Pages 256 - 277 Summary

The old ragpicker starts his day looking through garbage bins in the alley to salvage anything he can eat or make into kindling. He finds bottles to redeem and anything he can sell. He tells Suttree that he came down this river in 1901 with a carnival. He saw a man be hanged for something he didn't do, and cyclones that picked up the river and set whole houses down where they didn't belong. He is sick of living and wants to die. Suttree asks him if he believes in God, but the ragpicker has no reason to think God believes in him. Suttree presses him, asking what he would say to God, and the ragpicker answers that he would ask God why he put the ragpicker down in this crapgame, since he "couldn't put any part of it together." He does...