Suttree heaved a shovelful of mussels up and looked at the boy. It was hot in the sun. The boy standing there in his rancid overalls looked pale and pitiful and slightly malevolent. Just okay, Willard, he said.
They rowed into camp at dusk sitting side by side on the seat of the skiff each with a sweep in two hands. Suttree staggered up the bank with the rope and tied up and went to the fire and sat and stared into it. Reese emerged from the lean-to in his underwear. Is that you all? he said.
Yeah.
Where you been?
Suttree didnt answer. The boy had come up and was looking around. Where you all been? the man asked him.
Where’s everbody at? the boy said.
They’ve done gone to a social. Where you all been?
Is there anything to eat? Suttree said.
They’s some whitebeans and cornbread in the pan.
Is they any onions? the boy said.
No they aint, said Reese. He came over to where Suttree was sitting on a board with his feet stretched out before him. Did you all do any good? he said.
Ask him, said Suttree.
How did you all do?
We done all right Aint they no milk?
No they aint.
Shit, said the boy.
What?
I said shoot.
You better of.
Did ye’ns get a pretty good mess?
We got about all the boat would hold. How did you all do?
We done all right.
Suttree had taken up a plate and was spooning beans from the pot. Is there any coffee? he said.
No they aint.
He stared sullenly into the fire. No they aint, he said.
He was lying in his blankets out on the knoll when they came back. They came down through the woods by the river swinging a lantern and singing hymns. He lay there listening to this advancing minstrelsy and watching the moon ride up out of the trees. He was hungry and his shoulders ached. His eyelids felt like they were on springs, he couldnt get them to stay shut. After a while he got up.
One of the girls was going toward the river and he called to her. Hey, he said. Is there anything to eat up there?
It was quiet for a minute. The fire had been built back and the flames looked hopeful up there under the rocks. No they aint, she said.
In the morning they were up at some misty hour and were at donning the crazy calico churchclothes. They did not wake him. He raised the edge of his blanket and peered out. Among the slats of the lamplit shed he could see thin flashes of white flesh, birdlike flurryings. The girls emerged in their carboncopy dresses and the boy came out of the woods stiffly and looking churlish and sullen and strange, like a child pervert. They set off upriver through the woods and Suttree sat up in his blanket to better view the spectacle.
They were gone all day. He stirred out and searched through the kitchen things and through the jumble of stuff in the lean-to but he could find nothing to eat other than the cornmeal and a handful of whitebeans that had been left to soak. He made a fire and put the beans on and went off down to the river to look at the skiffs. He squatted on his heels and threw small stones at waterspiders skating on the dimpled river.
In the afternoon he sat in the cool under the bluff. Summer thunderheads were advancing from the south. He leaned back against the rock escarpment. Jagged blades of slate and ratchel stood like stone tools in the loam. Tracks of mice or ground squirrels, a few dry and meatless nuthulls. A dark stone disc. He reached and picked it up. In his hand a carven gorget. He spooned the clay from the face of it with his thumb and read two rampant gods addorsed with painted eyes and helmets plumed, their spangled anklets raised in dance. They bore birdheaded scepters each aloft.
Suttree spat upon the disc and wiped it on the hip of his jeans and studied it again. Uncanny token of a vanished race. For a cold moment the spirit of an older order moved in the rainy air. With a small twig he cleaned each line and groove and with spittle and the tail of his shirt he polished the stone, holding it, a cool lens, in the cup of his tongue, drying it with care. A gray and alien stone of a kind he’d never seen.
He took off his belt and with his pocketknife cut a long thin strip of leather and threaded it through the hole in the gorget and tied the thong and put it around his neck. It lay cool and smooth against his chest, this artifact of dawn where twilight drew across the iron landscape.
He was sitting on a log carving a whistle from willow wood when the family returned from service. He watched them come down through the woods, the six of them indianfile. When they had passed and gone on to the camp he rose and folded away his knife and went after.
Yonder he comes, sang out Reese.
Yeah, said Suttree.
We seen ye was asleep when we left out of here this mornin. Didnt want to bother ye.
The women were gone to the shed to change out of their clothes and Reese had taken a seat under his tree in his suit. Suttree squatted on one knee in front of him and pinned him with a hungry stare.