He lifted the slice of cake and bit into it and turned the page. The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.Some curious person in the past with a penchant for deathbed studies has remembered to us this old man upreared among his stained coverlets, stale smell of death, wild arms and acrimony, addressing as he did kin long parted in a fevered apostrophe of invective. The nurse swore they spoke back. He listened, no ranting fool. Commend him gently, whom the wrath he suckled at his heart has wasted more than years. Suttree remembered the blue pools of his dead eyes. He and his sisters filing past the tall old bed. Lifted up to see. Waxen flesh obscenely wrinkled. In the picture this old grandfather sat up in his yellowed bedding like a storybook rat, spectacles and nightcap and eyes blind behind the glass. And pictures. The old picnics, family groups, the women bonneted and with flowers, men booted and pistoled. The patriot in his sam browne belt and puttees, one of the all but nameless who arrived home in wooden boxes on wintry railway platforms. Tender him down alongside the smoking trucks. Lading bills fluttering in the bitter wind. Here. And here. We could not believe he was inside. Cold and dry it was, our shoes cried in the snow all the way home. The least of us tricked out in black like small monks mourning, a clutch of vultures hobbling in stiff black shoes with musty hymnals in our hands and eyes to the ground. Someone to be thanked for digging in such frozen ground. Weary chant told from an old psalter. The leaves clap shut dully. Pulley squeak, the mounded flowers sucked slowly into the earth. A soldier held the folded flag to Mamaw but she could not look. She pushed gently at it with one hand, a gorgon’s mask of grief behind her black glove. Scoop of dirt rattling, this sobbing, these wails in the quiet winter twilight. Blue streetlights came up beyond the wall as we turned to go.
>>25311477Post the part where he fucks a melon.
>>25311496He crossed the tracks of the railway and loped into the growth on the far side wiping his nose with his sleeve as he went and casting his eyes about, passing along a high revetment of honeysuckle and then through a patch of cane and coming at last along the edge of a field where his old tracks had packed the clay in a furrow you could follow in the dark and his shape washed shadowless across a backdrop of sumac and sassafras. He could see the house beyond in darkness against the starblown sky and the barn behind it rising outsize and stark. He was going along the troughs in the heavy turned earth, past cornrows, the shellbrown spears on his arms with fine teeth, into the open field where the melons lay.There were no more than a quarteracre of them, a long black rectangle set along the edge of the corn in which by the meager starlight of late summer he could see the plump forms supine and dormant in spaced rows. He listened. In the distance a dog was yapping and in his keen ears the blind passage of gnats sounded incessantly. He knelt in the rich and steaming earth, his nostrils filled with the winey smell of ruptured melons. To steal upon them where they lay, his hand on their warm ripe shapes, his pocketknife open. He lifted one, a pale jade underbelly turning up. He pulled it between his knees and sank the blade of the knife into its nether end. He shucked off the straps of his overalls. His pale shanks kneeling in a pool of denim.A whippoorwill had begun to call and with his ear to the ground this way he began to hear the train too. A star arced long and dying down the sky. He raised his head and looked toward the house. Nothing moved. The train had come on and her harpiethroated highball wailed down the lonely summer night. He could hear the wheels shucking along the rails and he could feel the ground shudder and he could hear the tone of the trucks shift at the crossing and the huffing breath of the boiler and the rattle and clank and wheelclick and couplingclacking and then the last long shunting on the downgrade drawing on toward the distance and the low moan bawling across the sleeping land and fading and the caboose clicking away to final silence. He rose and adjusted his clothes and went back along the rows of corn to the woods and to the road and set himself toward home again.
>>25311496>>25311505Brogans stood in the tracks he left. Walking up, back, turning. Toeing the bunged melons lying in the sun. A slow spout of black ants pluming forth. A yellowjacket.He came again that night. In a persimmon tree at the edge of the field a mockingbird whistled him back but he would not hear. Down past the corn he came and into the dark of the melonpatch with stark wooden lubricity, looking once toward the lightless house and then going to his knees in the rich and wineslaked loam.When the light of the sealedbeam cut over the field he was lying prone upon a watermelon with his overalls about his knees. The beam swept past, stopped, returned to fix upon his alabaster nates looming moonlike out of the dark. He rose vertically, pale, weightless, like some grim tellurian wraith, up over the violated fruit with arms horrible and off across the fields hauling wildly at the folds of old rank denim that hobbled him.Hold it, a voice called. He had no ear for such news. The dry bracken that rimmed the field crashed about him. He crossed the stand of cane in a series of diminishing reports and went over the top of the honeysuckle in graceful levitation and lit in the road in the lights of a car rounding the curve. The car braked and slewed in the gravel. A crazed figure dressing on the run blown out of the dark wall of summer green and into the road. In the distance the train called for the crossing.Two pairs of brogans went along the rows.You aint goin to believe this.Knowin you for a born liar I most probably wont.Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.What?I said somebody has been …No. No. Hell no. Damn you if you aint got a warped mind.I’m tellin you …I dont want to hear it.Looky here.And here.They went along the outer row of the melonpatch. He stopped to nudge a melon with his toe. Yellowjackets snarled in the seepage. Some were ruined a good time past and lay soft with rot, wrinkled with imminent collapse.
>>25311505>>25311507Hahaha. Holy shit. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I thought he was going to steal something to eat, then he takes off his pants... >The beam swept past, stopped, returned to fix upon his alabaster nates looming moonlike out of the dark.Out of all the discussions I've seen of this book I don't recall anyone mentioning this.
That’s Elizabeth again, said the old lady. That’s as old a picture as there is, I reckon.Between the mad hag’s face and this young girl a vague stellar drift, the wheeling of planets on their ether trunnions. Likenesses of lost souls haunt us from old chromos and tintypes brown with age. Bloodless skull and dry white hair, matriarchal meat drawn lean and dry on frail bone, a bitter refund ashen among silk and lilies by candlelight in a cold hall, black lacquered bier on sawhorses wound with crepe. I would not cry. My sisters cried.This here’s Uncle Will. You might not remember him. He was like me, he couldnt turn his head to do no good. She turned her head stiffly to show.Yes.He was a blacksmith. They all had trades.He was a drunk, he a grifter.Suttree turned up a tinted photograph of a satin lined wickerbound casket with flower surrounds. In the casket a fat dead baby, garishly painted, bright fuchsia cheeks. Never ask whose. He closed the cover on this picturebook of the afflicted. A soft yellow dust bloomed. Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.
>>25311505>>25311507LOL
In the cool of the mornings he’d run his lines, out with the sun on the foggy river. Afternoons he’d walk in the city but he kept much to himself. He came upon Smokehouse uptown and the old derelict pawed him and begged for a coin. Suttree was holding his pocket with one hand while he reached in with the other but then he looked at Smokehouse and said no. He moved past the old cripple but found him fallen in at his elbow, hobbling along on his twisted legs like a broken disciple. Hey, called Smokehouse, though he wasnt a foot away.Hey yourself.Hell fire, let me have somethin. A dime. Goddamn, Bud, you got a dime aint ye?Mine’s the greater need, said Suttree.This brought the old man up short. He watched Suttree go on up Market Street. He called out again but Suttree didnt turn. That’s right, called the derelict. That’s the way to treat a old cripple man never done nothin but favors for ye.He made his way down Vine among blacker mendicants but he kept his silver to himself such as he had of it. An old negress in rags washed up on the paving beneath the Human Furniture Company like a piece of dark and horrid flora ran her wasted leg over the walkway before her and invited whomever to walk upon it. It lay there like a charred treelimb. Whomever smile wanly and look away and she calls down upon them the darker curses of a harried god. Her eyes are red with drink, her geography is immutable. Whereas the quick are subject to the weathers of a varied fate and know not where a newer day will find them she is fixed in perpetuity, steadfast, a paradigm of black anathema impaled upon the floor of the city like a medieval felon.Suttree passed by, in these days moving through the streets like a dog at large. Such old things strangely new, the city seen through eyes unsealed. The repetition of its own images had washed out and leveled it and he saw upright and arrant on the dead alluvial grimmer shapes, the city of his remembrance a ghost like him and he himself a shape among the ruins, prodding dried artifacts like some dim paleontrope among the bones of fallen settlements where no soul’s left to utter voice at what has passed. A garrulous jocko was miming buggery behind a young black girl passing on the walk and she turned on him with hot eyes and he fled laughing. The gallery of indolents draped among trashcans and curbstones pointed and croaked. Give it to you mammy, she told them and the black mummer mimed masturbation at her, two hands holding an imagined phallus the size of a lightpole while the watchers hooted and slapped their knees. To Suttree they appeared more sinister and their acts a withershins allegory of anger and despair, clutches of the iniquitous and unshriven howling curses at the gates and calling aloud for redress of their right damnation to a god who need be interceded with bassackwards or obliquely. Some knew him to nod to and nodded but the hand he raised to greet them with seemed held in a gesture of dread.
Suttree pulled off the cotton undershirt he wore and tied it around his lower face.Okay, said Leonard.Leonard’s father was wrapped in the sheets he’d died in months before. Leonard was setting out wheelrims and a pile of chain. He got hold of the body and wrestled part of it over the car bumper. Suttree held the lamp.Get his feet there, Sut, and I’ll haul on his arms.How did you get him in there?What?Suttree freed his mouth from the shirt. I said how did you get him in there?Me and the old lady done it. He aint all that heavy.Suttree took hold of the limbs beneath the sheet with sick loathing. They dragged the body out and it slumped to the ground with a nauseating limberness. Leonard’s father lay like a dead klansman. By the light of the lamp on the bare ground they could see strange brown stains seeping through the sheets. Suttree turned away and went to sit on the bank for a while.They dragged the remains down to the boat and Suttree stood in the transom and hauled the thing aboard, goggleheaded under the thin cotton, against his naked chest. Leonard bearing up behind with the lamp, chains clanking.They rowed far downstream. Leonard saying Hell, Sut, any place is good and Suttree rowing on. They looked like old jacklight poachers, their faces yellow masks in the night. The corpse lay slumped in the floor of the skiff. The lamp standing on the stern seat with its thin spout of insects caught in its light the wet sweep of the oars, the beads of water running on the underblades like liquid glass and the dimples of the oarstrokes coiled out through the city lights where they lay fixed among the deeper shapes of stars and galaxies fast in the silent river.Coming about below the railway bridge Suttree shipped the oars. Leonard was at wrapping his father in chains, fastening them with dimestore locks, chaining up the wheelrims through the center holes. One of the old man’s legs lay twisted in the floor of the skiff and Suttree could see the stained flannel pajamas that he wore.I think that’ll get it, Sut, said Leonard.Think it will?Yeah. Shit, this’ll take his ass to the bottom like a fucking rocket.Are you going to say a few words?Do what?Say a few words.Leonard gave a sort of nervous little grin. Say a few words?Arent you? I mean you’re not going to bury your father without anything at all.I aint burying him.The hell you’re not.I’m just puttin him in the river.It’s the same thing.It’s the same as burial at sea.Well goddamn, Suttree.Well?This old son of a bitch never went to church in his life.All the more reason.Well I dont know no goddamned service nor nothin. Shit. You say it.The only words I know are the Catholic ones.Catholic?Catholic.
I started reading this book yesterday and I like it. It's like a spiritual predecessor to Blood Meridian. Same exact style, similiar characters, but set in the 1970s(?) in Louisiana(?). I'm curious to see where it goes. Right now I'm just excited I get to scry through 400 pages of beautiful prose.
>>2531285140 I believes. Knoxville. All the locations are real and people have taken photos of how they look today.
>>25312942Ok, 40s. One character in chapter one said he went to jail in 1916, but it didnt specify when he got out. I was picturing him as an old man. McCarthy isnt that old, was he? I heard this was semiautobiographical.
>>25312946eh sorry I googled it, takes place 1950-54. McCarthy was born 1933.
>>25311477Faulkner did it better.
>>25313348Faulkner could never write a book like Suttree
