Suttree rose from the cot and stumbled from the room. He went down the hall in the dark and unlatched the door at the end of it and stepped outside. The rind of a moon lay cocked in the sky and the world looked cold and blue. He could see the stalks of dockweed dead in the yard and beyond them the barren and pestilential locust wood and the trashpapers and newsprint among the boughs like varied birds illshapen pale and restless in the wind. He wandered through the wood as if he meant to read the old bleached news spiked there, the artless felonies, the murder in the streets. His tongue lay swollen in his mouth and his skull vised his brain. He could see figures moving in the woods greenly phosphorescent. He thought he might hear singing and he stood in the dark a long time listening but there was no sound, not even a dog barked. He made his way through a world unreal, through causeways in a darkened town, a gray light moving in the east, past dark brick walls and windows kept by steel grates, their panes opaque with soot. He wandered in the night murk by the river, in the cold damp of dead weeds, the lights on the far shore marking orders he had never seen before.
He lay in his bed half waking. He knew what would come to be that the fiddler Little Robert would kill Tarzan Quinn. A barge passed on the river. He lay with his feet together and his arms at his sides like a dead king on an altar. He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth’s cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.
In the madhouse the walls reek with the odors of filth and terminal ills they’ve soaked up these hundred years. Stains from the rusted plumbing, the ordure slung by irate imbeciles. All this seeps back constantly above the smell of germicidal cleaning fluids.
A cold and brittle day. The iron gate open and the trees like bare black fossils rising from the dead leaves on the lawn. Walking the long drive, the dark brick buildings on the hill looming dire against the winter sky.
Old scarred marble floors in a cold white corridor. A room where the mad sat at their work. To Suttree they seemed like figures from a dream, something from the past, old drooling derelicts bent above their basketry, their fingerpaints or knitting. He’d never been among the certified and he was surprised to find them invested with a strange authority, like folk who’d had to do with death some way and had come back, something about them of survivors in a realm that all must reckon with soon or late.
In the center of the room sat a nurse at a desk. She read the morning paper where the news was madder yet.
McKellar, Suttree said.
She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and pushed the paper back. She opened a ledger and held a pencil above it. Your name, she said.
Suttree. Cornelius Suttree.
You are … What?
I beg your pardon?
The nurse looked up at him. What, she said. A nephew?
Yes. Nephew.
You’ve been here before then.
Not in some years.
She put her glasses on again and laid down the pencil and turned in her chair. That’s her with the other lady sitting by the far wall. The two by themselves.
Thank you.
Eyes watched him cross the floor. A lone pacer in a strange knitted cap paused and raised a cautionary finger. Suttree nodded, agreeing as he did on the need for care. The old women sat like almstresses on the floor in their hodden cloaks. He knelt before them and they regarded him mildly. He thought that he might know her in some way but age and madness had outdone all the work of likeness there had ever been and he could not guess. Aunt Alice? he said.
The older lady moved. She made a little motion of gathering the hem of her gown and she looked at him with no change of expression. Yes, she said.
I’m Buddy.
Oh yes. How have you been?
Do you know me?
Are you Buddy?
Yes.
Grace’s son.
Suttree smiled, son of Grace. I didnt think you’d know me.
She reached out and took his wrist. Her hand cool and firm. He covered it with his own. She had her eyes fixed on him and would not look elsewhere. They were a pure cold gray and something feral in them but there was no malice there. He looked down at their hands. Hers was trembling, just gently. The old woman sitting by her reached over and put her hand with theirs and nodded her head solemnly. The three of them squatting there on the floor like conspirators pledging themselves.
How have you been, Aunt Alice?
A hollow croak of a voice in the drafty dayroom. He cleared his throat. He turned to see had he attracted attention. An old man in a wheelchair cringing by the wall watched. Chanting to himself some silent doxology.
I’m fine, the old woman said.
Do they treat you well?
Oh, a body ought not to complain.
Does Mother come?
Why she died in twenty-seven.
Does Grace come to see you? Or Helen?