Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

In the morning the boy helped them unload the mussels, sullen face filled with suspicion, a potential spy. The woman and the younger girls came up the river path with their shelling tools, the woman with her air of habitual rigidity and the girls in lockstep behind. At supper that night Reese said he thought the boy was well enough to work and the boy glared at Suttree across the table.

Two mornings later he was looking at Willard in the rear of the skiff. Willard wore a dark blue hat he’d come by somewhere made of imitation felt and maybe paper. Suttree rowed with his head averted watching the shore. They hardly spoke all day. By the time they’d unloaded the mussels downstream it was getting on toward evening.

Daddy’s got a hole baited down here, the boy said. Said for us to run his thowlines.

Suttree leaned on his shovel. You go run them, he said.

Willard clambered ashore and disappeared whistling down the river path. He was gone the better part of an hour and when he came back he was lugging a goodsized spoonbill catfish, relict of devonian seas, a thing scaleless and leathery with a duck’s bill and the small eyes harboring eons of night. Suttree shook his head. Some like spirit joined beast and captor. Looky here, called the boy. Suttree sat in the boat with his head in his hands. Darkness settled on them before they’d rowed halfway back to the camp.

They spent the last hour rowing upstream with the boy in the bow sounding with a pole, going up shoals where the oars grated on the gravel bottom and rocks passed along the planks with a slow dull wrenching, fighting off treelimbs that kept boarding them in the dark.

She came down to him at some hour before dawn and lay by him. She put her head against his chest.

We’ve got to stop this, he said.

Why.

We’ll get caught.

I dont care.

You’ll get pregnant.

She didnt answer. After a while she said: We could be careful.

There’s nothing careful about us.

What are we going to do?

Suttree lay staring up through the trees at the night sky.

Do you not want me to come anymore?

He didnt answer.

Buddy?

No, he said. His voice sounded strange.

She lay there for a long time. They didnt speak. Then she rose and went back up the hill.

He thought she would come the next night anyway but she did not. He woke once and heard a rustle, night wind, a dog in the dark. One of the girls went down to the river and back. He got up and walked down the path and waded out and crouched there looking across the dark current to the darker shapes of trees on the farther shore and the faint shoals of mist.

In the third week of August it began to rain. He and the boy were on the river when it started and the rain was very cold and they tucked their necks against it and put toward shore. Not drops but whole glycerinous clots of water were falling in the river, raising great bladderlike weals that exchanged with constant hissing pops. The boy’s hat came slowly and darkly down about his face like a flower in an inkbottle until he looked out from a soggy cowl, his back hunched and his eyes planing about in deep suspicion. Suttree at the oars grinned. The boy half grinned back. His whole head was turning pale blue with hatdye. I aint never seen it rain no harder, have you? he said

What?

I said have you?

No.

They sidled into the bank and Suttree boated the oars and took the rope in his hand and leaped for the bank. He went headlong and slid feetfirst back into the river, his hands dragging up great clawfuls of mud. When he came up he was in water to his chest. The first thing he saw was the boy hugging himself dementedly. He slogged over to the boat and hung his elbows over it. What the fuck are you laughing at, he said.

Whew, gasped the boy. You looked like a big springlizard slippin off into the river.

You simple shit. How about getting that oar and pushing us in.

The boy staggered up still shaking his head and took up the oar. They had drifted under some willows and Suttree was holding to the boat with one elbow and pulling on them. The rain was falling so hard it hurt. He got the boat tied and crawled through the willows and up the bank. There was a thick stand of cedars some little distance up the river and he made for that. Crawling under the trees, driving small birds forth into the weather. Within the copse the day was darker yet but the thick brown compost under him was almost dry and he took off his shoes and emptied out the water and fetched the wadded socks from the toes of them and wrung them out. He took off his shirt and twisted the water from it and put it on again. He heard his name called off down by the river. He heard his name called in the woods. Water was beading down through the cedars and dropping all about him. He parted the boughs and saw the boy going up the river path with his hat hanging about his ears and his face a mottled blue and his arms flailing like an idiot wandered from a pesthouse.

It rained for three days while they sat along the narrow strip of dry earth under the bluff and played cards and while they mended their clothes and Reese whittled first a flute from river cane and then a snake with seedpearl eyes and last a basswood bear he stained with shoeblack for the youngest girl.

It cleared a little on the fourth day and they tried to run their boats in the snarling yellow flood but were glad to give it up. That evening it began to rain again and it never did stop. They laid up in the camp for two weeks and watched the river bloat and swell until it was screaming through the trees below the bluff and the fields crossriver were flooded far as you could see.

The first of these days Reese had kept a watcher posted in the skiff to set forth should anything of value come down but soon the waters grew too treacherous for this commerce. They accumulated a strange collection of goods which he sorted and divided among them guided by inscrutable rules of equity. He’d squat for hours and watch the river pass, pointing sadly at valuables hurtling past with the speed of a train. He’d come back dripping and sit by the fire and shake his head.

They spent three days shoveling at the mussels upstream where the river was sucking away at the edge of the pile and taking back the shells. When they hiked downriver to see about things there they found part of the bank washed out and a great crescentshaped bite gone from their stacks.

At night she watched him with eyes full of questions. All were brought into such close and constant communion by the rain that the configuration of the family seemed to alter. A frailly structured matriarchy showed itself in these latter days, and Suttree reckoned it had always been so. Crouched there under the ledge in the wind’s lee while the flames of the small fire lapped back the dark and all around and ceaseless fell the rain in the forest they could have been some band of stone age folk washed up out of an atavistic dream.

In the office of the old motel on the pike Suttree had found a stack of moldering books and he read through them one by one without regard. Lying with his blanket for a laprobe, propped against the rocks. He read Tom Swift and His Motorcycle and he read The Black Brotherhood and he read Mildred at Home. There were about a dozen titles and when he had finished them all he started over again. She read Mildred at Home and a story about nurses. She said that she would like to be a nurse. He looked at her. She smiled thinly.

When all were asleep in their places she rose with her blanket folded about her and came from the lean-to and went down the bluff toward the woods. Suttree watched. When she was gone he raised up and looked around. Then he pushed back his blanket and followed her.

He caught her up just beyond the edge of the trees. She was all over him. It was raining lightly and they were both wet. She was naked under her blanket. It fell in a dark pool about her feet. In which he knelt, rain dripping from her nipples, runneling thinly on her pale belly. With his ear to the womb of this child he could hear the hiss of meteorites through the blind stellar depths. She moaned and stood tiptoe, her hands holding his head to her.