Sully's braided hair rope

Sully’s braided hair rope is both a working object and a record of the people whose hair is woven into it. Made from strands of many colors and textures, it is strong enough to bear a person’s weight, yet Sully handles it with the care of a craftsperson and the reverence of someone preserving a memory. Its first appearance, when Sully lays Mrs. Harmon’s hair beside her calico place mat and adds it to the rope, makes visible a history that Maren cannot easily reconcile with beauty, usefulness, and death.

Appearance and Materials

The rope first emerges from the opening of Sully’s pack after the clock on the mantel chimes six. Maren initially takes the thick, silvery coil for an ordinary rope; only when Sully draws it out and lays it on the table does she recognize Mrs. Harmon’s chignon. The object is not made from her hair alone. Its woven lengths include red, brown, black, and silver strands, varying from curly and kinky to slippery-straight. Maren finds it at once grotesque and beautiful, a response that captures the rope’s defining visual tension: its workmanship is intricate, but its material carries the knowledge of human remains.

Sully works on the rope with rough, gnarled hands, separating a lock into smaller pieces and deftly weaving them into the existing strands. He says he has been working on it for years. Its full length is not apparent at first: when he offers Maren another few feet to test, she grips it with both fists and pulls. It does not give way. She thinks she could climb it as she once climbed a rope in elementary-school gym class, while Sully says it is strong enough to hang a man. The comparison makes the rope’s practical strength inseparable from its unsettling material.

A Craft Without a Finished Form

Sully does not describe a completed object or a final purpose. When Maren asks what he will do with it when it is finished, he replies, “Who says it’ll ever be finished?” He presents the ongoing work as part of its meaning: something useful and lovely can be made from what is “done and gone.” He recalls the custom of making bracelets from the hair of corpses and says a widow might wear her husband’s hair as something to remember him by. In Sully’s account, weaving gives hair a second use without removing its connection to the dead.

The rope is also something Sully makes to occupy his hands. He says he needs to keep them busy, contrasting the work with repeatedly carving the same chess pieces. Maren suggests that he could play chess, but Sully points out that he would have to play against himself. His answer makes the solitary nature of the craft plain: it is an activity that can continue without a partner, audience, or declared endpoint. He compares its lack of completion to life that “just goes on and on,” a remark that deepens Maren’s bleak sense of the time stretching ahead of her.

Sully’s father was a rope-maker, a fact he offers when Maren asks how he learned the craft. He adds, “Among other things,” then flicks his wrist so that the hair rope leaps and twitches like a snake. The gesture turns the finished material momentarily into something animated and uncanny, while the mention of his father places Sully’s technique within a family history that he leaves only partly explained.

The People Preserved in the Weave

The strands preserve individual stories, though Sully does not explain every one. Asked whether he remembers who the different kinds of hair belonged to, he identifies one thick, fuzzy section as the hair of a boy with dreadlocks. Sully says he found the boy drowned in his own vomit and had to clean him before eating him. The blunt account connects the rope to his feeding, but it also shows that Sully remembers the circumstances attached to at least some of its strands.

A few inches from the dreadlocks, Maren notices a length of red-gold hair whose color strikes her as exceptionally lovely. Sully pauses over it and says, “She meant it.” He gives no fuller explanation. Maren’s response is not to learn a complete story about the woman, but to recognize a difference between Sully and herself: “I had victims. He did not.” The rope therefore becomes a material prompt for her judgment of their histories. Its strands are not interchangeable to her; the details Sully chooses to share alter how she understands the people represented in them and the moral distance between their acts.

Mrs. Harmon’s hair gives this record a new strand in the scene where Maren first sees the rope. Sully pulls a lock from her chignon and begins weaving it into the existing work while speaking about remembrance. The act does not make Maren comfortable: the cat enters the kitchen, bats at the rope, and Sully shoos it away before nudging it with his boot. Everyday gestures around the object—the weaving, the cat’s play, the food being prepared—sit beside the disturbing fact of what the hair is and how it came to be there.

Later Appearance and Significance

The rope reappears in Sully’s rucksack, stashed in a room closet while he has gone to look for Maren at the library. When Lee notices something trailing from the open closet, he pulls the rope out. Coil after coil gathers on the linoleum; the length is so great that Lee wonders how Sully fitted anything else into the pack. Lee’s disgust and fascination recall Maren’s first reaction to it at Mrs. Harmon’s house. He calls it “Like a Frankenstein zombie Rapunzel,” and Maren laughs despite everything. The comparison emphasizes the rope’s length and uncanny mixture of human material and crafted form without dispelling its repulsiveness.

Maren points out Mrs. Harmon’s hair near one end and notices that the rope has grown by several feet since she last saw it. Seeing the whole length leads her to infer that, if Sully had eaten only people who were already dead, the rope would contain much more gray, white, and silver. The inference makes the object a partial record of time and of the kinds of deaths behind it, though it does not identify every strand or settle every question about Sully’s past. Lee kicks the rope away and says, “That is the most repulsive thing I’ve ever seen.” Maren doubts him, and the two stare at the rucksack as if another disturbing object might emerge.

The rope’s effect on Maren has changed by this later encounter. At first she watches Sully weave and tests the strength he claims for it; now, after Lee has drawn out its full, lengthening mass, she cannot wait to be rid of it. She stuffs it back into the bag, grabs the strap, and drags it across the floor. The object has moved from a strange craft that invites questions to an unwanted presence she acts to remove. Across its appearances, the rope holds together the book’s competing ideas of preservation and violation: Sully makes a durable, beautiful thing from the dead, while its accumulating length keeps the human cost of that transformation in view.