Ah he’s back, God spare his blackened soul, another hero home from the whores. Come to cool his heels in the river with the rest of the sewage. Sunday means nothing to him. Infidel. Back for the fishing are ye? God himself dont look too close at what lies on that river bottom. Fit enough for the likes of you. Ay. He knows it’s Sunday for he’s drunker than normal. It’ll take more than helping old blind men cross the street to save you from the hell you’ll soon inhabit. Suttree went on toward the street with his fingers in his ears.
Howard Clevinger raised one eyebrow at his appearance in the store. Thought you’d left town, he said.
I’m back.
A thin and fragrant arm descended on Suttree’s shoulder in a taffeta whisper, a cufflink coined from a bicycle reflector. An African mask in meretricious harlequinade and ivory teeth beset with gold. Hey baby, where you been so long?
Hello John. Just around.
I been out of town myself.
Where’ve you been?
I’s in Lexington. I seen James Herndon. Sweet Evenin Breeze. She just beautiful, for her age.
Who’s the oldest?
Oldest what?
You or her. Him. It.
Hush. That thing is sixty.
How old are you, John?
Trippin Through The Dew ignored the question. He said: You know what they goin to put in the paper when she die? Big headlines.
What’s that.
They done got it all ready. Sweet Evenin Breeze Blows No More.
Suttree grinned. The invert was bent double holding himself, his face squinched. He whinnied like a she horse.
What are they going to say about you John?
Sheeit. I aint goin to die.
Maybe not, said Suttree.
The houseboat lay half sunken by one corner and the windows were stoned out and the front door was gone altogether. He entered a scene of old memories and new desolations. Torn playing cards and halfpint whiskey bottles broken in the floor, the stove crammed tight to the maw with trash. He crossed the tilted floor and righted the foodlocker from where it lay on its face among broken glass and rags.
By afternoon he had the place swept out and the mattress on the roof for airing, he sat on the veranda in the sun with a glasscutter and shaped old panes purloined from an empty warehouse and with them glazed the naked sashes of his house. In the days that followed he tarred the seams in the roof and carried on his back a door from a razing beyond First Creek and sawed it down to fit and hung it.
Lastly standing off in the skiff on a warm October morning he fended off from the sheer wall of the dredger’s hull and reached down the fireaxe handed him. The drums when he stove them filled and wheezed and sputtered and went slowly from sight in the river. He jostled the new ones into place and called up to the pilothouse. The winch creaked and the houseboat corner settled. Suttree unhooked the cables as soon as there was play enough and they went swinging up toward the deck.
What do I owe you? he called, passing up the axe.
The deckman jerked his thumb toward the pilothouse where the captain watched from his high window.
What do I owe you?
The captain spat. I dont know, he said. What’s it worth?
I dont know. I dont want to make you mad.
Would you say five dollars?
I’d say that was fair enough.
He handed up the money to the deckhand. The dredger began to back. Great boils of muddy water churned and broke. Suttree raised a hand and the old pilot rang a small bell. Rafts of straw rose and fell and the ratholes in the bank sucked and popped and the dredger moved out, the deckhand leaning on the rail smoking a cigarette and watching toward the shore.
He bought three five hundred yard spools of nylon trotline and spent two days piecing them with their droppers and leads and hooks. The third day he put out his lines and that night in his shanty with the oil lamp lit and his supper eaten he sat in the chair listening to the river, the newspaper open across his lap, and an uneasy peace came over him, a strange kind of contentment. Small graylooking moths orbited the hot cone of glass before him. He set back the plate with the dimestore silver and folded his hands on the table. A beetle kept crashing into the windowscreen and dropping to the deck below to whirr and rise and crash again.
A clear night over south Knoxville. The lights of the bridge bobbed in the river among the small and darkly cobbled isomers of distant constellations. Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking ovoid of lamplight on the ceiling to pose to him:
Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?
They’d listen to my death.
No final word?
Last words are only words.
You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.
I’d say I was not unhappy.
You have nothing.
It may be the last shall be first.
Do you believe that?
No.
What do you believe?