Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

He was a black of a contemplative nature and he was just slightly drunk and he stood leaning there against the abutment of the viaduct and took a sip from a halfpint bottle and slipped it back into his hip pocket and wiped his mouth and watched this spectacle of frenzied mayhem with a troubled gaze.

Ahhg, said Harrogate when he glimpsed him leaning there.

The owner nodded his head. Mmm-hmm, he said.

Hidy.

He turned his head and spat and regarded Harrogate with one eye slightly veiled. You aint seed a stray shoat abouts have ye?

A what?

Little old hog. A young, young hog.

Harrogate tittered nervously. Hog? he said in a high voice.

Hog.

Well. I got this one here. He pointed at it with the knife. The black craned his head to peer. Oh, he said. I thought that was somebody.

Somebody?

Yes. You say that’s a hog?

Yes, said Harrogate. It’s a hog.

You wouldnt care for me to look at it would ye?

No. No no. He gestured at it. Go ahead.

The black man came forward and bent and studied the pig’s ruined head. He took hold of the tip of the ear and turned it slightly. This hog’s dead, he said.

Yessir.

I swear if it dont look almost exactly like one I had up at my place.

It was just sort of runnin around.

What was your plans for this here hog if you dont care for my askin?

Well. I’d sort of figured on eatin it.

Unh hunh.

Did you mean to say it was yourn?

If I’m not mistook.

Well foot fire, if it’s yourn why then just go on and take it.

The owner was looking about the little camp for the first time. You live here? he said.

Yessir.

I see lights over here of the night.

I generally keep a lantern goin.

I guess it’s cold in under here. In the winter.

Well, I aint been here in the winter yet.

I see.

You say you live up on the hill yonder?

Yes. You can see my place from just out here.

Boy I like it down here dont you? I mean you’re close to town and all. And they dont nobody bother ye.

The owner looked at Harrogate and he looked at the pig. Boy, he said, what do you reckon I’m goin to do with that there mess?

I dont know, said Harrogate in a quick nervous voice.

Well you better think of somethin.

I’d take it if you didnt want it.

Take it?

Yessir.

Is you prepared to compensate me for that there hog?

Do what?

Pay me.

Pay ye.

Now you got it right.

Harrogate was still standing astraddle the deceased animal and now he unstood himself from over it and wiped his bloody hands down the side of his trouserlegs and looked up at the owner. How much? he said.

Ten dollar.

Ten dollar?

It’d of brung ever cent of it.

I aint got no ten dollars.

Then I reckon you’ll have to work it out.

Work it out?

Work. It’s how most folks gets they livin. Them what aint prowlin other folks’ hogpens.

What if I dont?

I’ll law ye.

Oh.

You can start in the mornin.

What you want me to do with this?

The owner had already started out through the weeds. He turned and looked back at Harrogate and at the hog. You can do whatever you want with it, he said. It’s yourn.

How do I find you up yonder?

You ast for Rufus Wiley. You’ll find me.

How much a hour do I get? To work it out at? Harrogate was fairly shouting across the space between them there under the viaduct although Rufus was not yet thirty feet away.

Fifty cents a hour.

I’ll take seventy-five, called Harrogate.

But Rufus didnt even answer this.

All that night cats moaned in the dark like cats in rut and circled and spat. Lean dogs came from the weeds highhackled and tailtucked with their lips crimpt and teeth bright red in the light of the roadlanterns. Beyond in the dark where the guts lay they circled and snapped and glided in like sharks.

He lay by a dying fire in the creeping damp and listened to the snarling and rending out there until some hour toward dawn when these windfall innards had been divided and consumed and even the most brazen cur had decided not to risk the red hell of lanterns surrounding Harrogate’s hog where it hung. The spoilers all slunk away to silence one by one and only a thin cat squall came back, far, now farther, from the hill beyond the creek.

When Harrogate went down the little path toward the hoglot lugging the pail of slops before him in two hands all the small pigs had been returned to the pen and they greeted him with squeals and snorts, jostling along the fence, their pale hammershaped snouts working in the mesh. He looked back over his shoulder toward the house and then fetched the nearest a good kick in the head.

He poured the curdled stinking mess down a rough board chute and stepped back. The pigs grunted and shoved and slurped at the swill and Harrogate shook his head. In the adjoining pen the sow lay sleeping in mud. He moved along the fence and bent to study her. Striped lice the size of lizards traversed the pink nigh hairless swine’s hide. He picked up a piece of coal and threw it and it made a dull thump against the fat barrel of her bulk. Her ears twitched and she raised up and snuffed about. The chunk of coal lay just behind her foreleg and she found it and set to eating it, grinding it up with great crunching sounds, a black drool swinging from her jowls. When it was gone she looked up at Harrogate to see if there were more. Harrogate pursed his lips and spat between her eyes but she seemed not to notice. You’re crazier’n shit, he said. The hog tested the air with her snout and Harrogate turned and went back to the house.

Dont set that bucket in here, she said. This aint no hogpen.

Harrogate gave her a malignant look and went back out again.

When’s dinner? he said, his face at the screendoor.

When it’s done.

Shit, he said.

What you say?

Nothin.

I hear him say for you to cut some wood?

Harrogate spat and made his way across the small scrabbled lot to the woodpile. Pullets trotted off before him, a patchy band of birds in moult, small leprous fowl that scudded across the mud with bald pinshaft rumps. He picked up a handaxe used for splitting kindling and set about chopping ants in two as they crossed a pine log. Niggers, he said. Shit.

On the other hand he was eating pretty good. Long after he’d worked out the price of the shoat he was still around to fetch and carry or lie these last warm days in a den in the honeysuckle and read comicbooks he’d stolen, risible picturetales of walking green cadavers and drooling ghouls.

Next door but one lived a pair of nubile young black girls and he used to hang from a treelimb outside their window at night in hopes of seeing them undress. Mostly they just stepped out of their cotton dresses and went to bed in their undershifts. He tried to lure the younger one to his bower in the honeysuckle with promises of comicbooks. She said: Me and Marfa come down there directly she gets in.

They came sidling and giggling after supper and carried off his whole supply. Visions of plump young midnight tits, long dusky legs. It was September now, a season of rains. The gray sky above the city washed with darker scud like ink curling in a squid’s wake. The blacks can see the boy’s fire at night and glimpses of his veering silhouette slotted in the high nave, outsized among the arches. All night a ruby glow suffuses the underbridge from his garish chancel lamps. The city’s bridges all betrolled now what with old ventriloquists and young melonfanciers. The smoke from their fires issues up unseen among the soot and dust of the city’s right commerce.

Sometimes in the evening Suttree would bring beers and they’d sit there under the viaduct and drink them. Harrogate with questions of city life.