Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

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.

the slow cataclysm of neglect,

blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and

Hutched hares ghost pale in the shade of the carriagehouse wall.

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.

Through the thin and riven wall sounds of fish surging in the sinking skiff. The sign of faith. Twelfth house of the heavens. Ushering in the western church. St Peter patron of fishmongers. St Fiacre that of piles. Suttree placed one arm across his eyes. He said that he might have been a fisher of men in another time but these fish now seemed task enough for him.

Come in, he said. Buddy? He turned his head. His uncle was standing in the doorway.

Uncle

Godamighty. Yeah, sang out Callahan,

In the long days of fall they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. They sat in groups and watched the rain fall over the deserted fairgrounds. Pools of mud and dark sawdust and wet trodden papers. The painted canvas funhouse walls and the stark skeletons of amusement rides against a gray and barren sky.

Small moths kept crossing the mouth of the lampchimney and spinning burntwinged into the hot grease.

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.

Come on honey, the goatman said to the nanny that stood sleeping in the traces. She opened one eye, a cracked agate filled with sly goat sapience.

It wasnt nobody’s fault Sut. It just got out of hand.

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 dark hand had scooped the spirit from his breast and a cold wind circled in the hollow there.

The old man’s cheeks new shaven and the fine red veins like the lines in banknote paper.

Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this.

Suttree went on. A mute and shapeless derelict would stop him with a puffy hand run forth from the cavernous sleeve of an armycoat. Woadscrivened, a paling heart that holds a name half gone in grime. Suttree looked into the ruined eyes where they burned in their tunnels of disaster. The lower face hung in sagging wattles like a great scrotum. Some mumbled word of beggary. To make your heart more desolate.

Suttree hadnt been back to his room in McAnally

Walls decked with random flattened roaches in little corollas of oilstain, some framed with the print of a shoesole.

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 ear or tell the spinebones in his back with such cool fingers.

I got some other deals in mind too. There’ll be a deal for you if you want in, Sut. You aint never been nothin but decent to me. I dont mind takin a buddy with me on the way up.

Shit, said Harrogate easily. Man has a little money about him he can get more pussy than you can shake a stick at.

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

What perverted instinct made folks group the mad together?

He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way.