Suttree (20 page)

Where at?

Gospel tent just up off the highway yonder. Did you not see it?

No.

Lord it's big enough. You come to meetin. They havin the reverend Billy Byington and the Sunrise Singers is supposed to be there too.

They are?

Dadjim right. Same as you hear on WNOX.

The women were turning and scowling.

The old man unscrewed and spat into his jar again and leaned forward. You come tonight, he said. I hear tell they might be goin to have May Maude. That does the oldtimey note singin.

There was a man now going into the water like a sleepwalker. He had his hands before him and his eyes were half closed and he was singing some incoherence over and over. The preacher took a step toward him, so unsteady he looked, the preacher smiling with a kind of grave benignity. Friends on the bank seemed to sway with him. This new candidate flailed once, eyes widening in alarm. The preacher lunged toward him with hands out. The man came aright and surged forth, his coattails dipping, reaching for the preacher and then going suddenly sideways with a long moan. The watchers on the bank stiffened. His hands wheeled wildly in the air and this supplicant went from sight like a drunken music conductor.

Suttree shook his head. The old man gave him a little crooked grin, his jawseams grouted with black spittle.

The preacher was blessing the subsiding roil with one hand and with the other was groping about in the water.

Suttree chuckled. The two women rose together and moved away over the grass. A man who was with them but was enjoying himself anyway turned and grinned. Boys, he said, that ought to take if it dont drownd him.

The preacher had the man up by the collar. He was sputtering and reeling about and he looked half crazy. The preacher steadied him by the forehead, intoning the baptismal service.

Suttree rose and dusted the grass from his trousers.

You aint fixin to leave are ye? the old man asked.

I sure as hell am, said Suttree.

You better get in that river is where you better get to, said the one in overalls. But Suttree knew the river well already and he turned his back to these malingerers and went on.

He went up the river path, swinging along in the sunshine, crossing a slough by a driftwood bridge and following the backwater of the smaller river that flowed in on the left. An upcountry river that grew more green as he went until it was a clouded jade. He sat to rest on a dusty log and watched it pass, A bittern stood in singlefooted siege among the cattails and small waterserpents swam. A dog came upstream on the far side tongue lolled with the heat and at a listless trot that told a weary way to go. He whistled at it and it looked at him and went on. Passing upstream it set the halms of marshweed quivering where nesting fish moved out unseen.

Suttree rose. The bittern flew. He went on until he came to a country road. It was hot walking and he didnt hurry. By and by he came to a small house.

He crossed to the front porch and tapped at the door. There were freshly painted boxes on the porch with new flowers cracking the loam of their beds and wasps were hanging about the eaves. The door opened and a small old woman peeped out. Yes, she said.

Hello Aunt Martha.

She pushed open the screendoor. Lord have mercy, she said. Buddy? Why Buddy.

How are you?

Oh lord, she said. She was tiny and frail and the hand that tucked at him trembled like a bird. Come in, she said.

Where's Clayton?

He's asleep. He eat a big dinner and he's asleep. Oh my lord he'll just be so tickled.

They entered the cool semidark of the front room with her taking his elbow like one might a blind man or like a blind man might. He could smell the rich cookery of their Sunday noon meal. She did not take her eyes from him. Have you eat? she said.

I had breakfast late.

They went into the kitchen where dishes still sat at table. Beyond was a sunporch rife with plantlife and the sun fell warmly through the glass and across the floor and table.

Set down, Buddy, she said, her doll's hands fussing at him. Let me just warm you up some dinner.

Dont bother with that, Aunt Martha. I just stopped by for a minute.

It's not any bother. You just set there. You want a glass of cold sweetmilk?

Yes mam, I'd love one.

I'll have some ice tea in just a minute. Lord I was thinkin about you all this mornin.

Suttree stretched his feet beneath the table. She brought a jar of milk from the refrigerator and a tall glass, pouring as she went, talking.

I was sortin out some old things and got to lookin through them old albums and pictures and I thought about you.

He set the halfdrained glass of milk on the table and blew and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. She poured it full again. I wish you'd come see us more, Buddy. What do you want to be so mean for?

Where are the pictures?

They're right here. Did you want to look at them?

If they're handy. If you dont care.

Why they're just right here.

He drank the rest of the milk and looked out at the flowers and the sun. She came in with two old leather photo albums and a blue shoebox. She laid these on the table and pushing the box to one side to make room she opened the first album. Just go ahead and look while I warm this dinner up.

He took her hand. It was thin and finely boned and cool. I couldnt eat anything, he said.

I wish you would.

He looked around. Just let me have a piece of that cake, he said.

You better eat somethin.

No.

She lifted a cracked cakebell and sliced away a heavy wedge of the chocolate cake it contained and laid it on a plate and set it by him.

He was bent over the album, confronting figures out of his genealogy. Who's this? he said.

She rested her hand on his shoulder and peered with him. Lord, she said, let me get my glasses, I caint make it out.

An ancient woman spreadeagled in a bed, dried hands at her sides, a cured looking face. She is bald save for sheaves of hair on either side her head and they lie opposed and extended upon the pillow like pale horns.

She came back with her spectacles and bent over the photo. That's Aunt Liz just afore she died. She was bald pret near. This here's Roy's baby picture.

A tintype picked from the wedge of the pages. Sailorsuited poppet a fiend's caricature of old childhoods, a gross cartoon.

The old woman's slow hands sorted a loose packet of brown faded photographs, glasses riding down the bridge of her nose as she nods in recognition. She must set them back again with her finger, shuffling these imaged bits of cardboard, paper, tin. They have a burnt look to them, as if dried in a flue. Dark and haggard eyes peer out. In the photographs the children appear sinister, like the fruit of forbidden liaisons.

Who's that?

That's Uncle Carter. He was a goodlookin somethin, wasnt he?

Who's this little boy here?

That's John.

He leaned closer to see was there anything left of that face in the face he knew.

This must be about nineteen ten.

Lord, I guess. I dont know. Here's Helen.

How long has Uncle Carter been dead?

She looked high on the far wall of the kitchen as if perhaps it were written there. He died in nineteen twenty-six. Guess who that is, she said, pointing.

He looked at the darkeyed girl. It was a very old picture. Aunt Martha when he looked at her had one hand to her mouth and was regarding the photograph with a shy and wistful look. Suttree said: That's you, Aunt Martha.

She pushed at his shoulder. Shoo, she said. How did you know that was me?

Why it looks just like you.

Go on, she said. She shook her head slowly. I just loved that dress. Look here. Here's E C.

He looks good in a hat, Suttree said.

Lord, she said, laughing, you remember that?

Sure, he said.

This is Grandma Cameron. She was ninety-two when she died.

This is Uncle Milo.

He was a merchant seaman you know.

Suttree nodded. I remember you Uncle Milo. Lost under Capricorn all hands aboard a bargeload of birdshit one foggy night off the limeslaked coast of Chile. Souls commended to the sea's salt clemency.

He'd not been home for thirteen year.

Foreign stars in the nights down there. A whole new astronomy Mensa, Musca, the Chameleon. Austral constellations nigh unknown to northern folk. Wrinkling, fading, through the cold black waters. As he rocks in his rusty pannier to the sea's floor in a drifting stain of guano. What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman.

Who is this, Aunt Martha?

Do you not know who that is?

He seized the faded picture and scrutinized the girl. She looked out at the void with one cast eye and a slack uncertain smile.

It's not Mama is it?

Why sure.

He turned the page. It doesnt look like her, he said.

The old lady turned back the leaf and regarded the picture. Well, she said, it's not a good likeness. She was a whole lot prettier than that. Here's Carol Beth.

How old was she when she died?

Nineteen. Lord that was a sad time.

This is a dog. He is dead too.

This is the house where the dead lived. It is gone, lost and gone.

What was the dog's name?

She bent to see. I disremember, she said. They had one one time named John L Sullivan cause it was the fightinest little thing you ever seen.

We had one named Jose Iturbi. Because it was the peeinest dog.

Oh Buddy, she said, slapping his arm. I'd be ashamed.

Suttree turned the page, grinning. Bits of ribbon, hairlocks fell slowly down over the photos. She reached past him to adjust these from obstruction. An old man came to light holding a baby in his arms. Proposing it stiffly before him like an offering, old lace and swaddled windings that hung from a small bald and squinting face.

That's you, she said, after a silence.

This is me, he said.

Cold eyes bored at him out of the cowled coverlet. The congenitally disaffected.

Lord you were such a angel your mother wished she had all boys.

Suttree's spine convulsed in a long cold shunting of vertebrae. He looked up at the old woman. She gazed at the photograph through her delicately wired eyeglasses with that constrained serenity of the aged remembering and nothing more. Let me fix some tea, she said.

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.