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.
She came with the tea, a tall vase full, chocked with ice, a curl of lemon. He ladled sugar in.
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.
What say boy?
Suttree turned. Clayton was standing in the door scratching his stomach and grinning.
Hey, Suttree said.
They shook hands and Clayton patted him on the back.