Suttree(72)

Come set by the fire, the old man said. I didnt know it was so cold.

I’ve brought it all inside with me. How have you been?

Mean as ever. How you makin it?

I’m about froze out. Thought I’d better check on you to see were you still living.

The old man chuckled to himself. Well lord, he said. A little cold wont kill me I dont reckon. Set down.

He raised himself up slightly and rocked to one side as if he would make room and then subsided in the same place. Suttree sat on the edge of the bunk. Strangely like his own. The rough army blanket. The old man had been reading a coverless book and he laid it down and removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. A small desk stood against the wall and in the pigeonholes were yellowed timetables, waybills and tare sheets. In the far corner a great stack of old newsprint and magazines. The old man’s eyes must have followed his. I give up on the newspapers, he said.

Why’s that?

I never read one but what somebody aint been murdered or shot or somethin such as that. I never knowed such a place for meanness.

Was it ever any different?

How’s that?

I said was it ever any different.

No. I reckon not.

Well it’s always been in the papers hasnt it?

Yes. I just give up on it is all. I get older I dont want to hear about it. People are funny. They dont want to hear about how nice everthing is. No no. They aint somebody murdered in the papers their day is a waste of time. I give it up myself. Seen it all. It’s all the same. Train wrecks of course. Natural catastrophe. A train wreck’U make ye think about things.

Did you ever see a train wreck?

Oh yes.

What’s the worst one you ever saw?

Seen or heard tell of?

Either one.

I dont know. I seen a boiler cut loose in Letohatchie Alabama blowed the whole locomotive cab and all up onto a overpass and just left the trucks settin on the track. They’d stopped to take on water but fore they could fill her the crown sheet went. I seen that. But they was one blew up in the roundhouse in San Antonio Texas in the year nineteen and twelve that blowed the whole roundhouse down and a lot of other buildins besides. They found one chunk of the boiler that weighed eight ton a quarter mile from the wreck. Another piece weighed almost a thousand pound tore a man’s house down a half mile away. I was just a young man at the time but I remember readin it like it was yesterday. Had all the pitchers in the paper. I think they was twenty-eight killed and I dont know how many maimed for life.

Suttree looked at the old man. A thousand pound piece of iron went a half mile? he said.

Oh yes. Hadnt hit this feller’s house it might still be goin.

Would you have liked to have seen it, Daddy?

The old man looked at Suttree in alarm. Seen it? he said. Where from?

I see, said Suttree.

Course they’s been a lot worse wrecks than them. They was a Pennsy engine left the track in Philadelphia about ten year ago, hot box caused the axle to break, thowed some cars into a bridge and killed eighty people all told. Your worst wrecks was the telescopes. One car would run inside another and just gather everbody up out of their seats and make a big mud pie out of em at the end. Then of course they was bridges and trestles. I remember two trains run out on a doubletrack trestle up in Kentucky goin in opposite directions, about the time they got abreast of one another the whole thing just folded up and dropped into the river. Trestle, locomotives, tenders, cars, folks. All of it. Kaploosh. Back then most of ye trestles was just wood. The coaches was wood too and they had stoves in em about like thisn here and when they’d wreck they’d tip over and set the coaches afire and burn up everbody inside. I tell ye, ridin a train back in them days was a thing you give some thought to.

The old man rose heavily from the bed and opened the stove door and dumped in coal from the scuttle and sat back down again. He dabbed with the back of one knuckle at his nose. Outside it had grown almost dark and a cat appeared at the clerestory window and whined.

You caint get in that way, idjit, the old man called. You come to the door like everbody else.

When I was young I didnt care for nothin, he continued. I was always easy in the world. Saw a right smart of it. Never cared to go just wherever.

How did you happen to end up here?

I aint ended yet. Used to hobo a right smart. Back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I’d been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue lookin and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees goin by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I’m goin to tell you you’ll think peculiar but it’s the god’s truth. That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I’ll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.