He got the boat and rowed down to the landing and pulled in sideways. When they raised the trunklid of the car a vile stench came flooding out. He stepped back half gagging. Great God, he said.
Bad aint it?
Bad? Suttree looked at the stars. That’s the awfullest stink I ever smelled.
That’s the biggest reason we had to get him out of the house.
God you’re a sick bastard.
Well give me a hand with him.
Just a minute.
Suttree pulled off the cotton undershirt he wore and tied it around his lower face.
Okay, said Leonard.
Leonard’s father was wrapped in the sheets he’d died in months before. Leonard was setting out wheelrims and a pile of chain. He got hold of the body and wrestled part of it over the car bumper. Suttree held the lamp.
Get his feet there, Sut, and I’ll haul on his arms.
How did you get him in there?
What?
Suttree freed his mouth from the shirt. I said how did you get him in there?
Me and the old lady done it. He aint all that heavy.
Suttree took hold of the limbs beneath the sheet with sick loathing. They dragged the body out and it slumped to the ground with a nauseating limberness. Leonard’s father lay like a dead klansman. By the light of the lamp on the bare ground they could see strange brown stains seeping through the sheets. Suttree turned away and went to sit on the bank for a while.
They dragged the remains down to the boat and Suttree stood in the transom and hauled the thing aboard, goggleheaded under the thin cotton, against his naked chest. Leonard bearing up behind with the lamp, chains clanking.
They rowed far downstream. Leonard saying Hell, Sut, any place is good and Suttree rowing on. They looked like old jacklight poachers, their faces yellow masks in the night. The corpse lay slumped in the floor of the skiff. The lamp standing on the stern seat with its thin spout of insects caught in its light the wet sweep of the oars, the beads of water running on the underblades like liquid glass and the dimples of the oarstrokes coiled out through the city lights where they lay fixed among the deeper shapes of stars and galaxies fast in the silent river.
Coming about below the railway bridge Suttree shipped the oars. Leonard was at wrapping his father in chains, fastening them with dimestore locks, chaining up the wheelrims through the center holes. One of the old man’s legs lay twisted in the floor of the skiff and Suttree could see the stained flannel pajamas that he wore.
I think that’ll get it, Sut, said Leonard.
Think it will?
Yeah. Shit, this’ll take his ass to the bottom like a fucking rocket.
Are you going to say a few words?
Do what?
Say a few words.
Leonard gave a sort of nervous little grin. Say a few words?
Arent you? I mean you’re not going to bury your father without anything at all.
I aint burying him.
The hell you’re not.
I’m just puttin him in the river.
It’s the same thing.
It’s the same as burial at sea.
Well goddamn, Suttree.
Well?
This old son of a bitch never went to church in his life.
All the more reason.
Well I dont know no goddamned service nor nothin. Shit. You say it.
The only words I know are the Catholic ones.
Catholic?
Catholic.
Leonard regarded his chained and hooded father in the floor of the skiff. Hell fire. He sure wasnt no Catholic. What about that part that goes through the shadow of the valley of death. You know any of that?
Suttree stood up in the skiff. The river about them was black and calm and the bridgelights rigid where they lay upstream in the water.
Give me a hand with him.
Leonard looked up, one side of him softly lit by the lamp at his elbow, his shadow in the night enormous. He leaned and took hold of the cadaver and together they raised him. They laid him across the seat, one leg already reaching over the side into the river as if the old man couldnt wait. Suttree put his foot against the thing and shoved it. It made a dull splash and the white sheets flared in the lamplight and it was gone. Leonard sat back down in the stern of the skiff. Whew, he said.
Suttree washed his hands in the river and dried them on his trousers and took up the oars again. Leonard tried him in conversation on several topics as they came back up the river but Suttree rowing said no word.
Suttree drunk negotiated with a drunk’s meticulousness the wide stone steps of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. The virtues of a stainless birth were not lost on him, no not on him. The moon’s horn rode in the dark hard by the steeple. An older sot wobbled in the street without, caroming along a wall like a mechanical duck in a carnival. Suttree entered the vestibule and paused by a concrete seashell filled with sacred waters. He stood in the open door. He entered.
Down the long linoleum aisle he went, and with care, tottered not once. A musty aftertaste of incense hung in the air. A thousand hours or more he’s spent in this sad chapel he. Spurious acolyte, dreamer impenitent. Before this tabernacle where the wise high God himself lies sleeping in his golden cup.