Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

When he was finished he flung away the water in a beaded explosion of vapor under the scorching wall of the warehouse, a brief rainbow. He filled the basin again and took off his shirt and splashed himself wet and soaped and rinsed and dried himself with the towel. He put away the razor and brushed his teeth, squatting on his heels there in the raw clay, looking about. A hot silence hung over the riverfront. Over the stained and leaning clapboard shacks, over the barren rubble lots and the fields of wirecolored sedge, over the cratered wastes of hardpan and the railway road. And silence among these broiling colossi of tin and down by the stones and bracken and mud that marked the river shore. Something that looked like a mouse save it had no tail came out of the weeds below him and crossed the open like a windup toy and scuttled from sight beneath the warehouse wall. Suttree spat and rinsed his mouth. A black witch known as Mother She was going along Front Street toward the store, a frail bent shape in black partlet with cane laboring brokenly through the heat. He rose and collected his things and went back down the dry clay gutter by the edge of the warehouse and along the tracks and across the fields.

As he neared the shanty he saw a long gray cat struggling toward the weeds towing its own length of fish. He shouted and waved at it. He scooped and shied a rock. Hobbling along gingerfooted through the stubble. When he came up the cat squared off at him, a starved and snarling thing with the hackles reared along its razorous spine. It did not let go the fish. Suttree threw a rock at it. The cat’s ears lay flat along its head and its tail kept jerking. He threw another rock that caromed off its stark ribs. It dropped the fish and yowled at him, still crouched there cocked on its bony elbows.

Why goddamn you, said Suttree. He cast about until he found a huge clod of dried mud and going close he broke it over the animal. It squalled and scrabbled away, shaking its head. Suttree retrieved the fish and looked it over. He rinsed it in the river and gathered up the other fish and piled them in his washbasin, a tottery load, and went on to the shanty. The cat was already back in the skiff, searching.

With the day’s sun full on the tin roof the heat in the houseboat was unendurable. He put away his things and got a clean shirt and trousers from his cardboard bureau and dressed and took his shoes and socks and towel and went out onto the deck. There he sat looking out through the rails with his feet hanging in the river. Down near the bridge an old man poled a skiff by the shore. Standing precarious and daring. Wielding a longhandled hook. A fellow worker in these cloacal reaches, plying the trade he has devised for himself. The old man’s name was Maggeson and Suttree smiled to see him at his work, going slow, shaded by the fronds of a huge and raveled fiber hatbrim.

He dried his feet and put on his socks and shoes and combed his hair. Inside the shanty he wrapped the fish in a newspaper and tied them with a string and took the coaloil can from its corner. At the door he looked to see had he forgotten anything and then he left.

When he reached the street he walked along until he found a flat place at the paving’s edge and under the weeds and here he stopped and poured the kerosene over the warm tar. Then he set the can from sight in the weeds and went on.

Gravely, gravely, small chocolate children nodded or lifted pale brown palms. Hello. Hidy. He climbed up from the river and went toward the city with his fish.

Early in his living by the river Suttree had found a shortcut through old gardens on the river bluff, a winding path with cinder paving that angled up behind old homes of blackened boarding and old porches where rusted skeins of screening fell down the rotting facades. But passing under one high window always he heard a dull mutter of invective and sullen oaths and he no longer took the near path but went the longer way round by the streets. The invector however had moved to a new window so large was the house that he shared with his soul and he could still watch for the fisherman to pass. In these later years he had become confined altogether and this was hard for one accustomed to tottering daily abroad and dripping vitriol on passing strangers. He keeps his watch with fidelity. An old man dimly seen in upper windowcorners.

Market Street on Monday morning, Knoxville Tennessee. In this year nineteen fifty-one. Suttree with his parcel of fish going past the rows of derelict trucks piled with produce and flowers, an atmosphere rank with country commerce, a reek of farmgoods in the air tending off into a light surmise of putrefaction and decay. Pariahs adorned the walk and blind singers and organists and psalmists with mouth harps wandered up and down. Past hardware stores and meatmarkets and little tobacco shops. A strong smell of feed in the hot noon like working mash. Mute and roosting pedlars watching from their wagonbeds and flower ladies in their bonnets like cowled gnomes, driftwood hands composed in their apron laps and their underlips swollen with snuff.

He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with a vigor unknown to the sane. Suttree admired them with their hot eyes and dogeared bibles, God’s barkers gone forth into the world like the prophets of old. He’d often stood along the edges of the crowd for some stray scrap of news from beyond the pale.

He crossed the street, stepping gutters clogged with greenstuff. Coming from behind the trucks a beggarlady’s splotched and marcid arm barred his way, a palsied claw that gibbered at his chest. He slid past. Stale nunlike smell of her clothes, dry flesh within. The old almstress’s eyes floated by in a mist of bitterness but he had nothing but his fish.

He passed under the shade of the markethouse where brick the color of dried blood rose turreted and cupolaed and crazed into the heat of the day form on form in demented accretion without precedent or counterpart in the annals of architecture. Pigeons bobbed and preened in the high barbicans or shat from the blackened parapets. Suttree pushed through the gray doors below.

He went over the cool tiles, his heels muted by sawdust and wood-shavings. A halfman on a skatecart oared past with leather chocks. Huge fans wheeled slowly in the upper murk and marketers shouldered past with baskets, eyes stunned by the plenty through which they moved, shy women in wrappers of gingham print with the armpits eaten out and trailing small streaked children in tennis shoes. They milled and turned and shuffled by. Suttree wandering among the stalls where little grandmothers offered flowers or berries or eggs. Rows of faded farmers hunched at the lunchcounters. This lazaret of comestibles and flora and maimed humanity. Every other face goitered, twisted, tubered with some excrescence. Teeth black with rot, eyes rheumed and vacuous. Dour and diminutive people framed by paper cones of blossoms, hawkers of esoteric wares, curious electuaries ordered up in jars and elixirs decocted in the moon’s dark. He went by stacks of crated pullets, plump hares with ruby eyes. Butter tubbed in ice and brown or alabaster eggs in ordered rows. Along by the meatcounters shuffling up flies out of the bloodstained sawdust. Where a calf’s head rested pink and scalded on a tray and butchers honed their knives. Great cleavers and bonesaws hung overhead and truncate beeves in stark abbatoir by cambreled hams blueflocced with mold. At the fishmarket cold gray shapes dimly limned in troughs of powdered ice.

Suttree eased past the cool glass cases with their piscean wares and went on to the rear of the stall.

Hello Mr Turner.

Howdy Suttree, said the old man. What have you got?

Two nice cats and some carp. He unrolled the paper and laid them out on the block. Mr Turner thumbed one of the catfish over. Bits of newsprint clung to it. He felt the flesh, picked up the two fish and laid them in the scales.