Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  He came down an old logging road past the ruins of a CCC camp and swung through the woods toward a stone bridge beyond the sere or barren trees. The road crossed above. The river path went through the low stone arch along a bar of silt where blackened turds lay by pale wet clots of tissuepaper.

  When they were building the highway through the mountains a horseman came this way along the river, the gravel peppering the water behind the horse's heels and the horse lined out lean and flat and the rider wide-eyed with the reins clutched. Two boys fishing from the bridge watched him clatter down and pass beneath. They crossed to the other side of the bridge to see him go but the horse was downriver with the stirrups kicking out loose and it ran riderless out on the gravel bar and into the river in an explosion of steam. A pale breadth of buckskin flank turning in the cold green pool.

  The rider did not appear. They found him dangling by his skull from a steel rod that jutted from the new masonry, swinging slightly, his hands at his sides and his eyes slightly crossed as if he would see what was the nature of this thing that had skewered his brains.

  Suttree went up the narrow valley and deeper into the mountains. Over old dry riverbeds of watershapen stones that lay in the floor of the wood. His beard grew long and his clothes fell from him like the leaves. At these high altitudes the trees were stunted spruce and dark and twisted and nothing moved save he and the wind and the ravens. The spruce trees stood black and bereaved of dimension in the shadow of the high cloven draws, against the sky processional and nunlike ascending in the dusk.

  He'd taken to sleeping more and the walking made him dizzy. He'd watch the fire for hours, the curious incandescent world of settling embers, small orange grottoes and the way the wood looked molten there or half translucent. He had begun to become accompanied.

  First in dreams and then in states half wakeful. One day in the full light of autumn noon he saw an elvish apparition come from the woods and go down the trail before him half ajog and worried of aspect. Suttree sat in the moss and rested. The woods looked too green for the season. Before two days more had gone he hardly knew if he dreamt or not. Lying on a gravel bar with the tips of his fingers in the icy water he could see his face above the sandy creek floor, a shifting visage hard by its own dark shadow. He stretched himself and bowed his lips and sucked from the passing water. Taste of iron and moss and a silken weight on his tongue. A newt, small, olive, paintspattered, arrowed off downside a rock toward the bubbled green of the deeper pool. The water sang in his head like wine. He sat up. A green and reeling wall of laurel and the stark trees rising. Articulating in the slight lift of the forest wind some arboreal mute's alphabet. Pins of light near blue were coming off the stones. Suttree felt a deep and chilling lassitude go by nape and shoulderblades. He slumped and crossed his wrists in his lap. He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus. His fingers clutched up wet handfuls from the bar, polished lozenges of slate, small cold and mascled granite teardrops. He let them fall through his fingers in a smooth clatter. He could feel the oilless turning of the earth beneath him and the cup of water lay in his stomach as cold as when he drank it.

  That evening he passed through a children's cemetery set in a bench of a hillside and forlorn save by weeds. The stone footings of a church nearby was all the church there was and leaves fell few and slowly, here and here, him reading the names, the naked headboards all but perished in the weathers of seasons past, these tablets tilted or fallen, titles to small plots of earth against all claiming. A storm had followed him for days. He turned in an ashen twilight, crossing this garden of the early dead by weeds the wind has sown. Brown jasmine among the nettles. He saw small figurines composed of dust and light turn in the broken end of a bottle, spidersized marionettes in some minute ballet there in the purple glass so lightly strung with strands of cobweb floss. A drop of rain sang on a stone. Bell loud in the wild silence. Harried mute and protestant over the darkening windy fields he saw go with no surprise mauve monks in cobwebbed cowls and sandals hacked from ruined boots clapping along in a rude shuffle down small cobbled ways into an old stone town. Storm birds rode up dark and chattering and burst away like ash and mice were going down their homeward furrows like tailed shot.

  He crossed in the twilight a pitchgreen wood grown murk with ferns, with rank and steaming plants. An owl flew, bow winged and soundless. He came upon the bones of a horse, the polished ribcradle standing among the ferns pale and greenly phosphorescent and the wedgeshaped skull grinning in the grass. In these silent sunless galleries he'd come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who'd been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he'd be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever.

  That night he did not even make a fire. He crouched like an ape in the dark under the eaves of a slate bluif and watched the lightning. Down there in the wood the birchtrunks shone palely and troops of ghost cavalry clashed in an outraged sky, old spectral revenants armed with rusted tools of war colliding parallactically upon each other like figures from a mass grave shorn up and girdled and cast with dread import across the clanging night and down remoter slopes between the dark and darkness yet to come. A vision in lightning and smoke more palpable than wortled bone or plate or pauldron shelled with rot.

  The storm moved off to the north. Suttree heard laughter and sounds of carnival. He saw with a madman's clarity the perishability of his flesh. Illbedowered harlots were calling from small porches in the night, in their gaudy rags like dolls panoplied out of a dirty dream. And along the little ways in the rain and lightning came a troupe of squalid merrymakers bearing a caged wivern on shoulderpoles and other alchemical game, chimeras and cacodemons skewered up on boarspears and a pharmacopoeia of hellish condiments adorning a trestle and toted by trolls with an eldern gnome for guidon who shouted foul oaths from his mouthhole and a piper who piped a pipe of ploverbone and wore on his hip a glass flasket of some smoking fuel that yawed within viscid as quicksilver. A mesosaur followed above on a string like a fourlegged garfish heliumfilled. A tattered gonfalon embroidered with stars now extinct. Nemoral halfworld inhabitants, figures in buffoon's motley, a gross and blueblack foetus clopping along in brogues and toga. Attendants attend. Suttree watched these puckish revelers pass with a half grin of wry doubt. Dark closed about him. The lightning lapsed away and he could hear the grass kneeling in the wind. He raked leaves to him in his arms and struck a match with fingers stiff and fumblesome. They crackled along the edges and small hot sparks went singing down the wind. He tried again and gave it up. He curled into his blanket there on the high cold ground and he knew he should be cold but he had not been so for days.

  In this condition the next morning he passed a deerstand where a small man in overalls crouched with a crossbow. Suttree paid him no more mind than any other apparition and would go on but that the man spoke to him. Hey, he said.

  Hey, said Suttree.

  The hunter had the crossbow pointed Suttree's way and he cocked his head. What are you? he said.

  Suttree began to laugh. He let his blanket fall from his shoulders and he bent from the waist laughing.

  The hunter looked anxious at this. Hush, he said. Quit that.

  Okay.

  The man sp
at. It dont make no difference noway, he said. You've done run everthing off.

  Are you real? said Suttree.

  I didnt mean to thow down on ye thataway, said the crossbowman vailing his piece. He looked the traveler over. Not that I aint proud to be heeled and such a crazy thing as you look run loose in these woods. How long ye been scoutin thisaway?

  I dont know.

  Are ye lost?

  I think I know what state I'm in. I doubt you can direct me out of it.

  You're lost or crazy or both.

  Quite so.

  You wouldnt tell on a feller for poachin him a little deermeat would ye?

  I dont dine at the king's table, said Suttree.

  The hunter spat to one side and shook his head at Suttree. You're loony as a didapper, he said.

  At least I exist, said the wanderer. He wafted up the hem of his blanket and gestured at the hunter with it. Begone, he said.

  The hunter recoiled and brought his crossbow up again.

  Begone I say, said Suttree, shucking the tattered blanket at him.

  Why you dipshit idjit if anybody begones anywhere it'll be you with a arrowbolt up your skinny ass.

  Suttree batted his eyes. Are you real? he said.

  Damned if you aint beyond the bend in a queer road. Where'd you up from anyways?

  From over the mountain.

  What are you, a yankee or somethin?

  I'll tell you what I'm not.

  What's that?

  A figment. I'm not a figment.

  A what?

  A figment. A frigging figment. He crooned a weird laugh. The hunter stared at him.

  What have you there? said Suttree.

  A little sense for one thing.

  Is that a crossbow?

  I've heard it called that.

  How many crosses have you killed with it?

  It's killed more meat than you could bear.

  Shoot it.

  What for?

  I want to see. You shoot it.

  I think I'll just keep it strung and handy.

  Suttree rose from where he'd squatted. Pale liver spots listed across his vision. The woods had grown dim.

  It's snowing, he said.

  A delicate host expired on his filthy cuff. He pulled the blanket closer. He looked down at himself, at the rags of crokersack, the spats of knitting that had been his socks, at the twill trousers black with woodash, the bulbed green knees of them hanging. He had a beard an inch long and his hair was wild and matted with leaves and the eyes the hunter watched were black and crazed and smoking.

  How do I get out of here? he said.

  Where is it you're headed?

  Out of these mountains.

  Well, you're about nine mile from Cherokee.

  Which way?

  Right yon way. You'll come to the road about two mile.

  Thank you.

  You run crazy in these woods regular do ye?

  No, said Suttree. This is my first time.

  He did not come to the road. Coming down a stony draw through green and well nigh lightless grottoes where lay stones and windfall trees alike anonymous beneath the mantled moss he saw cross through a bosky glen two equine phantoms pale with purpose: one, the next, and gone in the dark of the forest. Suttree stumbled out of the woods onto a bridlepath. Faint smell of stables. Broken green horseturds steamed in the cold of the humus earth. He followed the path until it began to veer back toward the mountains and then he entered the woods again.

  Nor was he out of them that evening. The snow had not stopped falling and he sat in the feathered darkness and heard it sifting through the woods with just the faintest whisper. He drowsed and woke and nodded off again. He wondered would he freeze, sitting there under a balsam tree watching the snow encroach toward his toes. The rich smell of the branches and the needles in which he sat carried him back to old Christmases, those sad seasons. He dreamed sad dreams and woke bitter and rueful. The snow had stopped and the trees stood stark against a paler sky. With first light he rose and went on.

  All day this halfmad outcast staggered through the snow and what a baleful heart he harbored and how dear to him. In midafternoon he came upon a freshet and he turned downstream, his breath pluming. He could smell the water. Going down through the snow where ice tines hung from boughs above their replicas in graygreen pools like jaws from fierce Jurassic carnivores. Until late in the day he came out of the snow and crossed through a broad bottomland where the ground gave wet and spongy underneath. In his darker heart a nether self hulked above cruets of ratsbane, a crumbling old grimoire to hand, androleptic vengeances afoot for the wrongs of the world. Suttree muttering along half mindless, an aberrant journeyman to the trade of wonder.

  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 pitc
her 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.