Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Such beautiful prose, me thinks it may be poetry?

Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker’s trade, the dusty bones and rotted silk, the deathwear stained with carrion. Out there under the blue lamplight the trolleytracks run on to darkness, curved like cockheels in the pinchbeck dusk. The steel leaks back the day’s heat, you can feel it through the floors of your shoes. Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock. Through warrens of sumac and pokeweed and withered honeysuckle giving onto the scored clay banks of the railway.

Civilization/Wasteland, a real hot place.

Faint summer lightning far downriver. 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.

Go to and fro …to survive.

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.

But still perhaps the street life is better...

He went solitary and starlit through the sleepfast countryside, trotting soundlessly on his softworn shoes, past dead houses and dark land with the odor of ripe and humid fruits breathing in the fields and nightbirds crying in the keep of enormous trees. The road climbed up out of the woods and went on through farmland and he slowed to a walk, his hands slung in his hippockets and his elbows flapping, taking a dirt road down to the right, padding along soft as a dog, sniffing the rank grass and the odor of dust the dew had laid.

His descriptive skill in the depiction of nature, sights, smell and touch, is at the same time matter of fact, yet full of respect and awe...I might add, his keen description of the industrial wasteland, detritus and pollutions of civilization is equally impressive, both matter of fact, keen and attentive to man's rot.

There were no more than a quarteracre of them, a long black rectangle set along the edge of the corn in which by the meager starlight of late summer he could see the plump forms supine and dormant in spaced rows. He listened. In the distance a dog was yapping and in his keen ears the blind passage of gnats sounded incessantly. He knelt in the rich and steaming earth, his nostrils filled with the winey smell of ruptured melons. To steal upon them where they lay, his hand on their warm ripe shapes, his pocketknife open. He lifted one, a pale jade underbelly turning up. He pulled it between his knees and sank the blade of the knife into its nether end. He shucked off the straps of his overalls. His pale shanks kneeling in a pool of denim.

Bathed in nature's bounty.

A whippoorwill had begun to call and with his ear to the ground this way he began to hear the train too. A star arced long and dying down the sky. He raised his head and looked toward the house. Nothing moved. The train had come on and her harpiethroated highball wailed down the lonely summer night. He could hear the wheels shucking along the rails and he could feel the ground shudder and he could hear the tone of the trucks shift at the crossing and the huffing breath of the boiler and the rattle and clank and wheelclick and couplingclacking and then the last long shunting on the downgrade drawing on toward the distance and the low moan bawling across the sleeping land and fading and the caboose clicking away

to final silence. He rose and adjusted his clothes and went back along the rows of corn to the woods and to the road and set himself toward home again.

Seemingly at one with his surrounding, and his world, but? Let's wait a bit...

Down past the corn he came and into the dark of the melonpatch with stark wooden lubricity, looking once toward the lightless house and then going to his knees in the rich and wineslaked loam. When

the light of the sealedbeam cut over the field he was lying prone upon a watermelon with his overalls about his knees. The beam swept past, stopped, returned to fix upon his alabaster nates looming moonlike out of the dark. He rose vertically, pale, weightless, like some grim tellurian wraith, up over the violated fruit with arms horrible and off across the fields hauling wildly at the folds of old rank denim that hobbled him. Hold it, a voice called.

At one with his surrounding indeed! And having his way with the watermelon...country hijinx and buffoonery of the highest order: hold it! And caught with his pants down. Did I say Cormac is funny too? Knew something was coming... Oh gosh, that was unintentional .

The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will. Truth of his doings came in at the door and up the stairs in the dark. Come morning the prisoners were seeing this half fool in a new light.

Moonlight Melonmounter...18 when the juices are flowing!

Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.

Who writes like that?

Sot’s skull subsiding, sweet nothingness betide me.

He lifted his swollen eyes to the desolation in which he knelt, the ironcolored nettles and sedge in the reeking fields like mock weeds made from wire, a raw landscape where half familiar shapes reared from the slagheaps of trash. Where backlots choked with weeds and glass and the old chalky turds of passing dogs tended away toward a dim shore of stonegray shacks and gutted auto hulks.

Nature and industry intertwined. Laid to waste.

Desecration row.

Little painted turtles tilted from a log one by one like counted coins into the water. The child buried within him walked here one summer with an old turtlehunter who went catlike among the grasses, gesturing with his left hand for secrecy. He has pointed, first a finger, then the long rifle of iron and applewood. It honked over the river and the echo drifted back in a gray smoke of sulphur and coke ash. The ball flattened on the water and rose and carried the whole of the turtle’s skull away in a cloud of brainpulp and bonemeal. The wrinkled empty skin hung from the neck like a torn sock. He hefted it by the tail and laid it up on the mud of the bank. Green

fungus hung from the serried hinder shell. This dull and craggy dreamcreature, dark blood draining. Do they ever sink? The turtlehunter charged his rifle from a yellowed horn and slid a fresh ball down the bore. He recapped the lock, cradling the piece in his armcrook. Some does, some dont. Quiet now, they be anothern directly. What do you do with them? Sell em for soup. Or whatever. The boy was watching the dead surface of the river. Turkles and dumplins if ye’ve a mind to. They’s seven kinds of meat in one. What do turtles eat?

Folks’ toes if they dont be watchful wadin. See yan’n? Where? Towards them willers yander. Down there? Dont pint ye fanger ye’ll scare him. You pointed. Thatn’s eyes was shut. Hush now. He opened his eyes. Redwings rose from a bower in the sedge with thin cries. He bent to the oars again and came down the narrows and into the main channel, the skiff laying a viscid wake on the river and the bite of the oars sucking away in sluggish coils.

Perfectly pictured turtles entering the water... triggers childhood memory with turtle hunter, not horrible, rather curious, interested in turtles, "what do you do with them?" Turtles place in this world. The order of things.... Then the transition back to the boat in the river.

Whatever’s right, said Suttree. I aint no infidel. Dont pay no mind to what they say. No. I always figured they was a God. Yes. I just never did like him.

There it's said.

Scarlet trumpets of cowitch overhung the little house and wildflowers bloomed up through the twisted shapes of steel by whatever miracle renders grease and cinders arable and the junkman’s lot was a

garden more lovely for the phantasm from which it sprang. Harrogate paused at the fence and leaned his hood there. He pushed open the weighted gate, starting a hummingbird from the flowers in the dooryard. Rainwater still dripped from the tarpaper eaves and it lay in bright pools and slashes on the gray and steaming backs of the autos where they reared above the grass and fronds like feeding bovines.

Nature intertwined with industrial waste, indefatigable .

The first few dawns half made him nauseous, he’d not seen one dead sober for so long. He sat in the cold gray light and watched, mummied up in his blanket. A small wind blew. A rack of clouds troweled across the east grew mauve and yellow and the sun came boring up. He was moved by the utter silence of it. He turned his back to the warmth. Yellow leaves were falling all through the forest and the river was filled with them, shuttling and winking, golden leaves that rushed like poured coins in the tailwater. A perishable currency, forever renewed.

Fall...

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.

At wits end.

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. Suttree muttering along half mindless, an aberrant journeyman to the trade of wonder.

Hardly there.

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.

Religion is not salvation simply a diversion. ..

Bearing along garbage and rafted trash, bottles of suncured glass wherein corollas of mauve and gold lie exploded, orangepeels ambered with age. A dead sow pink and bloated and jars and crates and shapes of wood washed into rigid homologues of viscera and empty oilcans locked in eyes of dishing slime where the spectra wink guiltily. One day a dead baby. Bloated, pulpy rotted eyes in a bulbous skull and little rags of flesh trailing in the water like tissuepaper.

The swollen river, combining the common to horific detritus of human kind.

Something woke him in the small hours of the morning. Things moving in the dark. He took his flashlight and trained it out along the trees until it ghosted away in the dark fields downriver. He swept it toward the woods and back again. A dozen hot eyes watched, paired and random in the night. He held the light above his head to try and see the shapes beyond but nothing showed save eyes. Blinking on and off, or eclipsing and reappearing as heads were turned. They were none the same height and he tried his memory for anything that came in such random sizes. Then a pair of eyes

ascended vertically some five feet and another pair sank slowly to the ground. Weird dwarfs with amaurotic eyeballs out there in the dark on a seesaw sidesaddle. Others began to raise and lower. Cows. He agreed with himself: It is cows. He switched off the flashlight and lay back. He could smell them now on the cool upriver wind, sweet odor of grass and milk. The damp air was weighted with all manner of fragrance. You can see it in a dog’s eyes that he is sorting such things as he tests the wind and Suttree could smell the water in the river and the dew in the grass and the wet shale of the bluff. It was overcast and there were no stars to plague him

with their mysteries of space and time. He c...

The eyes of night and smells...

He sat in the skiff and held his hands in his lap with the dark blood crusted on the upturned palms. His eyes beheld the country he was passing through but did not mark it. He was a man with no plans for going back the way he’d come nor telling any soul at all what he had seen.

A burden to be held close, not to be shared.

Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. 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?

Take me mother nature...no, we’ll let you stew some more.

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

There it is, but not something to talk about .

She thrust the spoon against the back of his throat and capsized its cargo down his gullet. A tasteless slime impacted with a harsh grit. He swallowed. She sat back to watch. Nodding her head. Suttree felt himself go queasy. He watched her eyes and her mouth but the words seemed detached. She spoke of a boarcat, black through. Find the bone that will not burn. Suttree had half forgotten the paste on his eyelids and he reached to wonder what had clogged them but she stopped his hand. He shuddered in the grip of grue. Scorpion dust, frogpowder in sowsmilk. Ye’ll shit through the eye of a needle at thirty paces. Pieces of a dream unreeled down the back of his brain. He pulled himself up and

looked at the old woman. She watched him as if he were a thing in a jar. What? he said. She did not say, nor was there any news at all in those faded eyes. What do I do? You dont do nothin. You will be told. Will you tell me? No. A wave of nausea swept through him. He was going to comment on it but it was gone. And then came another. A shuddering sickness that brought his stomach up tight against his diaphragm. I dont feel good, he said.

A man in desperate straits ... a last recourse?

Old scarred marble floors in a cold white corridor. A room where the mad sat at their work. To Suttree they seemed like figures from a dream, something from the past, old drooling derelicts bent above their basketry, their fingerpaints or knitting. He’d never been among the certified and he was surprised to find them invested with a strange authority, like folk who’d had to do with death some way and had come back, something about them of survivors in a realm that all must reckon with soon or late. In the center of the room sat a nurse at a desk. She read the morning paper where the news was madder yet.

The only place to go.

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. He rose. Casting

his eyes over this wreckage. What perverted instinct made folks group the mad together? So many.

Now they leave them outside to whither and shoot up.

He was caught at his first robbery. White lights crossed like warring swords the little grocery store and back, his small figure tortured there cringing and blinking as if he were being burnt. He dove headlong through a plateglass window and fetched up stunned and bleeding at the feet of a policeman who stood with a cocked revolver at his head saying: I hope you run. I wish you would run. He

rode handcuffed through the winter landscape to Nashville. It is true that the world is wide. Out there the open ends of cornfield rows wheel past like a turnstile. Dark earth between the dead stalks. The rails at a junction veering in liquid collision and flaring again silently in long vees. His forehead to the cold glass, watching.

Harrogate's last ride.

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.

What choice did he have in the matter. Suttree chose the path of the river, and the streets. Wherever it may lead…

One morning the priest came. The bed tilted. Suttree’s body ran on it saclike and invertebrate, his drained members cooling on the sheets. Would you like to confess? said the priest.

I did it, said Suttree. A quick smile. I’d like some wine. Oh you cant have any wine, said a nursevoice. The priest bent and opened his little leather case and took out a cruet. You had a close call, he said. All my life. I did.

Consigned to live.

The destruction of McAnally Flats found him interested. A thin, a wasted figure, he eased himself along past scenes of wholesale razing, whole blocks row on row flattened to dust and rubble. Yellow machines groaned over the landscape, the earth buckling, the few old coalchoked trees upturned and heaps of slag and cellarholes with vatshaped furnaces squat beneath their hydra works of rusted ducting and ashy fields shorn up and leveled and the dead turned out of their graves. He watched the bland workman in the pilothouse of the crane shifting levers. The long tethered wreckingball swung through the side of a wall and small boys applauded. Brickwork of dried blood-cakes in flemish bond crumbling in a cloud of dust and mortar. Walls grim with scurf, a

nameless crud. Pale spongoid growths that kept in clusters along the damper reaches came to light and all day grime-caked salvagers with hatchets spalled dead mortar from the piled black brick. 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. Old gothic soffits hung with tar and lapsing paintflakes. Ragged cats picked their way over the glass and nigger dogs in the dooryards beyond the railsiding twitched in their sleep. Until nothing stood save rows of doors, some bearing numbers, all nailed to. Beyond lay fields of rubble, twisted steel and pipes and old conduits reared out of the ground in clusters of agonized ganglia among the broken slabs of masonry. Where small black hominoids scurried over the waste and sheets of newsprint rose in the wind and died again.

Make way, highway coming through... progress a plenty, get the hell out of the way or you be run over.

came up to Suttree where he stood by the roadside and swung the bucket around and brought the dipper up all bright and dripping and offered it. Suttree could see the water beading coldly on the tin and running in tiny rivulets and drops that steamed on the road where they fell. He could see the pale gold hair that lay along the sunburned arms of the waterbearer like new wheat and he beheld himself in wells of smoking cobalt, twinned and dark and deep in child’s eyes, blue eyes with no bottoms like the sea. He took the dipper and drank and gave it back. The boy dropped it into the bucket. Suttree wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Thanks, he said.

The boy smiled and stepped back. A car had stopped for Suttree, he’d not lifted a hand. Let’s go, said the driver. Hello, said Suttree, climbing in, shutting the door, his suitcase between his knees. Then they were moving. Out across the land the lightwires and roadrails were going and the telephone lines with voices shuttling on like souls. Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the white concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere.

Don't ask and you shall receive. Go forth and prosper.