Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  Suttree went out through the kitchen and through the ruined garden to the old road. Reprobate scion of doomed Saxon clans, out of a rainy day dream surmised. Old paint on an old sign said dimly to keep out. Someone must have turned it around because it posted the outer world. He went on anyway. He said that he was only passing through.

  At night he could hear the sewage gurgling and shuttling along through the pipes hung from the bridge's underbelly overhead. The hum of tires. Faint streetlight fell beyond the dark palings of sumac and blackberry. He rubbed his stomach and belched in his crepuscular solitude, the lamp at his elbow turned down so that the small flame burned in the glass bell ruby black. He has eaten for his supper an entire chicken boiled in a lardpail he, and he himself is the batfowler who crossed like smoke the dark garden patches above First Creek, something out of the night that drifted bedraped with dead hens down toward the moonlit miasma whitening the cleft of the glen, the ragged trees that seemed to be breathing cold, crossing this small and wretched estuary by a fallen truckdoor and climbing rapidly the far side toward the arches of the viaduct.

  Suttree came, each day new marvels. They sat in purloined lawnchairs and watched a pigeon ringing down, standing off with backing wings and neck hooked while his pink pettysingles reached to grasp the pole and then like the Dove itself descending the bird limned in blue flame and a hot crackle of burnt feathers and the thing pitching backward to fall blackened to the ground in a plume of acrid smoke.

  Gene, Suttree said.

  Slick aint it?

  Gene.

  Yeah.

  What have you got that pole wired to?

  Harrogate pointed. Them lightwires yonder. What I done, I got me some copper wire and wired it and tied one end to a rock and thowed it ...

  Gene.

  Yeah.

  What the hell do you reckon is going to happen when somebody touches that pole?

  Harrogate had not even risen to secure the bird. He sat there squatting in the lawnchair with his arms wrapped around his knees, smoked odor of his ragged clothes, looking up at the pole and then at Suttree. Well, he said. I'd say it would knock em on their ass.

  It would kill them.

  Harrogate looked mildly speculative. You reckon it would? he said.

  Another day pigs. A whole covey of red shoats loose from some hillside hogpen that crossed a clearing in the blackened vines and went on downcreek toward the river. Harrogate watched them and then suddenly sat very erect, looking around.

  If them niggers catches you eatin one of their hogs they will have your ass, he said.

  But they got to catch me.

  He rose and started down the hill toward the road and toward the creekside jungle where the pigs had gone. As he went he studied the pens scattered among the trees on the hillside above him, eclectic shelters hammered up out of snuff signs and boards and odds of fencing all hung in plumbless suspension down the bald and raingutted slope. He could see no one hunting hogs. When he struck the path along the creek he could see the tracks of the pigs here and there in the patches of black mire like the delicately pointed prints of small deer. Coming past a collection of old waterheaters he started them and they flushed into the wall of ivy with high raspy snorts. He picked one out and dove after it. It went through a mass of vines and over a mound of broken fruitjars and disappeared with an agonized squall. Harrogate fetched up in a small clearing. He had tilted himself into a locust tree and was bleeding in several places. He could hear the pigs diminishing in the distance.

  When they came out on the riverbank at the point they paused to test the air. They started downstream at about the time that Harrogate emerged from the brush and they checked and swung back along the creek, their noses dishing and their eyes white. They defiled down a gully to the water and bunched and jerked their noses at it and came back. Harrogate was closing on them like a gangly tiptoe spider. They veered with new alarm and snuffled and went on down the point.

  Looky here at these pigs daddy.

  A man rose up from the tall grass where he'd been sitting and put his hand on top of his hat and turned around. The pigs flared like quail. They passed Harrogate some to the left and some to the right all screaming and he looked about and threw himself finally in the general direction of the pigs and landed full length with a grunt.

  When he came upon them next they were feeding in a bower of honeysuckle, turning up the black earth and devouring worms and grubs and roots with subdued hoggish joy. Harrogate watched them through the vines, admiring them for plumpness, salivating slightly. He had resolved upon a rush, the pigs being too wary for stealth. He came headlong through the honeysuckle, his eye on one pig and one pig only. They squealed and went rocketing away through the underbrush, his the fleetest of the pack. In no time they were gone. He stood leaning against a tree, his hand on his chest, panting. He turned around. There was a sustained muffled screeching coming from behind him. He retraced his steps and crossed the chopped ground of the clearing. Following the sound he came upon a pig with its head in a bucket. As he approached it went running. It crashed into a tree and fell back and lay there squealing. He ran to it and seized it by a hindleg. It kicked and peeled back a long flap of hide from his forearm. He dropped it again and tried to push the skin back over the wound. Goddamn, he said. The pig went on through the bushes.

  He could hear it caroming about, the bucket banging and the pig screeching. He plunged after it. It ran head on into the creek and floundered there in the filthy water with gurgling screams. Harrogate launched out birdlike and fell upon the shoat with an enormous splash.

  He came bedraggled and wet and filthy up through the woods dragging the pig by the hindlegs. Casting about for something to knock it in the head with. He finally selected a stick and laid the pig down, pinning the rear feet to the ground with one hand. He began to beat the back of the pig's head what of it showed above the bucket rim, knocking the bail off, denting in the bucket, raising bloody weals along the pig's neck and the pig shrieking until finally the stick broke and he flung it away. The pig gave a great jerk and he fell upon it to hold it down. Shit amighty, he said.

  He came up with the pig holding it about the waist, the bucket against the side of his face and blood running all down the front of him, hugging it while it kicked and shat. Coming up the creek walking spraddlelegged and half staggering until finally he must stop to rest. He and the pig sitting in a copse of kudzu quietly getting their strength back like a pair of spent degenerates. Every time the pig squirmed Harrogate would call down into the bucket for it to quit. His arms were getting tired and the one that had been peeled was hurting. He struggled up again with the pig and got as far as the garden of waterheaters when his eye fell on a piece of pipe lying naked and unattached upon the ground. He picked it up and hefted it, the pig sagging in his arm, its forefeet sticking out. He laid the pig down, kneeling on it until he could get both hindfeet in a good grip, and then he raised the pipe and swung with all his strength. Blood spewed from under the edge of the bucket. The pig screamed and gave a mighty surge and began to run sideways in a circle, dragging through the black leaves and rubbish. Harrogate swung again. The bucket went skittering off and the pig's fearcrazed eye looked up at him. A whitish matter was seeping from its head and one ear hung down half off. He brought the pipe down again over its skull, starting the eye from its socket. The pig had not stopped screaming. Die goddamn you, panted Harrogate, swinging the pipe. The pig humped and stiffened. He bashed it again, spattering brains over the ground. It stretched out, trembled and quit.

  Harrogate stood over his victim with a heaving chest and cursed it. He pitched the pipe away and hefted the pig by its hindlegs and got it over his shoulder, its bloody head flopping, the brains bulging soft and wet from one side of its broken skull. He labored up to the edge of the road and laid the pig in the dusty bushes and rested. Before starting across the road he checked to see that no one was about. Strange urchin dragging a dead pig. A trail of blood. Twigs, small stone
s clung to the clot of brains. He dragged it up the path and under the viaduct and laid it out on the cool earth and sat looking at it.

  He honed his shoplifted pocketknife on a small stone and knelt down by the dead pig and took it by one leg and held it so for a minute and then let the leg go. He squatted on his heels and flipped the knife into the dirt two or three times, his forehead wrinkled. Finally he raised the pig's leg and stuck the blade into the pig's stomach. Then he had another thought and seized one ear and wrested the head up and hacked open the throat. Blood poured out and ran over the dirt.

  Now he sliced the pig open and hauled forth the guts, great armloads of them, he'd never seen so many. What to do with them. He lugged them down the path and flung them into the bushes and came back. As he had no way of scalding the pig he had decided upon skinning it.

  When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.

  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 g
houls.

  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.

  You ever get so drunk you kissed a nigger?

  Suttree looked at him. Harrogate with one eye narrowed on him to tell the truth. I've been a whole lot drunker than that, he said.

  Worst thing I ever done was to burn down old lady Arwood's house.

  You burned down an old lady's house?

  Like to of burnt her down in it. I was put up to it. I wasnt but ten year old.

  Not old enough to know what you were doing.

  Yeah.--Hell no that's a lie. I knowed it and done it anyways.

  Did it burn completely down?

  Plumb to the ground. Left the chimbley standin was all. It burnt for a long time fore she come out.

  Did you not know she was in there?

  I disremember. I dont know what I was thinkin. She come out and run to the well and drawed a bucket of water and thowed it at the side of the house and then just walked on off towards the road. I never got such a whippin in my life. The old man like to of killed me.

  Your daddy?

  Yeah. He was alive then. My sister told them deputies when they come out to the house, they come out there to tell her I was in the hospital over them watermelons, she told em I didnt have no daddy was how come I got in trouble. But shit fire I was mean when I did have one. It didnt make no difference.