Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

Bearing along garbage and rafted trash, bottles of suncured glass wherein corollas of mauve and gold lie exploded, orangepeels ambered with age. A dead sow pink and bloated and jars and crates and shapes of wood washed into rigid homologues of viscera and empty oilcans locked in eyes of dishing slime where the spectra wink guiltily.

One day a dead baby. Bloated, pulpy rotted eyes in a bulbous skull and little rags of flesh trailing in the water like tissuepaper.

Oaring his way lightly through the rain among these curiosa he felt little more than yet another artifact leached out of the earth and washed along, draining down out of the city, that cold and grainy shape beyond the rain that no rain could make clean again. Suttree among the leavings like a mote in the floor of a beaker, come summer a bit of matter stunned and drying in the curing mud, the terra damnata of the city’s dead alchemy. The fish he raised up from the flood in this season themselves looked stunned.

He stood hard into the oars to come back against the current. Past the bridge risers where small ugly rips broke on the concrete and the boatshaped upstream face rode in a bone of curling froth. Along this clay shoulder where the river gnawed and pulled with her leathery brown waters.

In the fluted gullies where the river backed or eddied spoondrift lay in a coffeecolored foam, a curd that draped the varied flotsam locked and turning there, the driftwood and bottles and floats and the white bellies of dead fish, all wheeling slowly in the river’s suck and the river spooling past unpawled with a muted seething freighting seaward her silt and her chattel and her dead.

One morning while he stood on the gallery in the dim early light watching the river he saw an empty skiff go by. Next came looming out of the yellow mist a patchwork shack composed of old slats and tarpaper and tin snuff signs all mounted in wild haphazard upon a derelict barge and turning with the keelless rotations of a drunken bear, going downriver to founder cumbrously against a pier, list and halt, sidle and grope past with the next wall of the shack coming about and along it like plaster caryatids hung there in a stunned frieze above the licking river the figures of four women and two men, pale, rigid, deathless, wheeling slowly away below the bridge and gone in the mist.

Suttree watched the transit of this foggy apparition with no surprise. Two days later when he went downriver he saw the shantyboat pulled up under some willows on the south bank below the sand and gravel company. There was a line of wash hung out and a small skiff swung at tether below the mooring. Some coon hides were tacked flat to the wall, bleached a pale cream color. You’d have thought them to be wares but the hides were dry and all but hairless and seemed forgotten.

Suttree oared past while a group of wide faces watched from a window. When he came back in the afternoon there was a chair on the roof of the shanty and in it a man sleeping. The wash had been taken down and smoke was rising from a stovepipe elbowed through one wall. The skiff was gone.

As Suttree passed beneath the bridge he saw the skiff coming down. A thin young boy was rowing it. Suttree let one oar trail and lifted a hand in greeting. The boy nodded at him, one eye blueblack and swollen closed, and went on.

In the morning he went down early and as he passed the houseboat he saw a young girl come out along the little veranda and turn and squat, her skirts gathered in the crooks of her elbows. Through the fog Suttree was presented with a bony pointed rump. She pissed loudly into the river and rose and went in again.

He was back before noon with his catch. He came up close by the bank and swung around the houseboat. A woman was peering down at him, a stonejawed and apparently gravid slattern resting her belly on the rim of the washtub and regarding him through clotted rags of hair.

Howdy, he said.

She nodded.

I saw you all come down the other mornin. I live cross the river. He rested an oar under his elbow and pointed.

She said uh-hunh.

Suttree smiled. He said: I figured since we were kind of neighbors I ought to stop and say hidy anyway.

She reached down into the tub and brought something up from the bottom of it. He’s asleep, she said.

The mister is?

Yep.

He dipped the oars to stay against the current. You’ve got a goodsized family, dont you?

She watched down into the tub. How her face must look back from the dead well of blue washwater, rocking and licking in what shapes. We got four, she said. Three girls. She paused and pushed her nose against her arm and snuffled. And a boy, she said.

I believe I saw him the other day.

You aint the one hit him in the eye are ye?

No mam.

Somebody hit him in the eye, she said. With a beadle of soapsoftened wood she subdued the grayish rags that stewed in the pot. She lifted something out and wrung it and laid it on a bench.

Where are you all from?

We was from up around Mascot.

I see, he said.

She glanced down at him and went back to her washing. After a minute she said: Looks like you got you some fish there.

Yes mam. You all like catfish?

We eat it some.

I’ve got plenty here, if you’d like one for your supper.

She looked down into the bottom of the skiff. What would you have to have for one? she said.

He began to sort among the fish. I’ll just give you one, he told her.

Well. I’d rather just to pay ye.

Here. He stood in the skiff and handed up a sleek fourpounder.

She took it expertly behind the gills and looked it over. What do I owe ye? she said.

Not anything.

Well, let me pay ye.

I dont want nothin for it.

Well, she said.

I run a trotline on down a ways.

Well.

I got plenty.

Well, I better put him in here.

He sat down and leaned into the oars, watching her go in with the catfish. Before he had pulled more than a few yards upstream she was out again. He thought she had come back to her washing but she called to him across the water. Hey, she said.

Yes mam.

He’s awake now if you wanted to see him.

Well, I dont want to bother him.

He said to thank ye for the catfish.

You welcome. Tell him I’ll come by in a day or two.

Well, she said. Come back when you can.

The next day there was no one about but the day following the man was in his chair again reading a newspaper. Suttree hailed him as he came alongside and the man folded the paper and squinted down at him.

Hey, he said.

How you getting along?

Right tolerable. You the feller sent that catfish by the other day?

I just had more than I needed.

Well I wanted to thank ye. My old lady fried it up and we et it for supper and sure enjoyed it.

Good, said Suttree.

He turned his head and spoke down a ventilator pipe rising from the roof. Hey old woman, he said.

A muffled snarl came back.

You got any coffee fixed?

He started to turn back to Suttree and his face flickered a small annoyance. He leaned to speak into the pipe again. Fix some, he said. Then he looked down to where Suttree sat in his skiff. Come up, he said, and take some coffee with us.

I dont want to put you out.

Aint no bother. She’s got some ready. Just tie up there. Watch them lines. I got me some thowlines out. Just pull in down there on the lower end. Here, thow the rope.

He had climbed down off the roof and was going along the walkway talking and waving the folded paper about. Suttree pulled the skiff in and tossed his rope.

Come on in, said the man as Suttree climbed aboard. He pushed aside a curtain of knotted twine and ushered him in with a grand expansiveness.

As Suttree entered three girls flew to the far wall of the room whinnying like goats and subsided in a simpering heap together on a bed there. Suttree nodded to the woman and she said him a quiet howdy and pointed out a chair. He looked around. There were beds all along the wall and a table in the center of the room with a faded piece of oilcloth and miscellaneous white crockery draped with breakfast remnants.