Suttree
Chapters - Cormac McCarthy
Prologue
A lyrical, incantatory address to the reader - "Dear friend" - conjuring the nighttime streets of Knoxville, Tennessee. The prose moves through soot-blackened corridors, past cemeteries and warehouses, down to the river where houseboats ride at their hawsers and the mud lies ribbed along the shore.
The passage evokes a world within the world, populated by the "illshapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland." It is a dark overture, summoning images of death, decay, and the ruder forms that survive in this mongrel city built on the river plain. The night is quiet like a camp before battle, and a curtain rises on the western world.
Chapter 1
Cornelius Suttree drifts in his skiff on the Tennessee River, running his trotlines for catfish and carp. He watches a dead man pulled from the river by a rescue crew - a suicide who jumped from the bridge, still wearing his watch. His friend Joe suggests he get a proper job at Miller's department store, but Suttree declines, preferring to stick to the river.
Suttree brings a catfish to an old ragpicker who lives beneath the bridge, then returns to his solitary houseboat. In a long internal reverie he recalls his grandfather's death, his father's disapproving letters, and the stillborn twin brother with whom he shared his mother's womb - a mirror image buried at Woodlawn. His uncle John visits the houseboat, awkwardly trying to reconnect. They discuss the family Suttree has estranged himself from, and John inadvertently confirms the secret of the dead twin. Suttree asks John not to tell the family where he is living.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Joe, Uncle John, Jimmy Smith, Bobbyjohn, Junior Long, Nig
Chapter 2
A nameless rural boy prowls a watermelon patch at night, engaging in bizarre sexual congress with the melons. Discovered by the farmer's spotlight, he flees. The farmer and a neighbour inspect the ruined patch in bewildered disgust.
The boy returns on a rainy night and is ambushed. He is shot with a shotgun as he tries to run, his overalls tangled about his ankles. The farmer, horrified at what he has done, kneels beside the screaming boy in the moonlight. This episode introduces Gene Harrogate, the "country mouse" whose misadventures will run parallel to Suttree's story.
On page: Gene Harrogate
Chapter 3
Harrogate arrives at the workhouse - a state penitentiary - having been sentenced to eleven months and twenty-nine days. He is processed, sprayed for lice, and given an oversized prison uniform. He finds a bunk and waits nervously for his fellow inmates.
Suttree is already serving time in the same facility. They meet when Harrogate takes the bunk above his. Suttree gives the boy tobacco and listens to his story - shot for stealing watermelons, though the true offence is far stranger. They share meals in the grim mess hall. An unlikely friendship forms between the educated fisherman and the feral, illiterate country boy.
On page: Gene Harrogate, Cornelius Suttree, Red Callahan
Chapter 4
Suttree wakes on his houseboat in full summer, tends to his sunken skiff, cleans his catch of catfish, and shaves at the warehouse spigot. He walks into Knoxville to sell his fish - two catfish to Mr Turner at the Market Street fishstall, and four carp to a butcher in the black neighbourhood along Central Avenue.
With his modest earnings he buys hamburgers at the Sanitary Lunch, where he finds J-Bone, Boneyard, and Hoghead - all drunk and rowdy. J-Bone releases an enormous fart that clears the restaurant. They adjourn to the Huddle bar, where Blind Richard sits nursing a beer. Billy Ray Callahan arrives fresh from jail with Worm, Cabbage, and Bearhunter. Callahan mentions that Harrogate is coming to the city to make his fortune.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Mr Turner, J-Bone, Boneyard, Hoghead, Blind Richard, Billy Ray Callahan, Worm, Cabbage, Bearhunter, Jimmy Smith, Ethel·Mentioned: Gene Harrogate
Chapter 5
Suttree caulks his leaking skiff with tar dug from the road. Daddy Watson, an old railroader, stops by on his way to town, relieved to find Suttree alive after his absence in jail. They share a neighbourly exchange about railroad life and leaky caboose roofs.
Suttree spends a quiet evening on the houseboat - cooking his supper of beans and hamburger, watching moths at the window, listening to the River Queen paddle past. The chapter captures the solitary rhythm of his river life: the physical labour of fishing, the simple meals, the deep loneliness relieved only by passing boats and the sounds of the water beneath him.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Daddy Watson
Chapter 6
Harrogate arrives in Knoxville fresh from the workhouse, delivered by truck. He descends through kudzu-covered bluffs to the river, encounters menacing fishbutchers, and explores abandoned rolling stock on a siding. He meets Daddy Watson again, who wants nothing to do with him.
Harrogate searches for Suttree, visiting a junkman's shack where he does odd jobs stripping a wrecked Ford - discovering a human eye among the wreckage. He visits the ragpicker beneath the bridge and decides to make his home under the far end of the viaduct. He wanders Knoxville's poorer districts, is beaten by an old woman for stealing a peach, bitten on the leg by a legless beggar, and sleeps rough on a church lawn. The chapter is a picaresque tour of the city's underworld through Harrogate's feral, irrepressible eyes.
POV: Gene Harrogate·On page: Daddy Watson·Mentioned: Cornelius Suttree
Chapter 7
Suttree goes about his daily routine - running trotlines at dawn in the fog, cleaning his catch, and delivering catfish to Ab Jones's wife. At Ab Jones's place he drinks a beer with the enormous black man in his dim riverside establishment.
In the afternoon he sells fish in the city and eats at Granny and Hazel's. He encounters Hoghead, who tells him stories of misadventures with John Clancy involving a shooting incident at a black woman's house. Suttree visits Howard Clevinger's store on Front Street, where Oceanfrog Frazer and the androgynous figure Trippin Through The Dew hold court among the neighbourhood characters.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Ab Jones, Hoghead, Oceanfrog Frazer, Trippin Through The Dew, Howard Clevinger·Mentioned: John Clancy
Chapter 8
Suttree rows downriver on a Sunday, past childhood landscapes and the ruins of an old mill. He recalls a turtlehunter from his youth. He comes upon a riverside baptism and sits among the spectators, bantering with two old men who urge him to get saved.
He walks on upriver and visits his great-aunt Martha and her husband Clayton. Over cold milk and chocolate cake they look through old family photo albums - tintypes of dead relatives, his mother as a young girl, his uncle as a boy. Among the photographs he finds a picture of himself as an infant, held stiffly by his grandfather. The visit is tender and melancholy, a rare glimpse of Suttree's connection to family and the long chain of the dead that stretches behind him.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Aunt Martha, Uncle Clayton
Chapter 9
Harrogate, now living under the viaduct, rigs an electrified pole to kill pigeons, nearly creating a lethal hazard. He chases escaped pigs through the riverside brush in a long slapstick pursuit, finally killing one with a pipe after a brutal struggle. The pig's owner, a contemplative black man, arrives and regards the carnage with philosophical calm.
Suttree visits Harrogate's camp and is appalled by the electrified pigeon trap. Their friendship continues as an odd pairing - Suttree the reluctant mentor, Harrogate the incorrigible and inventive fool, always scheming, always just barely surviving in his cave beneath the bridge.
POV: Gene Harrogate·On page: Cornelius Suttree·Mentioned: Tarzan Quinn
Chapter 10
J-Bone delivers devastating news: Suttree's young son has died. Suttree takes a night train to a small town in the flatlands, arriving at his estranged wife's family home. His former wife tells him to go away; her mother attacks him, biting his finger and clawing at him; her father comes with a shotgun, and Suttree vaults through the hedge.
He walks to the cemetery alone and watches the funeral from a distance - the small coffin, the preacher's words, his own name spoken. His wife collapses wailing. Suttree kneels by a tree, overwhelmed with grief. After the mourners leave he shovels dirt into his son's grave himself, refusing the gravediggers' tractor. A sheriff drives him to the bus station, calling him a "fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch" but giving him five dollars to leave town forever.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: J-Bone
Chapter 11
Deep winter descends on Knoxville. The old black coal pedlar known as the General makes his rounds with his horse-drawn wagon, delivering coal through frozen streets. Suttree wakes in his freezing houseboat, buys coal on credit, and struggles to light his stove in temperatures near zero. His eggs are frozen solid; he throws one against the wall.
At Howard Clevinger's store, Jabbo and Bungalow try to press Suttree into drinking splo whiskey with them on Thanksgiving, but he refuses. Oceanfrog Frazer defuses the tense standoff by taking the bottle himself, spitting the vile liquor into the stove in a ball of blue flame. The bitter cold and poverty of Suttree's river existence are laid bare - a man enduring a self-imposed exile from comfort and privilege.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: The General, Jabbo, Bungalow, Oceanfrog Frazer, Howard Clevinger
Chapter 12
Suttree visits Daddy Watson in his old caboose, where the retired railroader tells stories of spectacular train wrecks - boiler explosions, telescoping coaches, a burning train ascending a snowy mountain in Colorado that remains the most beautiful thing he ever saw.
The visit is a quiet interlude of warmth and companionship between two solitary men. Watson's tales carry the poetry of a vanishing world of steam locomotives and hoboes, of dangers survived and wonders witnessed. The caboose is stacked with yellowed timetables and old newspapers, the accumulated archive of a life lived on the rails.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Daddy Watson, Howard Clevinger
Chapter 13
Suttree, J-Bone, Sharpe, and Cabbage spend a freezing night sleeping in a car, waiting for a bar to open at five in the morning. Sharpe lights a fire on the floor of the car. They drink beer at dawn at the Signal Cafe.
By evening the group has grown to a dozen McAnally Flats regulars who descend on a roadhouse called the Indian Rock. A titanic brawl erupts. Callahan robs purses and provokes fighters. Paul McCulley trades punches with multiple opponents. Suttree is hit with a floor buffer and nearly killed, his skull cracked, blood pouring into his eyes. He stumbles past a dead man on the floor. He wakes in the hospital with broken ribs, a broken finger, loose teeth, and bleeding from the ears.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: J-Bone, Sharpe, Cabbage, Billy Ray Callahan, Hoghead, Paul McCulley, Jimmy Smith
Chapter 14
Spring arrives. A wandering goatman enters Knoxville leading a procession of thirty-four goats pulling strange carts decorated with biblical messages and goat skulls. He camps in the field near Suttree's houseboat. The two men sit by the fire and talk - the goatman has been on the road fourteen years with his goats, preaching every Sunday at four o'clock.
They discuss fishing on the sabbath, Jesus weeping over Lazarus, and the goatman's intent to question Jesus personally when they meet. Black children come to pet the goats. Suttree promises to bring a catfish. He visits Ab Jones's place, where Smokehouse, a white derelict, tends bar. The chapter marks the turning of the season and a brief pastoral interlude in Suttree's grim river life.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Smokehouse·Mentioned: Ab Jones
Chapter 15
Oceanfrog Frazer witnesses a bloodied madman plunge through the lots above the river in a deranged flight, crashing through fences and clotheslines. Dead bats appear in the streets, and authorities offer a dollar bounty for them.
Harrogate seizes on the bat bounty as a money-making scheme. He collects a dead bat, trades it at the hospital for a dollar, and begins scheming to manufacture dead bats using rat poison. He buys pellets from the dimestore, acquires a second car hood from the junkman, and constructs a boat from two welded hoods tarred at the seams. He launches his improbable vessel on the river to general astonishment. Suttree watches these antics with a mixture of amusement and concern.
POV: Gene Harrogate·On page: Cornelius Suttree, Oceanfrog Frazer
Chapter 16
A new fisherman appears on the river - an Indian in a patchwork boat who catches an enormous eighty-seven-pound catfish displayed at Turner's stall. Suttree seeks him out at the base of a bluff where he lives in a cave. The Indian gives Suttree a jar of foul-smelling bait and they begin a cautious friendship.
The Indian is jailed for vagrancy and his boat is stolen. Suttree helps him recover it from the island downriver. The Indian reveals his name is Michael, though people call him "Tonto or Wahoo or Chief." As Suttree rows back alone, boys on the island hit him in the forehead with a thrown rock, leaving him bloodied and drifting. He makes his way to Ab Jones's, where Doll tends to his wound.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Michael, Mr Turner, Doll
Chapter 17
At the Huddle bar, Leonard - a pale, pimpled young man of dubious occupations - confides in Suttree. His father died the previous December, but Leonard and his mother have kept the corpse hidden in the back bedroom so they can continue drawing welfare and unemployment cheques. Six months on, the smell is terrible and the scheme has spiralled beyond their control.
Leonard begs Suttree to help him dispose of the body in the river, weighed down with wheel rims and chains. Suttree flatly refuses. That night, Suttree takes a dark-haired girl from the B&J bar back to his houseboat. He is woken in the small hours by Leonard at the door, whispering urgently: "I got him. He's in the trunk."
POV: Cornelius Suttree·On page: Leonard, J-Bone·Mentioned: Gene Harrogate, Hoghead
Chapter 18
Suttree, drunk, enters the Church of the Immaculate Conception and sits in the front pew, reflecting on childhood memories of Catholic school, May processions, and serving early Mass with J-Bone. He recalls the strict nuns, the rituals, and small acts of boyhood rebellion. He falls asleep in the church and is woken by a priest who gently asks if he was waiting for confession.
Suttree tells the priest that the building is not God's house, then walks out past the puzzled clergyman. The encounter is brief but revealing, showing Suttree's lapsed faith and his complicated relationship with the religion of his upbringing.
POV: Cornelius Suttree·Mentioned: J-Bone
Chapter 19
The ragpicker who lives beneath the bridge goes about his daily routine of scavenging, sorting through rubbish bins and pulling his kindling cart through the city's back alleys. He is doused with slop by an indifferent kitchen boy. In the evening, Suttree visits him and they share a philosophical conversation about death, God, and the purpose of life.
The ragpicker recounts tales from his youth travelling with a carnival and witnessing a hanging. He tells Suttree he looks forward to death and has no fear of what follows, declaring that nothing happens after you die. When Suttree reminds him he once claimed to believe in God, the old man says he would ask God what the whole confusing enterprise of life was for, and doubts there is an answer.
POV: Cornelius Suttree