Suttree(188)

A boy was going along the works with a pail and he leaned to each, ladling out water in a tin dipper. Suttree saw hands come up from below the rim of the pit in parched supplication. When all these had been attended the boy came down along the edge of the ditch and handed up the dipper to the backhoe operator. Suttree saw him take it and tilt his head and drink and flick the last drops toward the earth and lean down and restore the dipper to the watercarrier. They nodded to each other and the boy turned and looked toward the road. Then he was coming down across the clay and over the ruts and laddered tracks of machinery. His dusty boots left prints across the black macadam and he came up to Suttree where he stood by the roadside and swung the bucket around and brought the dipper up all bright and dripping and offered it. Suttree could see the water beading coldly on the tin and running in tiny rivulets and drops that steamed on the road where they fell. He could see the pale gold hair that lay along the sunburned arms of the waterbearer like new wheat and he beheld himself in wells of smoking cobalt, twinned and dark and deep in child’s eyes, blue eyes with no bottoms like the sea. He took the dipper and drank and gave it back. The boy dropped it into the bucket. Suttree wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Thanks, he said.

The boy smiled and stepped back. A car had stopped for Suttree, he’d not lifted a hand.

Let’s go, said the driver.

Hello, said Suttree, climbing in, shutting the door, his suitcase between his knees. Then they were moving. Out across the land the lightwires and roadrails were going and the telephone lines with voices shuttling on like souls. Behind him the city lay smoking, the sad purlieus of the dead immured with the bones of friends and forebears. Off to the right side the white concrete of the expressway gleamed in the sun where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate with iron rods bristling among the vectors of nowhere. When he looked back the waterboy was gone. An enormous lank hound had come out of the meadow by the river like a hound from the depths and was sniffing at the spot where Suttree had stood.

Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.





Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.