Mr. James’s Reviews > Suttree > Status Update

Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in a perpetual storm. Suttree went to his knees in the grass, his hand cupped over his ears. -- C.M.

By now the mother had come from the porch. She was dressed in black and closed upon them soundless as a plague, her bitter twisted face looming, axemark for a mouth and eyes crazed with hatred. She tried to speak but only a half strangled scream came out. The girl was thrown aside and this demented harridan was at him clawing, kicking, gurgling with rage. -- C.M.

They watched from the porch, gathered there like a sitting for some old sepia tintype, the mother's hand on the seated patriarch's shoulder. Watched him coming up the walk with his empty hands and burnt looking eyes. Suttree's abandoned wife. -- C.M.

He was a black of a contemplative nature and he was just slightly drunk and he stood leaning there against the abutment of the viaduct and took a sip from a halfpint bottle and slipped it back into his hip pocket and wiped his mouth and watched this spectacle of frenzied mayhem with a troubled gaze. -- C.M.

The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by sheer velocity of time... I am, I am. An artifact of a prior race. -- C.M.

The preacher had the man by the collar. He was sputtering and reeling about and he looked half crazy. The preacher steadied him by the forehead, intoning the baptismal service. Suttree rose and dusted the grass from his trousers. You aint fixin to leave are ye? The old man asked. I sure as hell am, said Suttree. [...] Suttree knew the river well already and he turned his back to these malingerers and went on. -- C.M.

Suttree smiled. I hear that old woman shot you the other night. [...] She shot about four holes in the wall. Shot a picture down. I ducked behind the sofa and she shot a hole in that and John Clancy said they was a rat the size of a housecat come out from under it just shittin and a gettin it. He was layin in the floor and he said it run right over the top of him. -- C.M.

He went into the Gold Sun... sitting at the counter among the morning smells of fried sausage and eggs. He rolled back the folds of his trouserlegs and examined his wound. The beggar's illspaced teeth had printed two little sickle shapes, the flesh blue, small pinlets of blood. Harrogate wet a paper napkin in his water glass and laved it over his queer stigmata. Son of a bitch, he muttered. -- C.M.

The carpeting had been rained on and was lightly furred with pale blue mold. Something small and fat and wet with an umbilical looking tail lying there. A sort of slug. He picked it up. A human eye looked up at him from between his thumb and forefinger. -- C.M.

He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly and wings. Eyes black, triangular, a robber's mask. Furred and wizened face not unlike a monkey's and wearing a windswept ermine shako. Suttree bent to see him better. What do you want? -- C.M.