Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.

  Equally?

  It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.

  Of what would you repent?

  Nothing.

  Nothing?

  One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

  Suttree's cameo visage in the black glass watched him across his lamplit shoulder. He leaned and blew away the flame, his double, the image overhead. The river spooled past dark and silent. A truck droned on the bridge.

  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.

  In the toils of orgasm--she said, she said--she'd be whelmed in a warm green sea through which, dulled by the murk of it, pass a series of small suns like the footlights of a revolving stage, an electric carousel wheeling in a green ether. Envy's color is the color of her pleasuring, and what is the color of grief? Is it black as they say? And anger always red? The color of that sad shade of ennui called blue is blue but blue unlike the sky or sea, a bitter blue, rue-tinged, discolored at the edges. The color of a blind man's noon is white, and is his nighttime too? And does he feel it with his skin like a fish? Does he have blues, are they bridal and serene, or yellows, sunlike or urinous, does he remember? Neural colors like the fleeting tones of dreams. The color of this life is water.

  In the morning he set off down the river to run his lines. A cool morning with mist still rising. Crossriver the cries of hogs in the slaughterhouse chutes like the cries of lepers without the gates. He sat in back of the skiff and sculled it slowly down beneath the bridge. As he passed under he raised his head and howled at the high black nave and pigeons unfolded fanwise from the arches and clattered toward the sun.

  A season of death and epidemic violence. Clarence Raby was shot to death by police on the courthouse lawn and Lonas Ray Caughorn lay three days and nights on the roof of the county jail among the gravels and tar and old nests of nighthawks until the search reckoned him escaped from the city. What dreams did he have of the lady Katherine? Suttree saw her one evening in the Huddle with Worm Hazelwood. She had no need to travel about the country robbing people. And news in the papers. A young girl's body buried under trash down by First Creek. Sprout Young, the Rattlesnake Daddy, indicted for the murder.

  Suttree found people out of doors that would as soon stayed in. A family of aged black folk sitting in the dark among their furnishings in total silence. Their figures swaddled up in old quilts against the cold and the old man's cigarette rising and falling in slow red arcs. When he passed there in the morning they were all gone to seek help save an old woman who sat in a chair on the sidewalk among the piled and grimy household goods. She watched the passers in the street but none watched back. A starling landed on the old yellow icebox and she struggled up to shoo it away.

  The junkman lay among sleeping sots in the jungle nor did he stir when the thief who dropped from the dark of a boxcar door went among them. A hominid composed of smoke sucking out the pockets socklike and boarding loose change and half empty packets of cigarettes. Through dark bowerpaths in the honeysuckle where newsprint crouched like ghosts and smokehounds lay so drunk the flies had shat eggs in their earholes. Pausing here to take some shoes. Emerging from the jungle and disappearing into the dark of the car again and the train shunting into motion again as if it had been waiting him. A dog crossed the tracks and paused to sniff at the old man's feet and moved on.

  And in the dawn a female simpleton is waking naked from a gang-fuck in the back seat of an abandoned car by the river. She stirs, sweet day has broken. Reeking of stale beer and dried sperm, eyes clogged, used rubbers dangling senselessly from the dashboard knobs. Her clothes lie trampled in the floor. They bear bootprints of mud and dogshit and her cunt looks like a hairclot fished from a draintrap. She sees on rising two black boys crouched on the car fenders like gibbons purloined from the architraves of an old world cathedral. She folds her hands across her breasts and they leap to the ground and scamper hooting through the weeds. In the distance cars are rifling along a highway. She bends moaning to sort among her clothes.

  Uptown one evening in the Huddle Suttree found Leonard fresh from the workhouse. Leonard had a job as dishwasher and he had gonorrhea of the colon and was otherwise covered with carbuncles. He hobbled over to Suttree's table and sat uneasily. He told how he had seen the lies run down the lawyer's tongue. Vague but of a substance, they came down like mice and looked about a moment before scuttling off. Leaning over Leonard and wagging a long finger, and is it not true that you sought to conceal the death of your father for the purpose of extorting monies unlawfully from the state? Wild in the eye, thrusting his sweating face into Leonard's smaller one and fixing him with a lidless look of triumph until Leonard half rising from his chair seized the lawyer's cold skull in his two hands and pulled his face down and parted those thin lips with a smoking kiss.

  He come up, Sut. Draggin all them chains with him.

  Fathers will do that, said Suttree.

  I hunted you everwheres.

  Suttree didnt ask what for.

  The catamite tucked his chair closer and leaned in confidence. I need to ast ye somethin Sut.

  Okay.

  If you buy somethin and dont pay for it can they take it back?

  Sure. Of course they can.

  I mean no matter what it is?

  Well. I dont know. I guess there are some things it would be hard to repossess. What is it?

  Well this guy's been comin to the house ...

  Okay.

  Well. You know after they found the old man and we had all that trouble with the law.

  Okay.

  Well, the old lady went and bought this plot out in Woodlawn so they wouldnt bury him down here in the whatever thing it is here and she bought this whole deal, this guy come out to the house, and he sold her this deal, this plot with anothern alongside of it for her and it had this pet, pet ...

  Perpetual care.

  Petual care and got her to sign for it all and she didnt have to pay nothin down nor for the first sixty days I think it was and now she's three months behind on her payments and she owes em sixty-two fifty ...

  Leonard.

  Yeah.

  Are you trying to tell me they're going to repossess your old man's grave plot?

  Can they Sut?

  I dont know.

  Well I know a guy one time they come and got his teeth he never made the payments.

  I'll check on it for you. Did they really say they were going to repossess it?

  What they tell me, Sut, if she dont make a payment by the tenth up he comes.

  Suttree looked at the earnest pinched face. He shook his head in wonder.

  Times been rougher'n a old cob, said Leonard. At our house they have.

  What's become of Harrogate? said Suttree.

  Leonard grinned. I dont know. I seen him uptown about a month ago he had some old country girl on his arm was about a head taller'n him. I hollered at him was he gettin any of that old long stuff but he didnt know me.

  Maybe it was his sister.

  May be. She favored him some.

  Suttree closed his eyes as if he were trying to picture such a person. He opened them to see Leonard watching him. He looked about him as if he could not place how he came to be there.

  And this was Harrogate. Standing in the
door of Suttree's shack with a cigar between his teeth. He had painted the black one and it was chalk white and he had grown a wispy mustache. He wore a corduroy hat a helping larger than his headsize and a black gabardine shirt with slacks to match. His shoes were black and sharply pointed, his socks were yellow. Suttree in his shorts leaned against the door and studied his visitor with what the city rat took for wordless admiration.

  What say Sut. How in a big rat's ass are ye?

  I was okay. Come on in.

  Harrogate pinched his hat up by the forecrown and swept it to his chest and entered, ducking slightly as he did so though the lintel of the doorframe was two feet above his head. He laid the hat on the table and hitched his trousers and tucked in his shirt with his thin little hands and puffed on the cigar and grinned and looked about. Good God, said Suttree.

  I seen old Rufus said you was back down here.

  Suttree shut the door. Sit down, he said.

  I hunted you up at Comer's. They said you was into the tall cotton.

  Yeah. Well, the market collapsed. Sit down, sit down.

  Harrogate pushed his hat to one side to make room for his elbow and sat. You fishin again? he said.

  Suttree leaned back on the cot. Fishing again, he said.

  I thought you'd give it up.

  I did too.

  I come by a time or two. Your old boathouse was about in under.

  What are you doing, Gene?

  Hmm?

  I said what are you doing.

  Harrogate grinned. I got me a few little routes, he said. He turned the cigar in his teeth and gave Suttree a look of fey cunning. Got me a few little routes.

  Suttree waited. The story must be elicited with care. It is that the city rat has a telephone route. With small dimestore sponges through which he's fastened wire loops. He runs his routes with a special hook taped to his forefinger, fetching down the blocks from inside the coinreturns of the telephones, a few nickels clattering into the slot, the sponge poked back.

  I dont see how that would pay very much, said Suttree.

  Harrogate grinned slyly.

  How many phones do you have?

  He took the cigar from his teeth. Two hunnerd and eight-six, he said.

  What?

  I had a twenty-six dollar day Saturday. I just barely could walk for the fuckin nickels in my pockets.

  Good God, said Suttree. You've got half the telephones in Knoxville plugged up.

  Harrogate grinned. It takes me all day to run em. I put on a few new ones ever day. You get away from uptown they's a lot of hard sidewalk tween telephones. I done wore out two pair of brand new Thorn McAn shoes.

  Suttree shook his head.

  Harrogate tipped the ash from his cigar into his palm and looked up. Listen, he said. You ever lose any money in a telephone why you just let me know. I'll make it back to ye. You hear?

  Okay, said Suttree.

  Or anybody you know. You just tell me.

  All right.

  You the only other son of a bitch in the world I'd tell. I mean anybody could get on my route and run it if they knowed about it. They aint no way for me to protect myself.

  No.

  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.

  Gene.

  Yeah.

  You're on your way up to the penitentiary is where you're on your way up to.

  Shit, said Harrogate. I have me another day like Saturday I'll buy the goddamned penitentiary.

  It's not like the workhouse. They have these coalmines up there for you to work in.

  Harrogate smiled and shook his head. Suttree watched him. Smiling a sadder smile.

  I saw Leonard the other day and he said he saw you uptown with some girl on your arm.

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

  Suttree tapped at the dosshouse door. The keeper shuffled along the hall and unlatched the door and peered out. He shut one eye, he shook his head. No ragman here. Suttree thanked him and descended into the street again.

  It was still raining a cold gray rain when he eased himself down the narrow path at the south end of the bridge and made his way over the rocks to the ragman's home. As he came about the abutment and entered the gloom beneath the bridge three boys darted out the far side and clambered over the rocks and disappeared in the woods by the river. Suttree entered the dim vault beneath the arches. Water ran from a clay drain tile and went down a stone gully. Water gushed from a broken pipe down the near wall and water dripped and spattered everywhere from the dark reaches overhead.

  Hello, called Suttree. An echo echoed in the emptiness. He shaded his eyes to see. Hey, he called. He could make out the shape of the old man's bed dimly in the cool dank.

  He stood at the foot of the ragpicker's mattress and looked down at him. The old man lay with his eyes shut and his mouth set and his hands lay clenched at either side. He looked as if he had forced himself to death. Suttree looked about at the mounds of moldy rags and the stacked kindling and the racks of bottles and jars and the troves of nameless litter, broken kitchen implements or lamps, a thousand houses divided, the ragged chattel of lives abandoned like his own.

  He moved along the side of the bed. The old man had his shoes on, he saw their shape beneath the covers. Suttree pulled a chair up and sat and watched him. He passed his hand across his face and sat forward holding his knuckles. Well, he said. What do you think now? God, you are pathetic. Did you know that? Pathetic?

  Suttree looked around.

  These boys have been at your things. You forgot about the gasoline I guess. Never got around to it. Did you really remember me? I couldnt remember my bear's name. He had corduroy feet. My mother used to sew him up. She gave you sandwiches and apples. Gypsies used to come to the door. We were afraid of them. My sisters' bears were Mischa and Bruin. I cant remember mine. I tried but I cant.

  The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sandbags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.

  Did you ask? About the crapgame? What are you doing in bed with your shoes on?

  He passed his hand through his hair and leaned forward and looked at the old man. You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.

  He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.

  There's no one to ask is there? There's no ... He was looking down at the ragman and he raised his hand and let it fall again and he rose and went out past the old man's painted rock into the rain.

  She unscrewed the threaded halves of a wooden darningegg and took from inside a single piece of pale brown bone. Her hand closed up about it like a burnt spider and she turned slowly to Suttree where he sat at the table. The specter of things sings in its own ashes. Who has ears to hear it? She let shut her nutshell eyelids. A pair of fat black candles dripped and spat, the wax a gray grease congealing in the saucers where they stood. Her tiny hands with their yellow nails looked like the mummied hands he'd seen crossed on the breast of a dead slave in a wormfluted barrow at the rear of a secondhand furniture store. She had before her an ageblackened box of boardhard leather and now she opened it and began to set out her effects. Much like a priest with his deathbed kit. The candleflames lurched in the shadow of her movements and their own shapes reeled briefly on the wall.

  Merceline Essary that they said would not never walk on this earth again by men was doctors come under me and I rewalked her in three days. She originally died in October of last year and she walked to that day.

&nb
sp; I can walk, said Suttree.

  You can walk, she said. But you caint see where you goin.

  Can you?

  To know what will come is the same as to make it so.

  Suttree smiled. Somewhere in the house clockgears clacked.

  She lifted from the hide box a castiron jar and set it on the table in a little stand. She took out a small alcohol burner and filled it from a bottle and lit it and set it beneath the pot. She unrolled and spread a black cloth and put things out upon it and seemed to puzzle over them. A blood agate bored with a small hole, a cracked and yellow tooth that may have been a boar's tusk, a tin box too small to hold anything of christian use. She touched each of these in turn. She looked at Suttree. He sat loosely in his chair with his hands resting on the insides of his thighs. He felt an easy peace settle in his spine. Studying the apposition of these effects for hidden systems, waiting for her to fetch down her purse of bones to see what construction they might have for him, their rorschach text, pattern in a carpet. A figure lifted from a cave floor wherein old fossils lay anachronistically conjoined, taxonic absurdities and enemies of order. But she had taken out an old bottle handblown that held an oily unguent and seemed gone on to philters now, spooning some grim powder from the tin into the pot where the oil began to smoke and sputter with a stench like frying dung.

  Suttree seemed unalarmed. She unfolded the hand that held the piece of bone and she put the bone under her tongue and she placed her tiny palm against Suttree's eyes, one, the other. He felt a light tingling in his nape, his eyes lost focus. He leaned back in his lassitude and watched the shapes of the candleflames on the ceiling. She was at her triturations. Spooning to death in a salver a speckled slug, marked like an ocelot, viscous and sticky. A whitish paste. Crooning a low threnody to her pawky trade. She said: Aint no common fire can cruciate a groundpuppy. Fetching the smoking mess from the burner she stirred it with her spoon and she blew out the small blue flame and set the pot within the rack again. Her hands unmindful of the heat. Her movements rapid and sure. She spat through a ringbone into a watchglass and mixed with her finger a paste of something drear and leaned with her thumb to anoint his eyelids. Then she took up the pot again and she spooned out the mess within and swung it toward him.