Suttree(140)

Hers was a tale of bridled lust. He made her tell him everything. Never a living man. When he rose from between her thighs the fire had died almost to coals. She sat and smoothed her skirt and swept back her hair. She got up and took up her fallen underclothing and went to the lean-to. Suttree saw her go with a basin toward the river and when she returned she had bathed and changed her dress and he had mended back the fire and she came and sat by him and he took her hand.

She came to him again in the night where he slept above the river, waking him with her hands on him and her warm breath. She wanted to sleep with him but he sent her away. She came back again toward the morning and Suttree faced the day on buckling knees. He saw her coming from the river with a pail of water, smiling. He went up to the fire and found Reese squatting there with his arms folded on top of his knees.


Hot nights filled with summer thunder. Heat lightning far and thin and the midnight sky becrazed and mended back again. Suttree moved down to the gravelbar on the river and spread his blanket there under the gauzy starwash and lay naked with his back pressed to the wheeling earth. The river chattered and sucked past at his elbow. He’d lie awake long after the last dull shapes in the coals of the cookfire died and he’d go naked into the cool and velvet waters and submerge like an otter and come up and blow, the stones smooth as marbles under his cupped toes and the dark water reeling past his eyes. He’d lie on his back in the shallows and on these nights he’d see stars come adrift and rifle hot and dying across the face of the firmament. The enormity of the universe filled him with a strange sweet woe.

She always found him. She’d come pale and naked from the trees into the water like some dream old prisoners harbor or sailors at sea. Or touch his cheek where he lay sleeping and say his name. Holding her arms aloft like a child for him to raise up over them the nightshirt that she wore and her to lie cool and naked against his side.


She sat in the bow of the boat going upriver. She traced her cool fingertips along his nape and he turned and squinted at her. Sunlight swarmed on the water. That’s going to get you screwed, he said. She knelt forward and ran her velvet tongue between his lips. She smelled of soap and woodsmoke. Tasted of salt.

He turned the skiff toward shore and he spread her naked in the grass, her grave and slightly smiling face pooled in black hair, her perfect teeth, her skin completely flawless, not so much as a mole. The nipples tulipshaped and full and her navel just a slit in her flat little belly. Her smooth thighs, her childlike shamelessness, her little hands dug into his buttocks. Her whimpering like a puppy’s.

They swam in the river and slept in the sun. They woke in the hot forenoon and laughed at the hurry with which they worked. Reese came down in the dark to help them moor the loaded skiff and ran his flashbeam over the piles of shellfish and the three of them went up through the trees to the fire.

She sat across from him and watched him and she brought his coffee and pushed a soft young breast against his ear in taking away his empty plate.

I believe that gal’s a better cook than her mother, said Reese. What do you think?

Suttree stopped chewing and looked sideways at Reese and then went on chewing again.

That little old gal is special to me, Reese said. She’ll just do a man’s work.

Suttree spat an insoluble wad of gristle at the dark. The women were laboring up the slope with a washtub of water between them, the girl laughing, the water licking over the sides.

You want some more coffee, Sut? Holler there and tell her to bring the pot.

And across the fire her hot eyes watched him and she seemed half breathless in the things she did. He walked off down by the river with his flashlight, along the path, flicking the light into the dead water by the shore where suckers lay on the bottom, old bottles furred with silt, pale mooneyed shad in catatonia. He turned off the light and sat in the easy dark and listened to a rip in some rocky shoal, a gentle whispering in the reeds where the river ran. A figure came down from the fire and squatted in the grass and rose and went back. The willows at the far shore cut from the night a prospect of distant mountains dark against a paler sky. Halfmoon incandescent in her black galactic keyway, the heavens locked and wheeling. A sole star to the north pale and constant, the old wanderer’s beacon burning like a molten spike that tethered fast the Small Bear to the turning firmament. He closed his eyes and opened them and looked again. He was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it sudden love.

In the morning the boy helped them unload the mussels, sullen face filled with suspicion, a potential spy. The woman and the younger girls came up the river path with their shelling tools, the woman with her air of habitual rigidity and the girls in lockstep behind. At supper that night Reese said he thought the boy was well enough to work and the boy glared at Suttree across the table.