Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

He rowed out to visit. Coming about the end of the shantyboat in his welded skiff and singing out at the woman where she sat on the porch shelling beans.

Howdy! he called.

She sprang like a wounded moose and came up against the rail at the far corner of the catwalk with her eyes walled and her fallen bosom heaving beneath the rag of a shirt she wore. He didnt seem to notice, sitting there with his impassive smile in the center of his suicidal boat with the in chrome letter across the bow and the homemade paddle laid dripping across his knees. Right purty day, aint it? he said.

Lord God, she said, I knowed the law had me. Dont you never come up on me thataway, you hear?

Yes mam, he said, his face a flower in the warm sunshine.

She looked down at him. He just sat there smiling. She took her seat on the box she’d vacated and fell to shelling beans again.

I live crost the river yonder, he said. I seen ye’ns at church Sunday.

She nodded.

Thought I’d come on down and say hidy.

She looked at him with her caved eyes.

So, he said, toying with the paddle. So hidy.

Hidy, she said.

Where’s the rest of the family at today?

Gone on over in town.

Left ye by your lonesome huh?

She didnt answer.

He looked about and he eyed the sun’s progress. Looks like it’s goin to be another warm’n, I’d say.

Perhaps she didnt hear.

Wouldnt you? he said.

She looked down at him. Flushed, her lank hair matted about her sweating face. I reckon, she said.

That’s the biggest thing about this here boat. It gets hot as a two-peckered … it gets hot as anything. And it settin in the water where you’d allow it’d cool.

Yes, she said.

I like to of drownded in it once.

Uh huh.

It wont float atall.

He took a dip with his paddle to recover the current.

What time you reckon they’ll get back?

I dont know.

Does that boy go to school?

He does sometime. He aint now.

I just despise a school. What kind of hides is them?

Coon hides. Or they was.

Harrogate leaned and spat into the river and raised up again. How old’s that boy of yourn anyway?

She looked at him. She looked at the contraption in which he sat. She said: He aint old enough to ride in that.

What, this here? Shoot. Why you couldnt sink it with dynamite.

She tilted a paper of shucked beanpods overboard. Harrogate watched them drift away.

Old Suttree’s a friend of mine. You know him dont ye?

No.

He et with ye’ns here the other evenin. Runs trotlines. He said he knowed ye.

She nodded her head and tilted the beans in the pan and rose and dumped the debris from the folds of her skirt.

He’s a friend of mine, Harrogate said.

She bent and picked up the pan of shelled beans and tossed her hair back from her face.

He’s rid in it, said Harrogate. In this here boat. Suttree has.

They were walking along the tracks with the city rat at Suttree’s off elbow taking legstretcher steps over every other tie, his hands crammed in his hippockets gripping each a skinny buttock. He watched the ground and shook his head.

What do you say to em?

Say to them?

Yeah. Say.

Hell, say anything. It doesnt matter, they dont listen.

Well you gotta say somethin. What do you say?

Try the direct approach.

What’s that?

Well, like this friend of mine. Went up to this girl and said I sure would like to have a little pussy.

No shit? What’d she say?

She said I would too. Mine’s as big as your hat.

Aw shit, Sut. Come on, what do you say to em? Boy she’s got a big old set of ninnies on her.

Yes she has. You dont think she’s too old for you?

She’s same age I am.

Well.

How do you get em to take off their clothes. That’s what I’d by god like to know.

You take them off.

Yeah? Well what does she do while you’re doin that? I mean hell, does she just look out the winder or somethin? I dont understand it at all Sut. The whole thing seems uneasy to me.

They swung off the right of way and went along a dogpath, Suttree grinning. Tell her she sure has got a big old set of ninnies on her, he said.

Shit, said Harrogate. She’s liable to smack the fire out of me.

It was midsummer before they went back up the river. They left the crazylooking shanty in Knoxville and went by bus with their bedding and housegoods baled up. Suttree saw them off with promises he’d long regretted.

A week later he got a tow to the forks of the river and began rowing up the French Broad. After nine hours at the oars he pulled into the bank and crawled out with his blanket and slept like a dead man. He had reason to think of the old Bildad up on the Clinch who used to flood his skiff and sleep under water in it to keep the insects off.

When he woke in the smoky dawn he felt alien and tainted, camped there in a wilderness with his little stained boat and his weariness. As if the city had marked him. So that no eldritch daemon would speak him secrets in this wood. He ate two of the sandwiches he’d packed and drank a grape drink, sitting there on the bank and watching a wood duck that floated on the river like a painted decoy block mitered to its double on the pewter calm.

He rowed on upriver until he came to the landing at Boyd’s Creek. His hands were puffy and clawed and he wished the skiff at the bottom of the river. He went into the store and drank two cold drinks and got a third one to sip on. Coming back out into the glaring sunlight he saw a thermometer hung in a tin coughsyrup sign on the storefront. The red line in the glass ran from bottom to top and out of sight. He eyed it with baleful bloodfilled eyes and turned and spat a grapestained clot of mucus at the cooking world. Not even a fly moved.

It was early afternoon when he came upon them. He passed a huge and stinking windrow of shells on the south bank and struggled upstream through faster water, towing the boat up shoals with a rope over his shoulder, clutching and fending among the shore bracken, the water very cold and clear. They were camped like gypsies under a slate bluff and smoke rose among the trees. The skiff at the bank bore a strange rigging of uprights and crosspoles and a travis bar with lines and hooks hanging from it. The boy squatted on a stump watching him. The womenfolk were boiling wash in a big galvanized tub and the old man was asleep under a tree. When she saw Suttree tying up, the woman called Reese, Reese. Two dry flat birdnotes he’d heard all his life. He didnt move.

Suttree came on up the bank. Howdy, he said.

They all nodded. They were shrouded in steam and they looked limp and half fainting. The old woman’s long white goat’s udders hung half out above the tub and the flesh of her upper arms swung as she wound the water from a pair of jeans. The girl gave him a sort of defeated smile.

Daddy, she called.

Reese opened one eye tentatively from beneath his tree. Yonder’s my partner, he sang out.

Hey, said Suttree.

Come set down. Boy we really into em up here. Looky yonder.

Suttree looked. A black slagheap of riven shellfish lay along the riverbank exuding a greenish vapor and quaking gently with flies.

And looky here.

The musselfisher lifted out the little foxcod purse and tilted into his palm a single pearl.

Suttree picked it up and looked at it. It looked a bit lumpy. What’s it worth? he said.

Caint tell. They’s lots they go by. He took it and rolled it in his palm and dropped it back into the purse. They aint no tellin what it might be worth, he said.

How many have you found?

Well. That’s the only really good’n. I got some others.