We dont rightly know which one of us is which noway, said the one with the shotgun. Mama never could tell us apart. They’d just kindly guess. Up till we was long in about four or five years old and could tell our own names. Fore that they aint no tellin how many times we might of swapped.
We had little old bracelets had our names on em but we kicked them off first thing. I caint stand to wear nothin like that nor Vernon neither. I just despise a wristwatch.
One time we was eight year old I fell out of a tree and broke my arm Vernon was at Grandaddy’s. They wouldnt let me go for somethin I done. I fell out of a black walnut tree in the back yard and laid there hollerin till Mama come and got me. Well, she run out in the road and stopped a car and they put me in it and took me in to Dr Harrison and we went up the steps to where his office was at and there set Vernon with his own arm broke.
The one with the shotgun grinned and nodded. We’d both fell out of black walnut trees at the identical same minute eight mile apart. I broke my right arm and Fernon his left’n and he’s lefthanded and me right.
Pshaw, said Reese.
You dont need to ast us. It was in the papers. You can go look it up your ownself.
We had that piece from the paper a long time.
We can tell what one another is thinkin, said the one with the shotgun. He nodded toward the brother. Me and him can.
Reese looked at him and then he looked at the one with the lantern.
He can think a word and I can tell ye what it is. Or him me, either one.
Caint do it, Reese said.
The possumhunters looked at each other and grinned.
What’U you bet on it?
Well, I dont want to bet nothin. But I’d like to see it done.
They looked at each other again. They had a curious way of turning their heads toward each other, like mechanical dolls. Go on over there Fernon and I’ll turn my back.
The one with the shotgun turned around with a lithe swiveling motion. He saw Suttree leaning against the rocks there and winked at him and put his hands over his ears and bent his head. The other one rose and went toward Reese and squatted by him and bent to his ear. Tell me a word, he said.
What kind of word?
Just a word. Whatever. Hush. Whisper it in my ear.
Reese leaned and cupped his hand to the possumhunter’s ear and then sat back again. The possumhunter mouthed the word to himself, his eyes aloft. Downriver came the thin cry of hounds and across the flooded fields a yard dog yapped in the distance.
The man with the shotgun raised his head and took his hands from his ears. The boy had come to the fire and was squatting near Reese and the old lady and the girls were watching the hunter with the gun. You got it, Fernon? he cried out.
Yep, said Fernon.
The hunter opened his eyes. He squatted there motionless. His folded shadow skewered by the shotgun leaned across the slates. He looked at Suttree. Brother, he said.
Suttree stood up. The hunter spun about and faced his unarmed image across the fire, his sinister isomer in bone and flesh. They hooted like mandrills and pointed with opposing hands at Reese. Reese drew back, his hand to his throat. Suttree took up his bedding and went down the face of the bluff beyond the firelight and through the woods to the river.
In the morning he walked out through the rain to the highway and looked down the long black straight. There had been a high wind in the night and the wet macadam lay enameled up with leaves. He could have just walked off down the road.
The old woman and the girls came in about four oclock with some eggs and things from the farm upriver where they traded and the old woman cast about with her sullen eyes as she did her work, kneading out biscuits and placing them in the iron dutch oven and piling coals with care onto the lid. It was past dark when Reese and the boy came in. They ate supper in silence. The rain that had fallen so small and fine all morning had ceased and Suttree took his bedding off down to the river and lay there with his hands composed upon his chest. Watching up at the starless dark. The shapes of the trees rearing dimly in the lightning. A distant toll of thunder. The sound of the river. Each drift of wind brought rainwater from the trees and it spattered lightly in the leaves and on his face. He’d had enough of rain. The fire had died, he eased toward sleep. The next moment all this was changed forever.
Suttree leaped to his feet. The wall of slate above the camp had toppled in the darkness, whole jagged ledges crashing down, great plates of stone separating along the seams with dry shrieks and collapsing with a roar upon the ground below, the dull boom of it echoing across the river and back again and then just the sifting down of small rocks, thin slates of shale clattering down in the dark. Suttree pulled himself into his trousers and started up through the trees at a run. He heard the mother calling out. Oh God, she cried. Suttree heard it with sickness at heart, this calling on. She meant for God to answer.
Reese! he called. There was no light. He stumbled on a clutch of figures on the ground. A sobbing in the dark. The rain was falling on them. He had not known that it was raining. In a raw pool of lightning an image of baroque pieta, the woman gibbering and kneeling in the rain clutching at sheared limbs and rags of meat among the slabs of rock. One of the younger girls was pulling at her. The boy had come with a flashlight.
Dont, said Suttree.
God almighty, said the boy.
He snatched at the boy’s hand. Get that damned light off of her.
Mama, Mama.
Oh God, said Reese.
Suttree turned to see him hobbling toward them holding one knee. He knelt by the woman. Where’s that light, he said. I know I seen a light.
Suttree was kneeling by Reese. The cryptic lightning developed a rainveiled face stark and blue upon the ground. He took hold of a pale arm to feel for pulse. The arm was limp and turned the wrong way in his hand and there was no pulse to it. Reese was clawing at the rocks and the woman was moaning and pounding at them with her hand as if they were something dumb that might be driven off. Suttree took the light from the boy and cast it about. A havoc of old crushed signs and lumber. A pot, a mangled lantern. At the far edge of the slide the youngest girl sat dumb and bloody in the rain watching them. He reached and took hold of the topmost slate and raised it and slid it back.
They worked without speaking and when the stones were all shifted the old man got the girl’s broken body up some way in his arms and began to stumble off with her. The flashlight lay cocked on the ground and the beam of it angled up toward ultimate night and the rain fell small and slant. He seemed to be making for the river with her but in the loose sand he lost his footing and they fell and he knelt there in the rain over her and held his two fists at his breast and cried to the darkness over them all. Oh God I caint take no more. Please lift this burden from me for I caint bear it.
He left downriver in the dark, the oars aboard, turning slowly in the current, jostling over the shoals. The cottonwoods went by like rows of bones. Come sunrise he was drifting through peaceful farmland upon a river high and muddy. He went along past grazing cows, their cropping in the grass audible above the clank of their bells. They looked up surprised to see him there. The fields were spatched with beds of silt and the shoreline brush wore shapes of wood and rags of paper all among the branches. He passed beneath a concrete bridge and boys fishing called to him but he did not look up. He sat in the skiff and held his hands in his lap with the dark blood crusted on the upturned palms. His eyes beheld the country he was passing through but did not mark it. He was a man with no plans for going back the way he’d come nor telling any soul at all what he had seen.