Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  He was wandering in a swampy wood, a landscape of cane and alder where gray reeks swirled. Cognate shapes among the vapors urged him on and in this sad glen under a pale sun he felt he'd grown improbable of succor and he began to run. Headlong through the bracken and briers in whose crushed wake he left small tattered stars of the rags he wore. Until at last he washed up in a little glade and fell to his knees gasping. Clouds lay remote and motionless across the evening sky like milt awash in some backwater of the planet's seas and a white woodcock rose from the ferns before him and dissolved in smoke.

  A curling bit of down cradled in this green light for the sake of my sanity. Unreal and silent bird albified between the sun and my broken mind godspeed.

  He woke in full daylight by the side of a road. A truck had passed. Leaves stirred about him. He struggled up. His blanket lay in the ditch. His head was curiously clear.

  The town that he came to was Bryson City North Carolina. He passed a shabby tourist court and went down the sidewalk in his blanket peering about at the sudden tawdry garishness in which he found himself. At the maze of small town mercenary legend, the dusty shopwindows, the glass bulb of a gaspump. Cars slowed in passing him. He entered the first cafe he came to and sat slowly in a booth. Some stark and darker bearded visage peered him back from the shiny black formica of the tabletop. Some alien Suttree there among the carven names and rings and smears of other men's meals.

  What for ye? said a leery matron.

  The menu. I dont have a menu.

  The old bird's eyes honed by past injustices to a glint just between suspicion and outrage swept over him and to the wall.

  Yonder it is.

  He looked. Chalk script on a slate. Country steak, he said. Mashed potatoes and beans. Cornbread. And bring me a cup of coffee.

  You get three vegetables.

  He looked again. Let me have the apples, he said.

  She finished writing and padded off on her white wedgeheeled shoes to the rear of the place. In the cameral shutting of the kitchen door he saw a black hand picking at the seat of a pair of greasy jeans. A dark wood clock above the door told a time of two twenty. Suttree seized the water tumbler she'd left and drank. A long cold drink laced with chlorine. His head swam, A pall of fried grease hung in the room. He rose from the booth and went to the counter and got a newspaper and came back. He looked in the upper corner for the date but there was none.

  Whoever heard of a newspaper with no date, he said aloud, tearing open the sheets. Here. December third. How long is that?

  He stared blankly across the empty dining hall. A huge and blackened trout hung bowed on a board above the counter and knew not. Nor the naked leather squirrel with the vitreous eyebulbs. A dull wooden clicking he'd thought some long coiled component of his forelobe together with the fading colored pictures and the receding attendance of horribles segued into a shrunken indian passing across the glass of the cafe front and the dull tocking of applewood clockworks from above the door. He turned to the paper. A rash of incomprehensible events. He could put no part of it together.

  The kitchen door swung out and she came bearing coffee. A thick rimmed cup of sepia crockery. Beads of grease veered on the dishing meniscus of inky fluid it held. He poured cream copiously from a tin pitcher and laced in sugar and stirred. The smell of it flooded his brain and when he sipped it it seemed like an odd thing to drink. He sipped again. The waitress reared above the rim of the cup. He leaned back. A plate of corn muffins fell before him, A small oblong platter with thick flour gravy wherein lay a slab of waffled beef and the vegetables. Suttree could hardly lift his fork. He buttered one of the muffins and bit into it. His mouth was filled with a soft dry sawdust. He tried to chew. His jaws worked the mass slowly. He tried to spit it out and could not. He reached in his mouth and fished it forth with his fingers in thick clogs of paste which he raked off on the side of the platter. He cut away a section of the steak with his fork and eased it past his teeth. His eyes closed. He could taste nothing. His throatpipe seemed grown shut.

  He mouthed the piece of meat like an old gummy man, dry smacking sounds. The waitress moved about the room refilling saltcellars, her eyes on him. He caught her watching from the sideboard. He spat in the plate.

  Is there something wrong with me? he demanded.

  She looked away.

  What is this crap?

  Other people eat it, she said.

  He stabbed at the potatoes with his fork. The imago does not eat, he told the plate mutteringly. Fuck it. He let the fork fall and looked up at the waitress.

  Will you take this away and bring me some soup.

  You'll have to pay for it.

  Suttree watched her with his fevery eyes.

  If you didnt want it you ought not to of ordered it, she said.

  Will you please bring me some goddamned soup like I asked?

  She turned and stalked off to the kitchen. He pushed the plate from him and laid his head on the table.

  A hand jostled his elbow. Suttree jerked upright.

  What's the matter here? said a man in cook's whites. The waitress hovered behind.

  What do you mean what's the matter?

  Did you cuss her?

  No.

  He's a damned liar. He did too do it.

  I asked her to bring me some soup.

  He cussed me and his dinner and everthing else.

  We dont allow no cussin in here and we dont allow no trouble. Now let's go.

  He had stood back for Suttree to rise, to pass. He did. He and his blanket. He was shaking with rage and frustration.

  He aint paid, said the waitress.

  Suttree glared at her.

  Just get on out, the man said. I dont need your money.

  He stood in the street. He could hear doors closing all back through his head like enormous dominoes toppling in a corridor. He shouldered the blanket and went on. A black man he passed looked him over and called back to him. Suttree turned.

  They'll vag you here, said the black.

  Suttree didnt answer.

  I'm just tellin you. You do what you want.

  He was gone. Somewhat jaunty, coatless in the cold. Suttree eyed the sun, cold worn and bonecolored above the chill overcast. He shuffled on. His knees kept grasshoppering out sideways and this way. He passed a storewindow and backed up. The glass was printed with the first three letters of the alphabet and in the hall beyond was a long counter and behind that were shelves ranked with bottles.

  He wheeled in through the door, adjusting the blanket as he went. Two men at the counter watched him come. One turned and found something to do and the other rose up from his elbows and stood in charge.

  I cant serve you, he said.

  Suttree still had his mouth open. He closed it and opened it again. He looked at the bottles. He looked at the counterman.

  You better go on, said the counterman.

  Where's the bus station, said Suttree.

  Where you left it, I reckon.

  Suttree suddenly began to cry. He didn't know that he was going to and he was ashamed. The counterman looked away. Suttree turned and went out. In the street the cold wind on his wet face brought back such old winter griefs that he began to cry still harder. Walking along the mean little streets in his rags convulsed with sobs, half blind with a sorrow for which there was neither name nor help.

  At the bus station he bought his ticket, smoothing out the crumpled bill on the counter, the grave face of the emancipator looking back from the currency. With the change he bought a candy bar and he sat alone on a bench in the empty waiting room in his blanket eating the candy in micesized bites and reading from a black leatherette copy of the Book of Mormon he found in a pamphlet rack. The candy he managed to get down but the words of the book swam off the page eerily and he thought he'd never read a stranger tale.

  The hands on the bald white clockface above the ticket office went by fits and starts. At ten till four he rose and went out, the book in his hand and his h
and at his breast and the blanket about him like an itinerant simonist. The baggageman watched warily the shuffling exit of this latterday crazyman.

  A driver in a shiny blue suit looked him up and down.

  Is this the bus to Knoxville? Suttree said.

  He said that it was. Suttree offered his ticket and the driver drew a punch from its holster and punched the ticket and handed it back and Suttree mounted the steps into the bus.

  All the faces that he passed were watching out the windows but as he went by they turned and followed him with their eyes. A parcel of old ladies. A young man in pressed twill. At the rear of the bus Suttree swung around and the faces all turned back. He lay down on the rear seat.

  When he woke they were swinging through the mountains and he was being shifted up and back on the seat as the rear of the bus followed. He sat up. His blanket had fallen to the floor and he got it and tucked it around him. The coach was filled with stale cigarette smoke and the windows were weeping. A few small domelights shone on magazines up the aisle. Beyond the windshield a pair of red taillights slid away and reappeared and swung back across the front of the bus again. Suttree slept, tottering upright on the seat.

  It was after nine oclock when they reached Knoxville. He clambered down on queasy legs and climbed the steps to the terminal. In the men's room he studied himself. An unshorn ghost in a black beard peered back from the glass with eyes like old furnace flues. He pulled the blanket from his shoulders and rolled it and tucked it beneath his arm. His jacket hung in ribbons. He touched the sharpened bones of his face. He raked back his hair with his hands. When he glanced down at his shoes the tiles of the floor seemed to be undulating like the scales of some cold enormous fish. An eye watched from a partly open toilet door. He staggered out. His feet made no sound in the empty arcade and he seemed to go for miles toward the lights of the street.

  At night in the bed high in the old frame house on Grand he listened to the engines switching in the yard, the long iron collision of couplings running out in the dark by the warehouse walls until the lamplit night echoed with their hammerings like some great forge where arms for a giants' tournament were being beaten out against the sun's rising and in the light of passing locomotives the shadows of trees and powerpoles raced within the cocked sash of the window across the peeling walls to blackness. He slept and slept. All day the house was empty. She'd come at noon and fix him soup and a sandwich until he felt like a child in some winter illness. Recurrences of dreams he'd had in the mountains came and went and the second night he woke from uneasy sleep and lay in the world alone. A dark hand had scooped the spirit from his breast and a cold wind circled in the hollow there. He sat up. Even the community of the dead had disbanded into ashes, those shapes wheeling in the earth's crust through a nameless ether no more men than were the ruins of any other thing once living. Suttree felt the terror coming through the walls. He was seized with a thing he'd never known, a sudden understanding of the mathematical certainty of death. He felt his heart pumping down there under the palm of his hand. Who tells it so? Could a whole man not author his own death with a thought? Shut down the ventricle like the closing of an eye?

  He got up and went to the window and looked out. The houses stood above the railyard with a kind of doomed austerity, locked in a sad frieze against the gray midwinter sky. From each chimney like a tattered rag a tongue of coalsmoke swirled. Beyond the tracks lay the market warehouses and beyond these the shapeless warrens of McAnally with its complement of pariahs and endless poverty.

  He woke in the paler gray of noon to find Blind Richard groping toward him from the door.

  Bud? he said, standing there on the boards in the barren room like a medicineshow clown, casting about in the dead air with his frozen grin.

  Hello Richard.

  The blind man sat on the bed and lit a cigarette and toyed at the ash with the tip of his little finger. Well, he said. I heard you was sick.

  I'm all right.

  What was it you had?

  Suttree eased himself among the sooty sheets. I dont know, he said. Something or other.

  Mrs Long look after ye good?

  Oh yeah. She's good.

  Good a woman as ever walked. Ast anybody. Dont take my word for it.

  How are you getting along?

  I wisht McAnally was full of em like her. Me? I aint braggin much.

  Well.

  The blind man looked about. Dark sockets clogged with bluish jissom. Smoke drawing upward alongside his thin nose. He knit his yellowed fingers in a mime of anxiety and leaned toward Suttree. You dont have a little drink hid away do ye? he said.

  No I dont.

  Didnt much allow ye did.

  Suttree watched him. How long have you been blind, Richard?

  What?

  I said how long have you been blind. Were you always blind?

  The blind man grinned sheepishly and fingered his chin. Oh, he said. No. I dont remember. I've forgot.

  Where did you get that lump?

  He touched a faint yellow swelling above his eye. Red done that, he said.

  Red did?

  Yeah. He comes over you know. Comes over to the house. He sets all the doors about halfway shut. I got in a hurry or I never would of run into it. I know him.

  How's everything down at the Huddle?

  It's about like you left it.

  They sat there in silence on the bed. Beyond the baywindow lay a deadly and leaden sky. Dimpled by the motewenned glass. A small gray rain had begun.

  Well, said Richard. I better get on.

  Dont rush off.

  I've got to get on home.

  Come back.

  You get well now, said the blind man. You do what Mrs Long tells ye.

  I will.

  He went down the stairwell holding to the wall. Suttree heard the door close. A few sad birds along the wires watched the rain fall. One had a crooked leg. Gray water was leaking from a rotted length of gutterpipe. As he lay there the water grew more pale and the rain fell and the water grew quite clear and the water beaded on the lacquered leaves of the old magnolia tree in the yard looked bright and clean.

  Late Saturday and all day Sunday drunks would come and sit on the bed and talk and sneak him whiskey. None asked if what he had were catching. Mrs Long on her duckshaped shoes came to the top of the landing to complain in her shrill voice and groggy sots clung halfway up the spindleshorn balustrade while ribald laughter rocked in the barren upper rooms of the rotting house.

  He came down to dinner, good plain food served in the shambles of patched and tacked furniture destroyed in drunken rages over the years. Another week and he was on the streets again.

  His first day uptown he weighed himself on the free scales in front of Woodruffs. He looked at the face in the glass.

  He went to Miller's Annex and called on J-Bone.

  Up and about eh? Did they run you off at the house?

  No. I slipped off after your mama went back to work.

  How do you feel?

  I feel okay. I feel pretty good.

  Where will you be later on?

  I dont know. I'm going up to Comer's.

  You think you feel well enough to drink a beer?

  I might get well.

  J-Bone grinned. Old Suttree, he said. He's hell when he's well.

  What time you get off? Five thirty?

  Yeah.

  I'll see you then.

  Okay Bud.

  When he came through the door at Comer's Dick winked at him and raised his hand. Hey Buddy, he said. Got a letter for you.

  Suttree leaned on the counter.

  You've lost a little weight havent you?

  Some.

  Where you been?

  I was over in North Carolina for a while.

  Dick turned the letter in his hand and looked at it and handed it over. It's been here about two weeks, he said.

  Suttree tapped the letter on the counter. Thanks Dick, he said.

  He
sat among the watchers by the wall and crossed his legs the way the old men do and opened the envelope. It was postmarked Knoxville and there was a letter from his mother and a check from his Uncle Ben newly dead. He looked at the check. It was for three hundred dollars. He tapped it in his hand and got up and went to the watercooler for a drink and came back. He wadded the letter and dropped it into the spittoon.

  Where you been Buddy boy? called Harry the Horse.

  Hey Harry, said Suttree.

  Harry stood shapeless in his shirt and changeapron by the cashregister. Bill Tilson made a few slow judo feints and laid the edge of his hand athwart Harry's ear. Ah, said Harry. That was on the bone.

  On the bone, called Tilson dementedly, passing on along the tables.

  Suttree looked up from the check to the racked cues along the wall, the old photos of ballplayers. A quiet figure there in the bedlam of ballclack and calling and telephones, the tickertape unspooling the sportsnews. Fuck it, he said. He rose and went to the front counter.

  Can you cash a check for me, Dick?

  Sure Bud. He laid the check on the sill of the cashregister and rang open the drawer. He read the check. Fat city, he said. How do you want it?

  A couple of hundreds and some twenties.

  With the money folded in his front pocket he went down the stairs to the street again.

  He went to Miller's and bought underwear and socks and went out through the Annex and crossed through the markethouse. Old Lippner akimbo in his abbatoir. By the side door blind Walter stood sleeping with his dobro and Suttree touched his sleeve. The blind eyes opened and rolled up. Suttree pressed a folded bill into his palm.

  You the only man I ever saw could sleep standing up.