Suttree crossed the road in the rain and blue motor smoke and descended an embankment into the fields. He went crosscountry among easy hills and sometime pastureland, through a copse of dark cedars where the ground was almost dry, down a long and narrow limestone draw where small flat cactus clung to the south walls and the rain swept grayly across the ledges and swirled away before him.
He came out on the bluff and went on up the hill toward the house. Came through the weeds upon a walkway of herringboned brick all but overgrown. Past cracked urns bedight with concrete flora, broad steps, tall fluted columns with their shattered paint. The immense and stark facade seemed to recoil before his footfalls.
As he entered the foyer three young boys dropped like stricken bats from a balcony above the main reception room to his right and lit soundless on the dusty floor and passed out through a window in the opposite wall.
A chandelier lay burst in the floor. He stepped around it and ascended the lefthand stairway, slowly curving into the dusky upper chambers, keeping to the wall because save random jagged spindles the balustrade was gone. At the top of the stairs stood newel and finial intact and solitary like a rococo hitchingpost.
He wandered dripping through the high rooms with their ruined plaster, the buckled wainscot, the wallpaper hanging in great deciduous fronds. Small mounds of human stool with stained shreds of newsprint. From an upper window he watched the three boys go along the brow of the hill in the rain. Wedges of dry cracked glazing lay among the broken panes of glass in the floor. Below the window a mossy courtyard where old concrete dolphins rusted in a dry fountain and the dark handkilned bricks of the walkways lay grown with moss and lichens. Black ivy crept the garden walls and small mute birds peeped out. Across the river, the rainy hodden landscape, he could see traffic going along the boulevard, locked in another age of which some dread vision had afforded him this lonely cognizance.
He emerged from the narrow back stairwell and came up the hall with slow tread over the weathersprung parquetry, past great doors of solid cherry split open in long fibrous cracks and plundered of their knobs and hardware. Into this drawing room with high plaster frieze and foliate scrollwork. Prolapsed and waterstained ceiling, the sagging coffers. He turned, a vain figure in the ruins. Blind parget cherubs watched from the high corners.
Hello, he called. A voice that went from room to room and back again.
Gods and fathers what has happened here, good friends where is there clemency?
One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike with harsh breath and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and bunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail.
He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man’s flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?
He moved along the hall toward the dining room. Paint on these old paneled doors crazed and yellowed like old porcelain. Something more than time has passed here. In this banquet hall. Scene of old heraldic feasts. Suttree in silent recognition of the somewhat illustrious dead. Large companies seated. A fat marcassin to adorn the board. The male bonecoupling rearing white and steaming up from the broken meat. Eyes watch. A malediction for those belated on the road and now commence. Mad trenchermen in armed sortees above the platters, the clang of steel, the stained and dripping chops, the eyes sidling. Yard dogs and starving palliards contest the scraps among the straw. There is nothing laid to table save meat and water. There is no sound of human speech. Beyond the muted clamor at the board there is a faint echo of another chase. Far hue and cry and distant horns and hounds in pain with eagerness. The master of the table has looked up. Down murrey fields another hunt has cried the stag. A shield crashes to the floor and three white birds ascend to the rafters and roost uncertainly. The master wipes his fingers in his hair and his rising says that the feast is done. Outside darkness has begun and the hounds’ voices are chimes in the distance that toll seven and cease. They wait for the waterbearer to come but he does not come, and does not come.
Suttree went out through the kitchen and through the ruined garden to the old road. Reprobate scion of doomed Saxon clans, out of a rainy day dream surmised. Old paint on an old sign said dimly to keep out. Someone must have turned it around because it posted the outer world. He went on anyway. He said that he was only passing through.
9
At night he could hear the sewage gurgling and shuttling along through the pipes hung from the bridge’s underbelly overhead. The hum of tires. Faint streetlight fell beyond the dark palings of sumac and blackberry. He rubbed his stomach and belched in his crepuscular solitude, the lamp at his elbow turned down so that the small flame burned in the glass bell ruby black. He has eaten for his supper an entire chicken boiled in a lardpail he, and he himself is the batfowler who crossed like smoke the dark garden patches above First Creek, something out of the night that drifted bedraped with dead hens down toward the moonlit miasma whitening the cleft of the glen, the ragged trees that seemed to be breathing cold, crossing this small and wretched estuary by a fallen truckdoor and climbing rapidly the far side toward the arches of the viaduct.
Suttree came, each day new marvels. They sat in purloined lawn-chairs and watched a pigeon ringing down, standing off with backing wings and neck hooked while his pink pettysingles reached to grasp the pole and then like the Dove itself descending the bird limned in blue flame and a hot crackle of burnt feathers and the thing pitching backward to fall blackened to the ground in a plume of acrid smoke.
Gene, Suttree said.
Slick aint it?
Gene.
Yeah.
What have you got that pole wired to?
Harrogate pointed. Them lightwires yonder. What I done, I got me some copper wire and wired it and tied one end to a rock and thowed it …
Gene.
Yeah.
What the hell do you reckon is going to happen when somebody touches that pole?
Harrogate had not even risen to secure the bird. He sat there squatting in the lawnchair with his arms wrapped around his knees, smoked odor of his ragged clothes, looking up at the pole and then at Suttree. Well, he said. I’d say it would knock em on their ass.
It would kill them.
Harrogate looked mildly speculative. You reckon it would? he said.
Another day pigs. A whole covey of red shoats loose from some hillside hogpen that crossed a clearing in the blackened vines and went on downcreek toward the river. Harrogate watched them and then suddenly sat very erect, looking around.
If them niggers catches you eatin one of their hogs they will have your ass, he said.
But they got to catch me.
He rose and started down the hill toward the road and toward the creekside jungle where the pigs had gone. As he went he studied the pens scattered among the trees on the hillside above him, eclectic shelters hammered up out of snuff signs and boards and odds of fencing all hung in plumbless suspension down the bald and raingutted slope. He could see no one hunting hogs. When he struck the path along the creek he could see the tracks of the pigs here and there in the patches of black mire like the delicately pointed prints of small deer. Coming past a collection of old waterheaters he started them and they flushed into the wall of ivy with high raspy snorts. He picked one out and dove after it. It went through a mass of vines and over a mound of broken fruitjars and disappeared with an agonized squall. Harrogate fetched up in a small clearing. He had tilted himself into a locust tree and was bleeding in several places. He could hear the pigs diminishing in the distance.