Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

She was standing across the room and the light was poor and she could not have rightly known which photograph among the many he was looking at and yet she said: She was born in seventeen and eighty-seven.

Who is she?

My grandmama. She was a hunnerd and two when she died.

She looks almost that old in the picture.

She’s dead in the picture.

Suttree looked at her. The goldwire frames catching the light, the little round panes of glass. He leaned to see the picture again. Someone in the photograph behind the grandmother was holding her head up and her eyes were glazed and sightless. Suttree could not stop looking at this cracked and lacquered scene from times so fabled. The hands at the neck of the creature seemed to be forcing her to look at something she had rather not see and was it Suttree himself these sixty-odd years hence?

Are you in the picture? he said.

I aint in it. That was in Fayette County Kentucky. They kep her in a rootcellar till they could fetch the man to come and take the picture. Her children set with her down there of a night with candles.

Was that before you were born?

No. I was there. I never come out in the picture. I was there when it was took but I never come out.

Where were you in the picture?

Right yonder in that dead place.

He bent to see. On the far right there was a grayed-out patch, a ghost in the photo among her pellagrous predecessors. Here? he said.

She nodded, the little spectacles winking in the lamplight. Set down, she said.

Suttree sat beneath the picture. Jones was still standing almost in the middle of the little room and he seemed suddenly mindless, a great tottering zombie that she must take by one elbow and steer to the table although he has been here before. She’s sewn him up like a hound with carpetthread and the blood beading very fine and bright from the pursings of black flesh, stanching lesser holes with cataplasms of cobweb, binding him in bedlinen. With him drunk at the door two days later demanding to be undone and sewn looser because he could not bend. Eyes raddled with blood, reeking of splo whiskey.

He sat. The crowned tooth of flame shifted and reshaped within the glass. Her neckware winked, tin amulets, a toadstone, an ebon baal that hung from a necklace of braided hair. She spread her hands. Under the black and dusky skin you could see how the fingerhinges were fashioned, the lean and jointed bonepipes. She said: I dont know which of these two souls is the worst troubled. Let me see your hand.

Jones laid his hand on the table. Fingers like old bananas, that fat, that brown. She sat slowly and took the hand palm up in her dark little claws and shut her eyes. Then she looked down at it. She bent closer. What’s that? she said.

Jones looked. That aint nothin. Just where I took a knife off of some fool.

She pressed his seamy palm with her fingertips. She leaned back. Suttree was studying a photograph above the table to his right. A black boy in uniform who has watched the camera with some suspicion of his own expendability. The old woman said: You wants him here?

The youngblood? The youngblood can stay.

She bent forward and her eyes opened and her mouth made a little popping noise like a turtle’s. Gimme five dollah, she said.

Jones raised one hip and reached into his pocket. He brought out a large roll of bills fastened with a rubber band and he dealt a five onto the tabletop. She took it and folded it and it disappeared somewhere about her person and she took his hand again. She began to recount for him aspects of his past. Legends of violence, affrays with police, bleeding in concrete rooms and anonymous coughing and groans and delirium in the dark.

Jones looked up. I aint interested in all that, he said. I just dont want to leave Quinn here and me gone.

You caint buy that.

I caint buy it with five dollar.

A flickering look of impatience in her blueblack face. She told a tale of retribution, silver seals but cannot buy such powers.

She has bored a keep in a treebole and hid therein the dung of her enemy and plugged it shut with an oakwood bung. She leans to them in terrible confidence: His guts swoll like a blowed dog. He couldnt get no relief. His stool riz up in his neck till he choken on it and he turn black in the face and his guts bust open and he die a horrible death a screamin and floppin in his own mess.

Jones nodded. He said that that would suit him fine. Suttree smiled against the back of his hand but the ogress waggled a finger before them both. She rose and went to a cupboard above the cookstove, climbing with surprising agility from a chair to the top of the stove and reaching up and taking down a small and moldy leather poke. She brought it with her to the table and she spread over the naked boards a cloth of black damask, smoothing the creases with hands as black, more deeply creased. She sat with her hands folded so and she rolled her soapy old eyes at them. She took up the pouch and held it and closed her eyes. Her fingers undid the mouth of the little bag and when the strings hung loose she held it clenched by the neck as if what crouched inside might otherwise out. She began to sway lightly back and forth and she was holding her head up very stiffly and something was moving in the black folds of her throatskin as if she were swallowing repeatedly. Suddenly she opened her eyes and looked about and with a motion almost violent raised the leather bag and upended it over the table. Out clattered toad and bird bones, yellow teeth, frail shapes of ivory strange or nameless, a small black heart dried hard as stone. A joint from a snake’s spine, the ribs curved like claws. A bat’s skull with needleteeth agrin, the little pterodactyl wingbones. Tiny pestles of polished riverstone. These things lay shapen still and final upon the black damask and the dark gospeler of their constellation who would in moments now postulate the denial of the old lie that beholder and beheld are ever more than one, this dusky fugitive of the pyre with whom they trafficked studied the figures briefly and looked away. Looked away, let shut the seamy doors of her eyes. They sat in silence.

Jones spoke. He said: What do it say?

About you it dont.

About Quinn then.

It dont say. It aint you nor Quinn neither. It’s him.

Suttree felt the skin on his scalp pucker.

Why aint it me? said Jones.

I caint make it be if it aint.

Do it again.

No.

Jones blinked heavily.

You should of come alone, she said. She still had her eyes shut and Suttree thought that she was talking to Jones but when she opened them she was looking at him.

He did not go back. He passed her in the street one evening toward the summer’s end but she might have been any black crone at all, stooped and shawled and silent save for the shuffling of her feet in the gutter. She did not look up nor did she speak and he could smell her on the night wind, lank harridan, a stale musty odor, dust dry. She passed in a light creaking of bones, dried bulb ends grating in their cups. Stranger yet he saw her a final time that year in the streets uptown in the full light of noon and she did look at him. Suttree shunned those adder’s eyes in which the sun lay split. She has borne her wares in a catskin bag through the brick alleyways and tarpaper lanes. Something moved her mouth very like a smile. The antique teeth like seedcorn. An odor of violated graves. Her small shadow fell against him like a bird and she passed on. He stood looking after. Five fingers to five pressing he constructed a tactile plate of glass between his fingertips. Then he turned and went on. Give over, Graymalkin, there are horsemen on the road with horns of fire, with withy roods. He ran among the crowds dodging and veering. The jar of his heels on the pavement kept stopping the fans that spun above the shop doors.