Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  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.

  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.

  Open you mouf, she said.

  That's hot.

  Under his hand the arm he stayed was like a piece of black meerschaum. Aneroid bones, birdhollow. To read the weathers in your heart.

  Look here at me, she said.

  Cold bloodwebbed globes. Wens clung along the dark and weighted lids.

  Open you mouf.

  He did. She thrust the spoon against the back of his throat and capsized its cargo down his gullet. A tasteless slime impacted with a harsh grit. He swallowed. She sat back to watch. Nodding her head. Suttree felt himself go queasy. He watched her eyes and her mouth but the words seemed detached. She spoke of a boarcat, black through. Find the bone that will not burn. Suttree had half forgotten the paste on his eyelids and he reached to wonder what had clogged them but she stopped his hand. He shuddered in the grip of grue. Scorpion dust, frogpowder in sowsmilk. Ye'll shit through the eye of a needle at thirty paces. Pieces of a dream unreeled down the back of his brain. He pulled himself up and looked at the old woman. She watched him as if he were a thing in a jar.

  What? he said.

  She did not say, nor was there any news at all in those faded eyes.

  What do I do?

  You dont do nothin. You will be told.

  Will you tell me?

  No.

  A wave of nausea swept through him. He was going to comment on it but it was gone. And then came another. A shuddering sickness that brought his stomach up tight against his diaphragm.

  I dont feel good, he said.

  Dont you puke.

  I think I might.

  She took his wrist in her spider's hand and leveled her eyes at him. Dont you puke, she said.

  I need to lie down.

  She pushed back her chair without speaking and rose and took his arm. He stood woozily. He wanted mightily to vomit.

  She took him across the room to a small cot. He looked like some medieval hero led by a small black gnome. He sat on the cot and lay back with his feet on the floor. She took down a lamp and lit it and put back the glass and turned to watch him. On the mantel a small brass amphora held a dark crepe rose and there was a mounted grackle with dull glass eyes and there were small objects, a box, a pincushion. In the lamplight the glass of the mirror in which these things lay doubled was the color of rhenish wine and it was streaked with mauve and metal blue, with petals of peeling spectra. She stepped from the hearth and crossed the room and went out. In the corner stood a coattree hung with celluloid birds green and yellow, and when the door closed they turned silently in the wind and dark flowers in the old coalscuttle swayed like paper cobras. Suttree stared at the fire within the iron teeth of the grate. She was gone for a long time. When she came back she stooped to look at him. He lay as before. The nausea had passed and he felt more and more removed from all that was. He said: Should I go home?

  It dont make no difference where you go.

  He went to raise himself up from the cot but when he was half sitting he became unsure as to whether he should walk about. There seemed no purpose to it. He lay back down. After a while he lifted his feet into the cot and stretched out his legs. The shifting of the flames in the coalgrate bloomed on the wall like the pulse of distant lightning. Suddenly the fire seemed to be far away and he seemed to be in another room. He seemed to be somewhere else. He looked at the old black woman. Her eyes were closed but when he looked at her she opened them. She was whispering something silently to herself like one in prayer but it was not prayer.

  What is that stuff?

  She didnt answer. She turned her face in profile, a black androgynous silhouette.

  He felt hollow inside and there seemed to be a cool wind moving through him like wind in a street. A door closed on all that he had been. Look at me, he said.

  Hush boy. I dont need to look at you.

  Suddenly he realized that this scene was past and he was looking at its fading reality like a watcher from another room. Then he was watching the watcher. He was aware of the light in the room and his hands on the iron of the cot under his thighs but he could not determine where he was. And then he was somewhere else.

  He had begun to move. He was wheeling in a vast brown circle and he was moving in a helix outward and each few minutes he would pass again the place where he had been. The shape of the fire in the grate would wheel past and the twin cups of light from the black candles on the table in the corner and the old hag's sere and shrunken face. And pass again.

  He felt a laying on of hands, dry claws divesting him. A clammy fear clogged his heart. Unknowing if his eyes saw or saw not. They seemed lidless and opened or closed beheld things all the same. His own hand put out to save him seemed to sink in a nameless mucilage and he lay like a moth in a web. Dust fell from her, her eyes rolled wetly in the red glow from the fireplace. A dried black and hairless figure rose from her fallen rags, the black and shriveled leather teats like empty purses hanging, the thin and razorous palings of the ribs wherein hung a heart yet darker, parchment cloven to the bones, spindleshanked and bulbed of joint. Black faltress, portress of hell-gate. None so ready as she. Her long fiat nipples swung above him. Black and crepey skin of her neck, the plaguey mouth upon him. A gray and handstitched scar flickered in the light. Where she'd survived some murder. Tin figures, the toadstone, dragged on his chest where they hung from her neck by plaited horsehair strands. In the yard he heard a bird scream. They are not rooks in those obsidian winter trees but stranger fowl, pale lean and salamandrine birds that move by night unburnt through the moon's blue crucible. Suttree craned his neck to breathe. Dead reek of aged female flesh, a stale aridity. Dry wattled nether lips hung from out the side of her torn stained drawers. Her thighs spread with a sound of rending ligaments, dry bones dragging in their sockets. Her shriveled cunt puckered open like a mouth gawping. He flailed bonelessly in the grip of a ghast black succubus, he screamed a dry and soundless scream. In the pale reach of firelight on the ceiling spiders were clambering toward the cracks in the high corners of the room and his spine was sucked from his flesh and fell clattering to the floor like a jointed china snake.

  The fire had died in the room, the candles burned to pools of grease in their dishes. Suttree saw with perfect clarity a parade he'd watched through the legs of the crowd like a thing that passed in a forest, the floats of colored crepe and the band with its drum and horns and the polished wine broadcloth and gold braid and the majordomo in a stained shako wielding a baton and prancing and farting like a brewery horse. He saw what had been so how a caravan of pennanted cars wound through the rain o
n a dark day and how Clayton in corduroy knickers and aviator's cap marched with his sisters in a high ceilinged room where the paneled doors were drawn and a nurse in a white uniform called closeorder drill and tapped out the time with a cane and he could remember the stamped brass grapes of an umbrella stand cool and metallic under his tongue and he knew that in that house some soul lay dying.

  He saw a pool of oil on a steel drumhead that lay shirred with the pounding of machinery. He saw the blood in his eyelids where he lay in a field in a summer noon and he saw young boys in a pond, pale nates and small bald cods shriveled with the cold and he saw an idiot in a yard in a leather harness chained to a clothesline and it leaned and swayed drooling and looked out upon the alley with eyes that fed the most rudimentary brain and yet seemed possessed of news in the universe denied right forms, like perhaps the eyes of squid whose simian depths seem to harbor some horrible intelligence. All down past the hedges a gibbering and howling in a hoarse frog's voice, word perhaps of things known raw, unshaped by the constructions of a mind obsessed with form.

  He saw white swans flying over a house he'd known as a child, enormous shapes laboring above the chimneypots like farm stock flying in a dream, apparitions of such graceful levity quartering on the winter wind with their long necks craned seaward, shouldering the thin and bitter air. And a mechanical victrola and the bitter taste of the cracked varnish and the small dull tiles in a Victorian bathroom and the footed castiron standards of the tub and the smell of toothpaste and excrement and the languid amber kelp that rose and fell in the swells of a cold gray sea.

  And he saw what had been so how the lilies leaned in the hall glass and a door closed and the candleflames trembled and righted again and he could smell the lilies and some other musty smell and he could feel the wirelike plush pricking the undersides of his legs in their short trousers where he sat in a chair with his elbows cocked high as his ears to rest on the dark oak chairarms. He saw a small boy in a schoolyard with a broken arm screaming and how the children watched like animals.

  He saw shellfish crusted on the spiles of a wooden bridge and a salt river that ran two ways. Buoybells on a reef where the bones of a schooner broke the shallow surf on the out tide and the sound of the parlous and marbled sea and the seethe of spume and the long clatter of pebbles in the foam. He saw ajar in a garden with mousebones and lint and old sash weights stacked like ingots under a woodshed and the mortised shape of a wagonhub, spokestripped, weatherbleached, oaken, arcane. He saw a dead poodle in a street like a toy dog with its red collar and flannel tongue.