She came with the coffee, setting it down with a click and the coffee tilting up the side of the pink plastic cup and flooding the saucer. He poured it back and sipped. Acridity of burnt socks. She returned with napkin, spoon. Ring of gold orangeblossoms constricting her puffy finger. He took another sip of the coffee. In a few minutes she came with the sandwich. He held the first wedge of it to his nose for a minute, rich odor of toast and butter and melting cheese. He bit off an enormous mouthful, sucked the pickle from the toothpick and closed his eyes, chewing.
When he had finished he took the quarter from his pocket and laid it on the counter and rose. She was watching him from beyond the coffee urn.
You want some more coffee? she said.
No thank you.
Come back, she said.
Suttree shoved the door with his shoulder, one hand in his pocket, the other working the toothpick. A face rose from a near bench and looked at him blearily and subsided.
He walked along Gay Street, pausing by storewindows, fine goods kept in glass. A police cruiser passed slowly. He moved on, from out of his eyecorner watching them watch. Past Woodruff’s, Clark and Jones, the theatres. Corners emptied of their newspedlars and trash scuttling in the wind. He went down to the end of the town and walked out on the bridge and placed his hands on the cool iron rail and looked at the river below. The bridgelights trembled in the black eddywater like chained and burning supplicants and along the riverfront a gray mist moved in over the ashen fields of sedge and went ferreting among the dwellings. He folded his arms on the rail. Out there a jumbled shackstrewn waste dimly lit. Kindlingwood cottages, gardens of rue. A patchwork of roofs canted under the pale blue cones of lamplight where moths aspire in giddy coils. Little plots of corn, warped purlieus of tillage in the dead spaces shaped by constriction and want like the lives of the dark and bitter husbandsmen who have this sparse harvest for their own out of all the wide earth’s keeping.
Small spills of rain had started, cold on his arm. Downstream recurving shore currents chased in deckle light wave on wave like silver spawn. To fall through dark to darkness. Struggle in those opaque and fecal deeps, which way is up. Till the lungs suck brown sewage and funny lights go down the final corridors of the brain, small watchmen to see that all is quiet for the advent of eternal night.
The courthouse clock tolled two. He raised his face. There you can see the illumined dial suspended above the town with not even a shadow to mark the tower. A cheshire clock hung in the void like a strange hieroglyphic moon. Suttree palmed the water from his face. The smoky yellow windowlight in the houseboat of Abednego Jones went dark. Below he could make out the shape of his own place where he must go. High over the downriver land lightning quaked soundlessly and ceased. Far clouds rimlit. A brimstone light. Are there dragons in the wings of the world? The rain was falling harder, falling past him toward the river. Steep rain leaning in the lamplight, across the clock’s face. Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.
2
He came up from the back lot threading his way among the shapes of castoff and broken and useless debris rotting under the late summer sun. Old tires and bricks and broken jars. A rusty chicken-feeder. He squinched his nose at the rank odor of wash water in the air and he threw a rock he was carrying at the tethered goat. The goat raised its chin from the grass and looked at him with its strange goat’s eyes and lowered its head to graze again. He went on around the corner of the house to the front porch where a green and white washingmachine shuddered and churned and over which stood a young woman with a soapy paddle clubbed in her hands as if defying the first insurgent rag to rear from the slateblue and foamless water in which the week’s wash moiled.
Hidy, he said.
She moved, her weight bringing up out of the spongy boards beneath her shoes a black seepage. She did not look nor answer.
Old Orville aint been by is he?
She laid the paddle across the washer where it slurred into concatenate images with the motion of the machine and began to slide off slowly. She wiped her forehead with the hem of her apron. No, she said. He aint been here.
He looked toward the open door of the house. What does she want now? he said.
What do you care?
I just ast.
She didnt answer. He propped his foot on the porch and spat, watching out across the dead clay yard at nothing at all.
The paddle dropped to the floor and she stooped and got it and began to dig at the clothes, her breasts pendulous and bobbing with the movement of her shoulders. Blue curded washwater dripped from the end of the porch into a puddle of gray scum. When she looked at him he had not moved. She tossed her hair and tilted one shoulder forward, blotting the sweat from her upper lip. She pouted and blew the hair from her eyes. Why dont you grub some of them weeds out of the tomatoes for me if you aint got nothin else to do, she said.
He sat down facing out across the yard. He put one finger in his ear and jiggled it and she bent to the washer again.
After a while a thin voice came again from the rear of the house. She stopped and looked at him. See what she wants, will ye?
He spat. I didnt take her to raise, he said.
She lifted her bleached and wrinkled hands from the water and wiped them on the front of her dress. All right, Mama, she called. Just a minute.
When she came back out he was hanging by his elbows in the wire fence that ran along the little lane the house faced and he was talking to another boy. They left together. He came back for his supper and went out again and stayed until past dark. Just before midnight she heard him leave the house again.
He listened at her door and then went on to the front room where he sat on the daybed and donned his shoes. Then he was out in the warm August night, lush and tactile, the door set shut with a faint cry of the keeperspring, down the path through the gate and into the lane. When he came out on the pike he could feel the day’s warmth from the macadam through his thin shoesoles and he could smell it, musky and faintly antiseptic. He went up the pike at a jog.
He went solitary and starlit through the sleepfast countryside, trotting soundlessly on his softworn shoes, past dead houses and dark land with the odor of ripe and humid fruits breathing in the fields and nightbirds crying in the keep of enormous trees. The road climbed up out of the woods and went on through farmland and he slowed to a walk, his hands slung in his hippockets and his elbows flapping, taking a dirt road down to the right, padding along soft as a dog, sniffing the rank grass and the odor of dust the dew had laid.
He 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.