Suttree (1979)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  Hush now. Come on.

  I have a thing to tell you. I know all souls are one and all souls lonely.

  Here we go.

  He paused with one knee in the iron bed. He looked up into an uncertain face. It crumbled away grayly, a dusty hag's mask. He lay back. Sheets clammy with salt damp. They clove to him like windings. She tightened the bed while he fanned his belly with the skirt of his gown.

  Quit that, she said.

  I will not, he said.

  She covered him and went away. He lay half waking in the heat, floating like a vast medusa in tropic seas while at his ear he heard sometimes the curious invocations attendant to his case, two hundred milligrams, good deal of fluid in the pleura....

  His dreams were of houses, their cellars and attics. Ultimately of this city in the sea.

  Some eastern sea that lay heavily in the dawn. There stood on its farther rim a spire of smoke attended and crowned by a plutonic light where the waters have broke open. Erupting hot gouts of lava and great upended slabs of earth and a rain of small stones that hissed for miles in the sea. As we watched there reared out of the smoking brine a city of old bone coughed up from the sea's floor, pale attic bone delicate as shell and half melting, a chalken shambles coralgrown that slewed into shape of temple, column, plinth and cornice, and across the whole a frieze of archer and warrior and marblebreasted maid all listing west and moving slowly their stone limbs. As these figures began to cool and take on life Suttree among the watchers said that this time there are witnesses, for life does not come slowly. It rises in one massive mutation and all is changed utterly and forever. We have witnessed this thing today which prefigures for all time the way in which historic orders proceed. And some said that the girl who bathed her swollen belly in the stone pool in the garden last evening was the author of this wonder they attended. And a maid bearing water in a marble jar came down from the living frieze toward the dreamer with eyes restored black of core and iris brightly painted attic blue and she moved toward him with a smile.

  Suttree surfaced from these fevered deeps to hear a maudlin voice chant latin by his bedside, what medieval ghost come to usurp his fallen corporeality. An oiled thumball redolent of lime and sage pondered his shuttered lids.

  Miserere mei, Deus ...

  His ears anointed, his lips ... omnis maligna discordia ... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. Japheth when you left your father's house the birds had flown. You were not prepared for such weathers. You'd spoke too lightly of the winter in your father's heart. We saw you in the streets. Sad.

  The priest's lamptanned and angular face leaned over him. The room was candlelit and spiced with smoke. He closed his eyes. A cool thumb crossed his soles with unction. He lay aneled. Like a rapevictim.

  I am familiar with the burial rites of the nameless and the unclaimed.

  What is it? said the priest.

  Well may he wonder, praetor to a pederastie deity.

  The priest wiped his fingers with bits of bread and rose. By candlelight he put away his effects in a little fitted case and left bearing the candle and followed by a nun and Suttree alone in the dark with his death and who will come to weep the grave of an alias? Or lay one flower down.

  He dreamed of a race at the poles who rode on sleds of walrus hide and rucked up horn and ivory all drawn by dogs and bristling with lances and harpoon spears, the hunters shrouded in fur, slow caravans against the late noon winter sunset, against the rim of the world, whispering over the blue snow with their sledloads of piled meat and skins and viscera. Small bloodstained hunters drifting like spores above the frozen chlorine void, from flower to flower of bright vermilion gore across the vast boreal plain.

  Down the night world of his starved mind cool scarves of fishes went veering, winnowing the salt shot that rose columnar toward rifts in the ice overhead. Sinking in a cold jade sea where bubbles shuttled toward the polar sun. Shoals of char ribboned off brightly and the ocean swell heaved with the world's turning and he could see the sun go bleared and fade beyond the windswept panes of ice. Under a waste more mute than the moon's face, where alabaster seabears cruise the salt and icegreen deeps.

  When he woke there were footsteps in the room. Shapes crossed between the light and his thin eyelids. He was going again in a corridor through rooms that never ceased, by formless walls unordered unadorned and slightly moist and warm and through soft doors with valved and dripping architraves and regions wet and bluish like the inward parts of some enormous living thing. A small soul's going. By floodlight through the universe's renal regions. Pale phagocytes drifting over, shadows and shapes through the tubes like the miscellany in a waterdrop. The eye at the end of the glass would be God's.

  Suttree saw the faces of the living bend. He closed his eyes. Gray geometric saurians lay snapping in a pit. Far away stood a gold pagoda with a little flutterblade that spun in the wind. He knew that he was not going there. He was awake for days. No one knew. He touched a hand attending him and smiled at its withdrawing. The freaks and phantoms skulked away beyond the cold white plaster of the ceiling. A tantric cat that loped forever in a funhouse corridor. He'd see them again on the day of his death.

  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.

  He tipped winedrops from the birdtongue spout down Suttree's throat. Suttree closed his eyes to savor it.

  Do you have any more?

  Just a drop. Not too much, I dont think.

  That works, Suttree said.

  Are you feeling better?

  Yes.

  God must have been watching over you. You very nearly died.

  You would not believe what watches.

  Oh?

  He is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving.

  Is that what you learned?

  I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only.

  I see, said the priest.

  Suttree shook his head. No, he said. You dont.

  The days were long and lonely, no one came.

  He watched birds come and go in the tree beyond the window, like a memory from some childhood scene, dim its purpose.

  He was given no food. A strange sour potion to drink. A nurse who came to catheterize him. He'd lain for hours with his cock hanging down the cool throat of a battered tin pitcher.

  Catheterina, he said.

  My name is Kathy.

  We've got to stop meeting like this.

  Hush now. Can you lift up some? Lift up some.

  Try to control yourself. Damn.

  You dont even have a temperature so I know this is all put on.

  I hear water running.

  Hush.

  I never saw a lovelier ass.

  I never knew anybody to get sexy being catheterized.

  Will you marry me?

  Sure.

  One night as he lay there he felt suddenly strong enough to rise. He thought he'd dreamed of doing so. He eased his feet over the edge of the bed and stood. He tottered across the room and rested against the wall and came back. And again. He felt giddy.

  The next night he went down the corridor. I feel like an angel, he told an old lady with a bucket whom he passed. There was no one about. A porter nodded at the desk. Suttree went out the door.

  Down the street in his nightshirt till he came to a phone booth. No coins blocked away in there. He had a tag with the name Johnson on it pinned to the front of him and he took it off and laid it on the little metal shelf beneath the phone and he straightened out the pin and lifted the receiver from the hook. H
e worked the pin through the insulation of the cord and grounded the end of it against the metal of the coinslot. After a few tries he got a dial tone and he dialed 21505.

  Carlights washed across this figure in nightwear crouched in his glass outhouse. He dropped to the floor of the booth. A reek of stale piss. The number was ringing. Suttree wondered what time it might be. It rang for some time.

  Hello.

  J-Bone.

  Bud? That you?

  Can you come and get me?

  As they descended into McAnally Suttree let his head fall back on the musty plush of the old car seat.

  You want some whiskey, Bud? We can get some.

  No thanks.

  You okay?

  Yeah. I'd just like maybe a drink of water.

  Mr Johnson like to left us didnt you Mr Johnson?

  So they say. Who put the priest on me?

  They said you was dyin. I came up last week and you didnt know nothin. I had a little drink hid away too.

  Suttree patted J-Bone's knee, his eyes shut. Old J-Bone, he said.

  I think you're a lowlife son of a bitch for not bringin us one of them, said Junior.

  He opened one eye. One of what?

  Them slick little nighties.

  Piss on you.

  Old Suttree's thinner than Boneyard, said J-Bone.

  Old Suttree's all right, said Suttree.

  They seemed a long time going. Down over the pocked and gutted streets under random pools of lamplight, blue jagged bowls moth-blown that reeled along the upper window rim by dim strung lightwires. Pale concrete piers veered off, naked columns of some fourth order capped with a red steel frieze. New roads being laid over McAnally, over the ruins, the shelled facades and walls standing in crazed shapes, the mangled iron firestairs dangling, the houses halved, broke open for the world to see. This naked spandrel clinging someway to sheer wallpaper and mounting upward to terminate in nothingness and night like the works at Babel.

  They're tearing everything down, Suttree said.

  Yeah. Expressway.

  Sad chattel stood on the cinder lawns, in the dim lilac lamplight. Old sofas bloated in the rain exploding quietly, shriveled tables sloughing off their papery veneers. A backdrop of iron earthmovers reared against the cokeblown sky.

  New roads through McAnally, said J-Bone.

  Suttree nodded, his eyes shut. He knew another McAnally, good to last a thousand years. There'd be no new roads there.

  At night in the iron bed high in the old house on Grand he'd lie awake and hear the sirens, lonely sound in the city, in the empty streets. He lay in his chrysalis of gloom and made no sound, share by share sharing his pain with those who lay in their blood by the highwayside or in the floors of glass strewn taverns or manacled in jail. He said that even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering and he thought that he'd guessed out likewise for the living a nominal grief like a grange from which disaster and ruin are proportioned by laws of equity too subtle for divining.

  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.

  When he went one morning to the river he found the houseboat door ajar and someone sleeping in his bed. He entered in a fog of putrefaction. A hot and heady reek under the quaking tin. So warm a forenoon. He screened his nostrils with his sleeve.

  Suttree nudged the sleeper with his toe but the sleeper slept. Two rats came from the bed like great hairy beetles and went rapidly without pause or effort up the wall and through a missing pane of glass as soundlessly as smoke.

  He went back out and sat on the rail. He watched the river and he watched the fishing canes wink in the sunlight at the point. Wands dipping and rising, an old piscean ceremony he'd known himself. Pigeons came and went beneath the arches of the bridge and he could hear the rattling whine of a bandsaw at Rose's across the river. Upstream at Ab Jones's no sign of life, he looked. After a while he sucked in a breath and entered the cabin again. He kicked away the covers. A snarling clot of flies rose. Suttree stepped back. Caved cheek and yellow grin. A foul deathshead bald with rot, flyblown and eyeless.

  He stood against the wall as long as he could hold his breath. A mass of yellow maggots lay working in one ear and a few flies rattled in the flesh and stood him off like cats. He turned and went out.

  A woman was trudging stoically across the fields toward his houseboat. She dipped into the swale on the far side of the tracks and rose up again, crossed the tracks and came on down the barren path toward the river. She was roundshouldered and slumped and she walked with a kind of mindless dedication like a circus bear. Suttree waited on her, pulling the door to at his back.

  When she reached the river she looked up at him and shaded her eyes with one hand. Mr Suttree? she said.

  Yes.

  She looked at the plank doubtfully, then shifted into motion again and came plodding up to the deck. She was sweating and she blew the hair from her eyes and wiped her eyes against her shoulders, one, the other, as if she were used to having things in her hands and had forgotten somewhat the use of them.

  I seen ye from over in the store, she said. They told me you come in over there. I was about give up on ye.

  Who are you? said Suttree.

  I'm Josie Harrogate. I wanted to see you about Gene.

  Suttree looked at her. A big rawboned woman, her hair matted over her face. The armpits of her cotton housedress black with sweat. Are you Gene's sister?

  Yessir. He's my halfbrother is what he is.

  I see.

  My daddy died fore Gene was born.

  Suttree ran his hand through his hair. Have you been to see him? he said.

  No. I allowed maybe you knowed where he was at.

  You dont know where he is?

  No sir.

  Suttree looked off down the river.

  Mama died back in the winter I dont reckon he even knows it.

  Well. I hate to have to tell you. He's in the penitentiary.

  Yessir. Whereabouts?

  Petros.

  Her lips formed the word but nothing came out. What was it again? she said.

  Petros. It's the state penitentiary. Brushy Mountain, it's called.

  Brushy Mountain. Where's it at?

  Well. It's west of here. About fifty miles I think. You could probably get a bus out there. They could tell you up at the bus terminal.

  What's he in for?

  Robbery.

  She stared fixedly into his eyes to stay his lying or to know it if he did and she said: They a
int fixin to electricate him are they?

  No. He's in for three to five years. He could get out in eighteen months.

  Well how long has he done been in?

  A couple or three months.

  Well, she said. I sure thank ye. I knowed you was a friend to Gene.

  Gene's a good boy, Suttree said.

  She didnt answer. She had turned to go but she stopped at the rail. What was that name again? she said.

  Brushy Mountain?

  No. That othern you said.

  Petros.

  Petros, she said. She said it again, staring emptily upward. Then she started down the catwalk. There must have been a loose cleat somewhere because going down it she fell. Her feet shot from under her and she sat down. The plank bowed deeply and rose again, lifting her flailing figure. She managed to get a grip and steady herself and she stood carefully and went on, teetering along till she reached the shore.

  Are you all right? called Suttree.

  She didnt look back. She raised one hand and waved it and went on, stooped and heavy gaited, across the fields and the tracks toward the town.

  Suttree went up the river path through dockbloom and wild onion to the old floating roadhouse and tapped a last sad time at the green door. He rested on the railing and he tapped again but no one came. After a while he descended the plankwalk and crossed the fields and the tracks to the store.

  She's moved out, said Howard Clevinger.

  Yes, said Suttree.

  She had a brother in Mascot, I think she went to live with them. Did that woman find you that was huntin you?

  She did.

  I seen you over there.

  Suttree went back out and crossed to the river and sat on a stone and watched the water pass for a long time.

  It was just dusk. Hung in the darker wall of the hillside among kudzu and dusty vines a few pale windowlights. The porch at Jimmy Smith's with its yellow light and half shadowed drinkers above the slat railed balustrade. A broken portico not unlike the shorn wreckage in McAnally save pasted up with these small crazed faces peering out. Over the squalid littoral, the wasteclogged river and the immense emptiness of the world beyond. A garish figure was coming along, a hoyden that sallied and fluttered through the one cone of uncashiered lamplight down all Front Street. Trippin Through The Dew in harlequin evening wear. They half circled, regarding one another.