a few whores and weird Leonard, pale and pimpled part-time catamite. They were sitting at the black table drinking beer and sharing ribald tales oft told and partly true of Johns and tricks.

A garrulous jocko was miming buggery behind a young black girl passing on the walk and she turned on him with hot eyes and he fled laughing. The gallery of indolents draped among trashcans and curbstones pointed and croaked. Give it to you mammy, she told them, and the black mummer mimed masturbation at her, two hands holding an imagined phallus the size of a lightpole while the watchers hooted and slapped their knees. To Suttree they appeared more sinister and their acts a withershins allegory of anger and despair, clutches of the iniquitous and unshriven howling curses at the gates and calling aloud for redress of their right damnation to a god who need be interceded with bassackwards or obliquely.

You aint got a little drink laid back anywheres have ye? I may have a beer about half warm. You want that? Be better’n a poke in the eye with a stick.

He caught her up just beyond the edge of the trees. She was all over him. It was raining lightly and they were both wet. She was naked under her blanket. It fell in a dark pool about her feet. In which he knelt, rain dripping from her nipples, runneling thinly on her pale belly. With his ear to the womb of this child he could hear the hiss of meteorites through the blind stellar depths.

A thin and fragrant arm descended on Suttree’s shoulder in a taffeta whisper, a cufflink coined from a bicycle reflector. An African mask in meretricious harlequinade and ivory teeth beset with gold. Hey baby, where you been so long? Hello John. Just around. I been out of town myself. Where’ve you been? I’s in Lexington. I seen James Herndon. Sweet Evenin Breeze. She just beautiful, for her age. Who’s the oldest? Oldest what? You or her. Him. It. Hush. That thing is sixty. How old are you, John? Trippin Through The Dew ignored the question. He said: You know what they goin to put in the paper when she die? Big headlines. What’s that. They done got it all ready. Sweet Evenin Breeze Blows No More. Suttree grinned. The invert was bent double holding himself, his face squinched. He whinnied like a she horse. What are they going to say about you John? Sheeit. I aint goin to die. Maybe not, said Suttree.

a tin box too small to hold anything of christian use.

Suttree saw with perfect clarity a parade he’d watched through the legs of the crowd like a thing that passed in a forest, the floats of colored crepe and the band with its drum and horns and the polished wine broadcloth and gold braid and the majordomo in a stained shako wielding a baton and prancing and farting like a brewery horse. He saw what had been so how a caravan of pennanted cars wound through the rain on a dark day and how Clayton in corduroy knickers and aviator’s cap marched with his sisters in a high ceilinged room where the paneled doors were drawn and a nurse in a white uniform called closeorder drill and tapped out the time with a cane and he could remember the stamped brass grapes of an umbrella stand cool and metallic under his tongue and he knew that in that house some soul lay dying. He saw a pool of oil on a steel drumhead that lay shirred with the pounding of machinery. He saw the blood in his eyelids where he lay in a field in a summer noon and he saw young boys in a pond, pale nates and small bald cods shriveled with the cold and he saw an idiot in a yard in a leather harness chained to a clothesline and it leaned and swayed drooling and looked out upon the alley with eyes that fed the most rudimentary brain and yet seemed possessed of news in the universe denied right forms, like perhaps the eyes of squid whose simian depths seem to harbor some horrible intelligence. All down past the hedges a gibbering and howling in a hoarse frog’s voice, word p...

Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away? It was in 1884. Did he die by natural causes? No sir. And what were the circumstances surrounding his death. He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way. Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide. Yessir.

Someone was tugging at Suttree’s sleeve. A small nun with a bitten face, a smell of scorched black muslin and her dead breasts brailed up in the knitted vest she wore. She tugged with little soricine claws at the bones in his elbow. Cornelius you come away from here this minute. 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.

He was given no food. A strange sour potion to drink. A nurse who came to catheterize him. He’d lain for hours with his cock hanging down the cool throat of a battered tin pitcher. Catheterina, he said. My name is Kathy. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.

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.