In midafternoon an old Packard hearse came wending through the woods leading a few cars and circled the canopy on the hill and parked on the far side. The cars came quietly to rest and people in black emerged. Steel doors dropped shut softly one by one. The mourners moved graveward. Four pallbearers lifted the small coffin from the funeral car and carried it to the tent. Suttree came up over the hill in time to see it go. Some flowers fell. He walked up the hill above the gravesite and stood numbly. The little bier with its floral offerings had come to rest on a pair of straps across the mouth of the grave. A preacher stood at the ready. The light in this little glade where they stood seemed suffused with immense clarity and the figures appeared to burn. Suttree stood by a tree but no one noticed him. The preacher had begun. Suttree heard no word of what he said until his own name was spoken. Then everything became quite clear. He turned and laid his head against the tree, choked with a sorrow he had never known.
When all the words were done a few stepped forth and placed a flower and the straps began to lower, the casket and child sinking into the grave. A group of strangers commending Suttree’s son to earth. The mother cried out and sank to the ground and was lifted up and helped away wailing. Stabat Mater Dolorosa. Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm. Suttree went to his knees in the grass, his hands cupped over his ears.
Someone touched his shoulder. When he looked up there was no one there. The last of the motorcade was moving down the little drive toward the gate and save the two sextons crouched in the hillside grass like jackals he was alone. He rose and went down to the grave.
There among flowers and the perfume of the departed ladies and the faint iron smell of the earth to stand looking down into a full size six foot grave with this small box resting in the bottom of it. Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God’s plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.
When he looked up the gravediggers were watching him from the side of the hill. He called to them but they did not answer. Thinking him mad with grief perhaps. Perhaps he addressed his God.
You two. Hey.
They looked at each other and after a time rose slowly and came shambling down across the green like ordinaries in a teutonic drama. Suttree was sitting in one of the folding chairs. He gestured loosely at the grave. Can you fill this in now?
They looked at each other and then one of them folded his arms and looked down. Orville’s comin with the tractor, he said.
We was just supposed to fold these here chairs and stack em, the other said. They got to come out and take the tent down.
Suttree stared at them. The one with his arms crossed began to rock up and down on his heels and look about.
Orville and them be here directly, the other one said.
Suttree rose from the chair and pulled back the canvas drop where it was thrown over the mound of earth. A few racks of flowers toppled. A pick and two spades lay there and he took up one of the spades and sank it into the loose dirt and hefted it and sent a load of clods rattling over the little coffin.
The two men looked at each other.
We got to get them straps, the one said.
You better get em then, said Suttree, swinging a spadeload of clay. Well hold up a minute.
The smaller man stepped down into the grave to free the straps and the other one hauled them up.
You want this here wreath? said the man in the grave, raising up, just his head sticking out. He shook it. It’s got dirty, he said.
Get out of there, said Suttree.
He climbed out and stood back. Orville and them’ll be here in a minute, he said.
Suttree didnt answer. He labored on, shoveling the dirt, the two men watching. After a while they began to stir about, folding shut the chairs and stacking them against the corner pole of the canopy. Suttree stopped and took off his jacket and then bent to work again.
Before the grave was half filled a truck entered the cemetery gates towing a lowboy with a tractor chained to the bed. The tractor was rigged with a frontloader. They came up the hill and swung down alongside the tent. The driver of the truck looked down at Suttree, his chin on his arm. He spat and looked out over the cemetery grounds and opened the door and climbed down. I allowed you’d have this thing down, he called out.
Suttree looked. The other two men were smoking and grinning and shuffling their feet. The three of them looked over at him. He shoveled on. The driver in the lowboy climbed out and the four of them stood around talking and smoking. I dont know, one of them said. He just jumped up and went to shovelin.
I reckon he was. I dont know. No, he was settin up here on the side of the hill.
Hey, called one of the new men.
Suttree looked up.
We got a tractor here to do that with if you want to wait a minute.
Suttree wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve and kept on shoveling. The men trod out their cigarettes in the grass and set about uncleating ropes, gouging stakes from the ground. They hauled down the canopy and folded it out on the ground and Suttree worked on in the open air. They disjointed the pipework frame and loaded poles and ropes and canvas in the truck and passed the folded chairs in after.
We might as well leave the tractor on the float, one of the men said.
We goin to do them sods in the mornin?
We’ll have to. It’s done past quittin time now.
They sat in the grass watching him. Already it was evening and overcast and before he was done a small rain came cold and slowly falling out of the south autumn sky. Suttree pitched a final shovelful of clods over the little mound and dropped the spade and picked up his jacket and turned to go.
You can ride in with us if you want, one of the men said.
He looked up. They were squatting in the rear of the truck watching the rain. He went on.
Before he reached the cemetery gates a gray car with a gold escutcheon on the door came down the little gravel road and stopped alongside him. A paunchy man in tan gabardines looked up at him.
Your name Suttree?
Suttree said it was.
The man climbed out of the car. He wore a tooled belt and holster and his clothes were neatly pressed. He opened the rear door of the car. Get in, he said.
Suttree climbed into the back of the car and the door shut after him. There was a heavy screen mesh separating him from the front seat. As if the car were used for hauling mad dogs about. There were no door handles or window cranks. The driver looked at him in the mirror and the man in the gabardines looked straight ahead. Suttree leaned back and passed his hand over his eyes. As they came into town people watched him from the street.
Pull over here, Pinky, the man said.
They came to a stop at the curb.
Go get yourself a Coke.
I’m all right.
Go get yourself a Coke.
The driver looked back at Suttree and climbed out and shut the door. The sheriff leaned one arm across the back of the seat and regarded Suttree through the wire. Then he climbed out and opened the back door.
Get up here, he said.
Suttree climbed out and got into the front of the car. The sheriff walked around and climbed into the driver’s seat. He studied Suttree for a minute and then he said: Let me tell you something.
All right, said Suttree.
He reached down and tapped Suttree’s knee with his forefinger. You, my good buddy, are a fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch. That’s what your problem is. And that being your problem, there’s not a whole lot of people in sympathy with you. Or with your problem. Now I’m goin to do you a favor. Against my better judgment. And it’s not goin to make me no friends. I’m goin to drive your stinkin ass to the bus station and give you an opportunity to get out of here.