Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

  He searched the underground until he thought it must be evening and when he emerged again at the foot of the cistern he was surprised to find the day hardly half spent. He looked back down the cistern but he had no heart for going there again.

  That evening he visited Harrogate's diggings under the bridge but there was no sign he'd been there. He ran his trotlines before daybreak in the morning and went again to search for him.

  He checked out narrow side passages and he watched the little mudspits in the cave's stone floors for footprints but there seemed to have been no travelers here for years. The names and dates on the stone grew old. Cimmerians passed on without progeny. Some lack of adventure in the souls of newer folk or want of the love of darkness. His light ran over the ceilings, the carinated domes, stone scallopings and random hanging spires. The ribbed palate of a stone monster comatose, a great uvula dripping rust. Blades of false cuspidine. Hematite deep burgundy and loded with iron, clotted in the shape of stone offal. Or malachite in green coprolitic stools like small stone turds becrept a brassy green.

  He found pale newts with enormous eyes and held them cold and quailing in his palm and watched their tiny hearts hammer under the blue and visible bones of their thimblesized briskets. They gripped his finger childlike with their tiny spatulate palps.

  At the end of the day he came upon pieces of light in an upper wall of the tunnel and he squatted and listened and he thought he heard very faint and far the cries of children. He switched off the light and sat in the dark. He sat there for some time. The children's voices went away. The three shapes of light on the floor of the cavern began to climb the farther wall. After a while he rose and went with his own light back the way he'd come.

  On the fourth day he found footprints in a patch of gray loam. Tennis shoe tracks and big ones at that. He set his own shoe inside. A little further he found a fresh candybar wrapper. He passed through a large cavern where bats lined the roof, their leather elbows jostling in their sleep, a constant reedy murmuring of squeaks like those numberless cries that Bishop Hatto must have heard in his tower prior to being consumed by mice. Suttree pressed on, down the carious undersides of the city, through black and slaverous cavities where foul liquors seeped. He had not known how hollow the city was.

  The air was becoming more tainted, a rising sulphur reek of sewage. Where this smell thickened worst he found the city mouse crouching. He was leaning against a wall and looking back down the tunnel toward the beam of light approaching. He looked like something that might leap up and scurry off down a hole. Suttree squatted in front of him and looked him over.

  How about gettin that light out of my eyes, said Harrogate.

  Suttree lowered the light. Their faces were blackened like miners or minstrels and the city mouse wore only shreds of clothing and he was covered with dried sewage. True news of man here below. He was looking down at the pool of light.

  I thought I was dead. I thought I'd die in this place.

  Are you all right?

  There was people down here.

  What?

  There was people down here.

  You were seeing things.

  I talked to em.

  Let's go.

  I hate for anybody to see me like this.

  Suttree shook his head.

  I'd give ten dollars for a glass of icewater, said the city mouse. Cash money.

  Suttree would see her in the street, dawn hours before the world's about. A hookbacked crone going darkly and bent in a shapeless frock of sacking dyed dead black with logwood chips and fustic mordant. Her spider hands clutching up a shawl of morling lamb. Gimpen granddam hobbling through the gloom with your knobbly cane go by, go by. Over the bridge in the last hours of night to gather herbs from the bluff on the river's south shore.

  He saw Jones all these summer evenings. Sat with friends under a caged windscrew the size of a plane's prop and in the howling wind drank dripping beers and watched the cardplayers in their wet shirts mutter and smoke and deal. Jones spoke no more of the witch. Then one evening he leaned toward Suttree where he sat at the small marble table. Say she wont come down here? He said.

  Who.

  He snuffled. His eyes shifted but he seemed to be watching the cardtable. That old nigger witch, he said.

  Ah, said Suttree. That's what she says.

  The black nodded.

  Why dont you go up and see her?

  He shrugged.

  She said it wasnt yourself you wanted to see her about.

  He looked at Suttree and looked back to the table again. Who she say I want to see her about.

  Your enemies.

  Ah, said Jones.

  They went in the evening through the locust wood, insects so named screaming in the greenery, beneath great blooms of newsprint and into the steaming sink.

  She was tending her garden, stooped with a hoe, a figure the size of a child. The homedyed black of her gown fugitive at back and shoulders from the sun. When she saw them she raised up and went into the house. They crossed the yard. Past the little rows of tomato plants and late runner beans. Suttree tapped at the door and they stood looking out at the little glade. After a while he tapped again.

  When she came to the door she was bareheaded and she wore her spectacles. She stood aside for them to enter as if they'd been expected.

  They followed her down the little hall in all but darkness toward an open door beyond which stood a table and a lamp burning. Jones stooped to enter, Suttree followed. They stood in the kitchen. Suttree looked about. The walls were hung with pictures, the pictureglass all dull with grease. He bent to study a clan of blacks, some thirty or more all formally aligned, old patriarchs and men and women and small children peering out and in the center seated and shawled what appeared to be a scorched rhesus monkey.

  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. He
r 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.

  In late October he pulled his lines. Leaves were falling in the river and the days of windy rain and woodsmoke took him back to other times more than he would have liked. He made himself up a pack from old sacking and rolled his blanket and with some rice and dried fruit and a fishline he took a bus to Gatlinburg.

  He hiked up into the mountains. The season had gone before, some trees gone barren, none still green. He spent the night on a ledge above the river and all night he could hear the ghosts of lumber trains, a liquid clicking and long shunt and clatter and the jargon of old rusted trucks on rails long gone. The first few dawns half made him nauseous, he'd not seen one dead sober for so long. He sat in the cold gray light and watched, mummied up in his blanket. A small wind blew. A rack of clouds troweled across the east grew mauve and yellow and the sun came boring up. He was moved by the utter silence of it. He turned his back to the warmth. Yellow leaves were falling all through the forest and the river was filled with them, shuttling and winking, golden leaves that rushed like poured coins in the tailwater. A perishable currency, forever renewed. In an old grandfather time a ballad transpired here, some love gone wrong and a sabletressed girl drowned in an icegreen pool where she was found with her hair spreading like ink on the cold and cobbled river floor. Ebbing in her bindings, languorous as a sea dream. Looking up with eyes made huge by the water at the bellies of trout and the well of the rimpled world beyond.

  Suttree lay on a warm rock above the river and watched the trout drift and quarter over the cold gray stones. He had baited his small hook with ricegrains. The trout stood or sidled or turned among the pouring leaves. Bulltrout with rutwarped snouts, pale trout with velvet fins. They would not bite.

  First he left the roads, then the trails. Small creeks half dry in this late season now the rains have gone. Scrambling up a stone throat pool to pool he saw a mink go black and bowbacked limping over the rocks. Dark mucronate droppings steaming on a shalepane replete with bones, scales, shellshards. At night a high cold wind sucked the fire he squatted by in the eye of the dark. A thin wind, thin air, hard to breathe and bitter cold.

  In the morning turning up the frostveined stones for bait he uncovered a snake. Soporific, sleek viper with flanged jawhinges. Fate ridden snake, of all stones in the forest this one to sleep beneath. Suttree could not tell if it watched him or not, little brother death with his quartz goat's eyes. He lowered the stone with care.

  That afternoon he crossed the watershed and started down through a dark spruce forest. Ravens flew over the vast high country, the slopes falling away all he
ather and gray weather wood into the clouds below. He made a fire beneath a shelf of rock and watched a storm close over the valley down there, ragged hot wires of lightning quaking in the dusk like voltage in some mad chemist's chambers. Rain fell, leaves fell, slantwise and wild, a silver storm blowing down the eaves of the world. He'd found a few wild chestnuts and he watched them blacken in the coals. He cracked and cooled them. All things contained of tree therein, leaf and root. He ate. He'd no food other and he thought his hunger would keep him awake but it didnt. He could hear the long wild sough of the wind in the high forest as he lay there in his blanket staring up at the heavens. The cold indifferent dark, the blind stars beaded on their tracks and mitered satellites and geared and pinioned planets all reeling through the black of space.

  In the morning there was snow at the higher elevations, a fairyland dust on the peaks. He had bound up his feet with the crokersack and now he simply wrapped the blanket about his shoulders and went down along the ridge, a hermetic figure, already gaunted and sunken at the eyes, a week's beard. Going shrouded in his blanket through the forest beswirled about by cold gray mist, gray weather, cold day, moss the color of stone. The wind sharp in the dry bores of his nostrils. Down through the pale bare bones of a birch forest where the clawshaped leaves he trod held little ferns of ice.

  Below him ravens rode up like things of wire and crepe weightless on the updrafts. They rocked and wheeled and slid away over the high vast emptiness with lost windmuted croaks.

  Suttree in the woods was surprised to find small flowers still. He fell into silent studies over the delicate loomwork in the moss. Annular forms of lichens fiery green that sprawled across the stones like tiny jade volcanoes. The scalloped fungus that ledged old rotted logs, flangeous mammary growths with a visceral consistency and pale indianpipes in pulpy clusters among the debris of humus and rich decay and mushrooms with serrate and membraneous soffits where under toads are reckoned to siesta. Or elves, he said. In breeks of kingscord, shirts paned up of silk tailings, no color like the rest. A curious light lay in the forest. He was squatting in the rich and murky earth, the blanket about his shoulders. He wondered could you eat the mushrooms, would you die, do you care. He broke one in his hands, frangible, mauvebrown and kidneycolored. He'd forgotten he was hungry.