Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  Small spills of rain had started, cold on his arm. Downstream recurving shore currents chased in deckle light wave on wave like silver spawn. To fall through dark to darkness. Struggle in those opaque and fecal deeps, which way is up. Till the lungs suck brown sewage and funny lights go down the final corridors of the brain, small watchmen to see that all is quiet for the advent of eternal night.

  The courthouse clock tolled two. He raised his face. There you can see the illumined dial suspended above the town with not even a shadow to mark the tower. A cheshire clock hung in the void like a strange hieroglyphic moon. Suttree palmed the water from his face. The smoky yellow windowlight in the houseboat of Abednego Jones went dark. Below he could make out the shape of his own place where he must go. High over the downriver land lightning quaked soundlessly and ceased. Far clouds rimlit. A brimstone light. Are there dragons in the wings of the world? The rain was falling harder, falling past him toward the river. Steep rain leaning in the lamplight, across the clock's face. Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.

  He came up from the back lot threading his way among the shapes of castoff and broken and useless debris rotting under the late summer sun. Old tires and bricks and broken jars. A rusty chicken-feeder. He squinched his nose at the rank odor of wash water in the air and he threw a rock he was carrying at the tethered goat. The goat raised its chin from the grass and looked at him with its strange goat's eyes and lowered its head to graze again. He went on around the corner of the house to the front porch where a green and white washingmachine shuddered and churned and over which stood a young woman with a soapy paddle clubbed in her hands as if defying the first insurgent rag to rear from the slateblue and foamless water in which the week's wash moiled.

  Hidy, he said.

  She moved, her weight bringing up out of the spongy boards beneath her shoes a black seepage. She did not look nor answer.

  Old Orville aint been by is he?

  She laid the paddle across the washer where it slurred into concatenate images with the motion of the machine and began to slide off slowly. She wiped her forehead with the hem of her apron. No, she said. He aint been here.

  He looked toward the open door of the house. What does she want now? he said.

  What do you care?

  I just ast.

  She didnt answer. He propped his foot on the porch and spat, watching out across the dead clay yard at nothing at all.

  The paddle dropped to the floor and she stooped and got it and began to dig at the clothes, her breasts pendulous and bobbing with the movement of her shoulders. Blue curded washwater dripped from the end of the porch into a puddle of gray scum. When she looked at him he had not moved. She tossed her hair and tilted one shoulder forward, blotting the sweat from her upper lip. She pouted and blew the hair from her eyes. Why dont you grub some of them weeds out of the tomatoes for me if you aint got nothin else to do, she said.

  He sat down facing out across the yard. He put one finger in his ear and jiggled it and she bent to the washer again.

  After a while a thin voice came again from the rear of the house. She stopped and looked at him. See what she wants, will ye?

  He spat. I didnt take her to raise, he said.

  She lifted her bleached and wrinkled hands from the water and wiped them on the front of her dress. All right, Mama, she called. Just a minute.

  When she came back out he was hanging by his elbows in the wire fence that ran along the little lane the house faced and he was talking to another boy. They left together. He came back for his supper and went out again and stayed until past dark. Just before midnight she heard him leave the house again.

  He listened at her door and then went on to the front room where he sat on the daybed and donned his shoes. Then he was out in the warm August night, lush and tactile, the door set shut with a faint cry of the keeperspring, down the path through the gate and into the lane. When he came out on the pike he could feel the day's warmth from the macadam through his thin shoesoles and he could smell it, musky and faintly antiseptic. He went up the pike at a jog.

  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.

  He crossed the tracks of the railway and loped into the growth on the far side wiping his nose with his sleeve as he went and casting his eyes about, passing along a high revetment of honeysuckle and then through a patch of cane and coming at last along the edge of a field where his old tracks had packed the clay in a furrow you could follow in the dark and his shape washed shadowless across a backdrop of sumac and sassafras. He could see the house beyond in darkness against the starblown sky and the barn behind it rising outsize and stark. He was going along the troughs in the heavy turned earth, past cornrows, the shellbrown spears on his arms with fine teeth, into the open field where the melons lay.

  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.

  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.

  Brogans stood in the tracks he left. Walking up, back, turning. Toeing the bunged melons lying in the sun. A slow spout of black ants pluming forth. A yellowjacket.

  He came again that night. In a persimmon tree at the edge of the field a mockingbird whistled him back but he would not hear. 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.

  He had no ear for such news. The dry bracken that rimmed the field crashed about him. He crossed the stand of cane in a series of diminishing reports and went over the top of the honeysuckle in graceful levitation and lit in the road in the lights of a car rounding the curve. The car braked and slewed in the gravel. A cra
zed figure dressing on the run blown out of the dark wall of summer green and into the road. In the distance the train called for the crossing.

  Two pairs of brogans went along the rows.

  You aint goin to believe this.

  Knowin you for a born liar I most probably wont.

  Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.

  What?

  I said somebody has been ...

  No. No. Hell no. Damn you if you aint got a warped mind.

  I'm tellin you ...

  I dont want to hear it.

  Looky here.

  And here.

  They went along the outer row of the melonpatch. He stopped to nudge a melon with his toe. Yellowjackets snarled in the seepage. Some were ruined a good time past and lay soft with rot, wrinkled with imminent collapse.

  It does look like it, dont it?

  I'm tellin ye I seen him. I didnt know what the hell was goin on when he dropped his drawers. Then when I seen what he was up to I still didnt believe it. But yonder they lay.

  What do you aim to do?

  Hell, I dont know. It's about too late to do anything. He's damn near screwed the whole patch. I dont see why he couldnt of stuck to just one. Or a few.

  Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in a whorehouse.

  I reckon what it was he didnt take to the idea of gettin bit on the head of his pecker by one of them waspers. I suppose he showed good judgment there.

  What was he, just a young feller?

  I dont know about how young he was but he was as active a feller as I've seen in a good while.

  Well. I dont reckon he'll be back.

  I dont know. A man fast as he is ought not to be qualmy about goin anywheres he took a notion. To steal or whatever.

  What if he does come back?

  I'll catch him if he does.

  And then what?

  Well. I dont know. Be kindly embarrassin now I think about it.

  I'd get some work out of him is what I'd do.

  Ought to, I reckon. I dont know.

  You reckon to call the sheriff?

  And tell him what?

  They were walking slowly along the rows.

  It's just the damndest thing I ever heard of. Aint it you? What are you grinnin at? It aint funny. A thing like that. To me it aint.

  Once she had moved beyond the shadow of the smokehouse he could not see her anymore. He could hear the dull chop of the hoe among the withered yardflowers as she progressed with bland patience along the little garden she had planted there, her and the hoe in shadow oblique and thin. And the chop and clink of the shadow blade in the stony ground. Or she came up from the springhouse lugging a shrunken bucket that sprayed thin fans of water from between the slats and left a damp and trampled swath out to the flowerbeds and back. He sat on the porch with his feet crossed and fashioned knots in weedstems.

  Finally it rained. It rained all one afternoon and at dusk the burnt grass stood in water and it rained on into the night. By the time he left the house it had quit and the sky was clearing but he would not turn back.

  He waited and waited at the field's edge watching the house and listening. From the dark of the corn they saw him pass, lean and angular, a slavering nightshade among the moonsprung vines, over the shadowed blue and furrowed summer land. They gripped each other's arm.

  It's him.

  I hope it is. I'd hate to think of there bein two of em.

  Before them in the field there appeared sudden and apparitional a starkly pale set of legs galvanized out of the night like a pair of white flannel drawers.

  Thow the light to him.

  He aint mounted.

  Thow it to him.

  He was standing in the middle of the patch facing them, blinking, his overalls about his ankles.

  Hold it right there, old buddy. Dont move.

  But he did. He caught up the bib of his overalls in both hands and turned to run. The voice called out again. He had the straps clenched in his fist, making for the field's edge. The train bawled twice out there in the darkness. Now beg God's mercy, lecher. Unnatural. Finger coiled, blind sight, a shadow. Smooth choked oiled pipe pointing judgment and guilt. Done in a burst of flame. Could I call back that skeltering lead.

  He was lying on the ground with his legs trapped in his overalls and he was screaming Oh God, Oh God. The man still holding the smoking gun stood about him like a harried bird. The blood oozing from that tender puckered skin in the gray moonlight undid him. Shit, he said. Aw shit. He knelt, flinging the gun away from him. The other man picked it up and stood by. Hush now, he said. Goddamn. Hush.

  Lights from the house limn them and their sorry tableau. The boy is rolling in the rich damp earth screaming and the man keeps saying for him to hush, kneeling there, not touching him.

  The deputy held the car door and he climbed out and they entered a building of solid concrete. The first deputy handed Harrogate's papers to a man at a small window. The man looked through the papers and signed them. Harrogate stood in the hall.

  Harrogate, the man said.

  Yessir.

  He looked him over. Goddamn if you aint a sadsack, he said. Walk on down to that door.

  Harrogate walked down the corridor to an iron barred door. The other deputy had emerged from a side door with a cup of coffee. He had his thumb stuck in his belt and he blew on the coffee and sipped at it. He did not look at Harrogate.

  After a while the man came down the hall with a big brass ring of keys. He opened the gate and pointed for Harrogate to enter. He shut the gate behind them and locked it and turned and went up a flight of concrete stairs. There were two men in striped pants and jumpers sitting there smoking. They scooted against the wall to let the man pass. Harrogate had started up the stairs when one of them spoke to him.

  You better not go up there if he aint said to.

  He came back down again.

  When the man reappeared he had a young black with him. The black wore stripes too. The man opened the door to a large cell and they entered. The black looked at Harrogate and shook his head and went on through to a door at the rear. There was a little window in the wall and Harrogate could see him in there thumbing through stacks of clothing on a shelf.

  Strip out of them clothes and take a shower yonder, said the man.

  Harrogate looked around. In the center of the room was a stained porcelain trough with a row of dripping taps hung from a pipe. In each corner at the front of the cell was a concrete wall about as high as Harrogate. Behind one wall there were three toilets and behind the other there were two showers. While he was looking at the showers a dry towel hit him in the back of the head and fell to the floor.

  You better get on some kind of time, the man said. Harrogate picked up the towel and put it around his neck and undid his shirt and peeled out of it and laid it on a bench by the wall Then he unbuttoned his trousers and stepped out of them and laid them across the shirt. He looked like a dressed chicken, his skin puckered with the shotwounds still red and fresh looking. He raised his shoes each and slid them from his feet without untying the laces. The concrete floor was cold. He crossed to the showers and peered at them, their valves and spouts.

  I aint goin to tell you again, said the man.

  I dont know how, said Harrogate.

  The black boy at the window turned his face away.

  The man looked up at this news with what seemed to be real interest. You dont know how to what? he said.

  How to run a shower.

  What are you, a fuckin smart-ass?

  No sir.

  You mean to tell me you aint never took a shower?

  I aint never even seen one.

  The man turned and looked back down the hall. Hey, George?

  Yeah.

  Come in here a minute.

  A second man looked in. What is it? he said.

  Tell him what you just told me.

  I aint never even seen one? said Harrogate.

  See
n what?

  A shower. He dont know how to take a shower.

  The second man looked him over. Does he know where he shit last? he said.

  I doubt it.

  It was down at the county jail, said Harrogate.

  I think you got a smart-ass on your hands.

  I think I got a dumb-ass is what I got. You see them there handles?

  These here?

  Them there. You turn em and water comes out of that there pipe.

  Harrogate stepped into the shower stall and turned the taps. He picked a slab of used soap from a niche in the wall and soaped himself and adjusted the taps, stepping under the shower carefully so as not to wet his hair. When he was done he turned off the shower and took the towel down from where he'd hung it over the top of the partition and dried himself and crossed the floor to where he'd left his clothes. He had one leg in his trousers when the black spoke to him.

  Hold it, little buddy.

  He paused on one leg.

  Bring them over here.

  Harrogate collected his clothes and carried them to the window. The black took them and hung them on a hanger gingerly with two fingers. The man was sorting about behind him.

  It's hangin on the nail yonder, the black said.

  Harrogate was sitting naked on the bench. The man came out with a longhandled spraygun. He stood up.

  Raise your arms.

  He did. The man pumped the sprayer and squirted his armpit.

  Shoo, said Harrogate. What's that for?

  Bugs, said the guard. Turn around.

  I aint got no bugs.

  You aint now, said the man. He sprayed under the other arm and then gave Harrogate a good spraying over his sparse pubic hair. Get them crotch crickets too, he said. When he was done he stepped back. Harrogate stood with his arms aloft like a robbery victim.