Suttree (49 page)

Suttree regarded him over the rim of the cup. He lowered the cup and cradled it in both hands. Well, he said. I guess I'd call him a poor loser at the least.

You daggone right he is, said the man, leaning back.

What do you aim to do?

Lord I dont know. I thought about huntin me a job down here. You dont know where there is one do ye?

I dont know. You might find something. If you go out Blount Avenue here there's a woolen mill and a fertilizer plant. Then there's the sand and gravel company right here. You could ask around.

Well much obliged. I just need to get set up back upriver so as to start in musselin come summer.

The woman set a plate of cookies on the table.

Start what? Suttree said.

The man looked at him. He looked behind him at the woman and toward the girls on the bed. Then he leaned toward Suttree again. Musselin, he said.

Musselin?

Yeah.

Suttree looked at him. What's that? he said.

The man leaned back and crossed his feet in a chair. Mussel brailin, he said. When the river gets down low towards middle and late summer we go up on the shoals of the French Broad and set us up a mussel camp. I've got everthing. I got a boat for it and everthing.

What do you do with them?

Sell they shells. The womenfolk clean em and me and the boy drags for em.

What do they do with them?

The shells?

Yes.

Different things. Make buttons out of em, the biggest part. Some I reckon they grind for chicken grit.

What are they worth?

They fetch round in about forty dollar a ton.

Forty dollars a ton?

That's right.

That doesnt seem like a whole lot.

The man smiled. Them little fellers is heavier than what you might think. Asides they's more money in it than just that.

The woman poured his cup full. The man didnt seem to notice, sitting there waiting for her elbow to move on out of the way. When she had done he leaned forward. They's more to it than just the shells, good buddy. He looked about craftily. More to it than that.

He stayed to dinner. By then the old man had told him about the pearls and even showed him some. Taking from some secret place on his person a small purse tailored from the scrotum of a treefox and setting out the pearls on the oilcloth. Suttree turned one in his hand and held it to the light.

If we had another hand we could run two boats, the old man said.

Can you make any money at it?

The old man turned away in mirthful derision. Money? Shit, boy. Whyyy ...

Suttree stared at the pearls. The little cabin had filled with a rich steam of cookery. Plates were clattering and the woman and the oldest girl whispered together at the stove.

How would you go shares if you was interested? the old man said.

Suttree looked up. He looked around the cabin. Shares, he said?

They's six of us. Everbody works.

Let her set the table, Reese, the woman said.

Reese raised his elbows. He hadn't taken his eyes off Suttree. Would you go fifths? Not takin out nothin for ye board.

Suttree scooped the pearls into his palm and funneled them back into the purse. His voice sounded far away. I might go fourths, he said.

A soft young breast crossed his nape. The girl leaned and dealt from a tray of old and mismatched silver.

The man took the purse and hefted it in his hand and eyed Suttree. It's hard work, he said.

Suttree nodded.

The old man grinned. Make ye sleep good of a night.

Suttree had started with a question but the old man suddenly flung his hand across the table. Partner, he said. You're on.

When they sat for dinner it was a tight fit and Suttree looking around the table couldnt help smiling. The boy came in with his swollen eye as they were taking seats and he studied Suttree without much interest. The two younger girls didnt know where to look at all. This had emboldened the oldest one who set her shoulders and flung her hair back and passed Suttree a platter of biscuits. She was extraordinarily well put together with great dark eyes and hair. The head of the house stood to better grapple with the joint of pork before him. The boy was ladling a great load of beans aboard his plate. Suttree buttered one of the buoyant looking soda biscuits and watched the pale slices of pork fall under the knife, the man turning the roast and finally seizing it in his hands, the white knob of bone coming from its socket with a sucking sound and breaking like a great pearl up through the steaming meat.

He forked the greasy slabs of meat onto what plates he could reach and told the woman at the end of the table to pass hers. Suttree ladled thick gravy onto his pork and biscuits and reached for the pepper. Beans were coming downtable and fat sweet potatoes and coffee was being poured around. He gripped his fork in his fist in the best country manner and fell to.

Dont be shy, called the old man. Eat a plenty.

Suttree nodded and waved his fork.

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning. People could not stop looking. The preacher forwent his station at the door when services were over and there was no one to shake the hands of these new and startling parishioners. Small boys had gathered outside to jeer but the emergence of this little group found them unprepared, inert. They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.

He rowed out to visit. Coming about the end of the shantyboat in his welded skiff and singing out at the woman where she sat on the porch shelling beans.

Howdy! he called.

She sprang like a wounded moose and came up against the rail at the far corner of the catwalk with her eyes walled and her fallen bosom heaving beneath the rag of a shirt she wore. He didnt seem to notice, sitting there with his impassive smile in the center of his suicidal boat with the in chrome letter across the bow and the homemade paddle laid dripping across his knees. Right purty day, aint it? he said.

Lord God, she said, I knowed the law had me. Dont you never come up on me thataway, you hear?

Yes mam, he said, his face a flower in the warm sunshine.

She looked down at him. He just sat there smiling. She took her seat on the box she'd vacated and fell to shelling beans again.

I live crost the river yonder, he said. I seen ye'ns at church Sunday.

She nodded.

Thought I'd come on down and say hidy.

She looked at him with her caved eyes.

So, he said, toying with the paddle. So hidy.

Hidy, she said.

Where's the rest of the family at today?

Gone on over in town.

Left ye by your lonesome huh?

She didnt answer.

He looked about and he eyed the sun's progress. Looks like it's goin to be another warm'n, I'd say.

Perhaps she didnt hear.

Wouldnt you? he said.

She looked down at him. Flushed, her lank hair matted about her sweating face. I reckon, she said.

That's the biggest thing about this here boat. It gets hot as a two-peckered ... it gets hot as anything. And it settin in the water where you'd allow it'd cool.

Yes, she said.

I like to of drownded in it once.

Uh huh.

It wont float atall.

He took a dip with his paddle to recover the current.

What time you reckon they'll get back?

I dont know.

Does that boy go to school?

He does sometime. He aint now.

I just despise a school. What kind of hides is them?

Coon hides. Or they was.

Harrogate leaned and spat into the river and raised up again. How old's that boy of yourn anyway?

She looked at him. She looked at the contraption in which he sat. She said: He aint old enough to ride in that.

What, this here? Shoot. Why you couldnt sink it with dynamite.

She tilted a paper of shucked beanpods overboard. Harrogate watched them drift away.

Old Suttree's a friend of mine. You know him dont ye?

No.

He et with ye'ns here the other evenin. Runs trotlines. He said he knowed ye.

She nodded her head and tilted the beans in the pan and rose and dumped the debris from the folds of her skirt.

He's a friend of mine, Harrogate said.

She bent and picked up the pan of shelled beans and tossed her hair back from her face.

He's rid in it, said Harrogate. In this here boat. Suttree has.

They were walking along the tracks with the city rat at Suttree's off elbow taking legstretcher steps over every other tie, his hands crammed in his hippockets gripping each a skinny buttock. He watched the ground and shook his head.

What do you say to em?

Say to them?

Yeah. Say.

Hell, say anything. It doesnt matter, they dont listen.

Well you gotta say somethin. What do you say?

Try the direct approach.

What's that?

Well, like this friend of mine. Went up to this girl and said I sure would like to have a little pussy.

No shit? What'd she say?

She said I would too. Mine's as big as your hat.

Aw shit, Sut. Come on, what do you say to em? Boy she's got a big old set of ninnies on her.

Yes she has. You dont think she's too old for you?

She's same age I am.

Well.

How do you get em to take off their clothes. That's what I'd by god like to know.

You take them off.

Yeah? Well what does she do while you're doin that? I mean hell, does she just look out the winder or somethin? I dont understand it at all Sut. The whole thing seems uneasy to me.

They swung off the right of way and went along a dogpath, Suttree grinning. Tell her she sure has got a big old set of ninnies on her, he said.

Shit, said Harrogate. She's liable to smack the fire out of me.

It was midsummer before they went back up the river. They left the crazylooking shanty in Knoxville and went by bus with their bedding and housegoods baled up. Suttree saw them off with promises he'd long regretted.

A week later he got a tow to the forks of the river and began rowing up the French Broad. After nine hours at the oars he pulled into the bank and crawled out with his blanket and slept like a dead man. He had reason to think of the old Bildad up on the Clinch who used to flood his skiff and sleep under water in it to keep the insects off.

When he woke in the smoky dawn he felt alien and tainted, camped there in a wilderness with his little stained boat and his weariness. As if the city had marked him. So that no eldritch daemon would speak him secrets in this wood. He ate two of the sandwiches he'd packed and drank a grape drink, sitting there on the bank and watching a wood duck that floated on the river like a painted decoy block mitered to its double on the pewter calm.

He rowed on upriver until he came to the landing at Boyd's Creek. His hands were puffy and clawed and he wished the skiff at the bottom of the river. He went into the store and drank two cold drinks and got a third one to sip on. Coming back out into the glaring sunlight he saw a thermometer hung in a tin coughsyrup sign on the storefront. The red line in the glass ran from bottom to top and out of sight. He eyed it with baleful bloodfilled eyes and turned and spat a grapestained clot of mucus at the cooking world. Not even a fly moved.

It was early afternoon when he came upon them. He passed a huge and stinking windrow of shells on the south bank and struggled upstream through faster water, towing the boat up shoals with a rope over his shoulder, clutching and fending among the shore bracken, the water very cold and clear. They were camped like gypsies under a slate bluff and smoke rose among the trees. The skiff at the bank bore a strange rigging of uprights and crosspoles and a travis bar with lines and hooks hanging from it. The boy squatted on a stump watching him. The womenfolk were boiling wash in a big galvanized tub and the old man was asleep under a tree. When she saw Suttree tying up, the woman called Reese, Reese. Two dry flat birdnotes he'd heard all his life. He didnt move.

Suttree came on up the bank. Howdy, he said.

They all nodded. They were shrouded in steam and they looked limp and half fainting. The old woman's long white goat's udders hung half out above the tub and the flesh of her upper arms swung as she wound the water from a pair of jeans. The girl gave him a sort of defeated smile.