Sin Eater Read online

  Then one day she was there on her knees, six dirty carrots at her side. One carrot, I remember, looked short and misshapen like a broken finger. I had come over to tell her about a crow that was pecking at an old bit of leather. She stood before I even got to the leather part.

  “No, no, no, you don’t. It’s too much,” she cried. “I’m not your ma. I’ve Lee and Tom to look after. Not you too.”

  “You’re my neighbor,” I said.

  “I’ve done my neighborly duty by you plenty.” Her words jumped all over me. “What you need is kin, and you’ve got a whole lot of them down by the river. Go there with your chitter and chatter about what a dog smelled this morning and which cloud is shaped like a lamb.”

  Kin was the last thing I needed.

  * * *

  Two mornings on, the hanging girls march out of the jail. The turnkey doesn’t even blink when I say, “What’s to become of me?”

  Just a few of us are left behind. It’s better because of the piss pot. There’s just the one, and when the cell is full, the pot fills so quick we have to piss in the corner. If I had known before how much piss there is in a jail, I’d have brought pails by to collect it. There’s places will buy old piss. My mother and I used it for whitening laundry and fullers use it to clean new wool. Woad dyers use it too, but I don’t know for what.

  More girls arrive. The piss pot overflows again. Lots of thieves in the new lot, including four sisters who worked in the royal kitchen and had a good side custom selling the uneaten food from off Queen Bethany’s tables when she and her court were staying in town.

  On the hip bones of the year, spring and fall, Queen Bethany and her court come up the river from the big city in great barges to live here. We all turn out to watch her arrive with her servants and ladies and trunks upon trunks of baggage. It means work and money. But the town sort of swells up in an uncomfortable way, the roads thickening with folk and carts and horses, pantoboys performing the news, tinkers and trinket sellers setting up stalls, vagabonds and beggars skulking about, like in the rhyme:

  Hark, hark the dogs do bark,

  The beggars are coming to town,

  Eaters of sin, and drinkers of spirits,

  And players in velvet gowns.

  The four sisters who worked in the kitchen are a small society unto themselves, talking and laughing and sometimes holding one another through weeping. I sit on the fringes and pretend I’m a part. It makes me feel like I have friends. They seem not to mind.

  “Selling leftover food weren’t against the law in our mum’s day,” says the eldest sister one morning. “Was part of the job!”

  “Everyfolk’s feeling the squeeze now,” gripes a younger sister. “Queen makes her court ladies pay their own keep, you know”—she speaks to those of us who don’t—“food, candles, firewood, even—though they serve at the Queen’s pleasure. The spiteful Queen!”

  “Hush, Lila!” scolds the eldest.

  “Those are words to say inside your head,” I suggest aloud.

  “Gemma saw the Queen stick a knife in a lady’s hand for smiling at her favorite! The blade went clean through and got stuck in the table,” says Lila.

  “You still don’t say such things if you don’t want your tongue cut out and hung up on the castle wall,” says the eldest.

  “A wedding would solve it quick,” says another sister. “No more favorites.”

  “If the fighting over her hand doesn’t bring us into another war,” moans the eldest.

  “Oh, think of a royal wedding,” says Lila. “Plenty of money and plenty of eating.”

  “I hope she’ll not marry a stranger,” says the eldest. “Such a wealth of countrymen. From south and west and up north.”

  “Up north’s not strangers?” I say. Everyfolk knows Northern men wear skirts, eat nought but bag pudding and will fug anything, man, woman, even their own sheep. The sisters go on together as if I haven’t spoken.

  “Do you recall the young suitor with the red stockings?” says the youngest, and they all fall to laughing. Then a sigh settles over the group, and they nestle in together like doves in a cote.

  Our neighbor Bessie would say it’s just the way of queens and kings to make war.

  “But they had a war,” I once complained to her when I was a girl. “My grandsire died in it.”

  “Aye, but that was the old king. He’s gone and left a poor brood. Just the two daughters, Maris and Bethany, and all the land at arms over whose faith is better.”

  “Isn’t it who’s eldest?”

  “Shall you go up to the castle and tell them now? ‘Excuse me, your graces, the old faith and the new faith are no longer a matter for fighting. Call the royal wet nurse, who was weaned first?’ ” Bessie collapsed into giggles with her daughter, Lee. Lee still thinks anything to do with breasts is a laugh, even though she was born a whole year before me.

  The faith bit is hard to sort out, but I know this much: the old king started the new faith, and while he was king, everyfolk had to be new faith too. If you were Eucharistian, or old faith, you could be killed. All the old-faith altars were destroyed and prayer beads burned in the rubbish field. But then he died.

  Maris, his oldest daughter, was queen next. She was Eucharistian. She made everyfolk go back to the old faith and burned you if you didn’t. She was known as Bloody Maris, even though it should have been Ashes Maris, since folk were burned not bloodied. Twice Queen Maris said that she was with child. And twice no child came. So when she died, her sister, Bethany, became queen. And what faith was she? Why, new faith. So she made everyfolk go back again to the new faith. Back and forth, back and forth. But it was no jest. Purgers came house to house to beat you if you didn’t go along with the new faith. Though I notice folk don’t call her Bloody Bethany. At least not aloud. And the fighting’s still not done. But now it’s for which suitor will win our queen, become king, and get his heir on her.

  * * *

  More days pass. I make my own nook in the straw. It’s hard to sleep with so many breaths and snorings, but the company’s a comfort.

  “Jail’s not so grim as you might think,” I tell a new girl barely bigger than a child. “Though watch for bedbugs.”

  She raises her shift and shows a smatter of bites. So she knows.

  For two days it rains. A small stream comes through the roof. It digs a path down the center of the dirt cell splitting all of us onto its two banks. Da could have mended the roof in a day.

  Things just want to run right, he’d say. Listen, and they’ll tell you what needs fixing. He’d hold a lock up to his ear. A jammed pin, you say? Let’s have a look.

  I remember one day Da brought home a wool merchant’s necklace to repair. It was midsummer, and I was nine. The chain was broken, and while fixing it, Da showed me the red stone in its middle. So lovely. Then he showed me the back. It was made of paste. My face fell.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Da. “Still shines as nice.”

  All the Owens could mend things. Owens. I pick apart each letter. The letters all sound wide and open to me. Like warm wind in spring. I am an Owens.

  When I turned ten, Da told me it was time for me to take a profession. “I wash clothes,” I said. “Like Mother did.”

  “Your mother washed clothes because she didn’t know anything else,” he told me.

  Da didn’t know she knew lots of things. She knew how to nap like a cat in the fine sheets brought by the wool merchant’s girl. She knew how to dress up in Goodwife Burley’s nightgowns and pretend she was a queen with a badge and a crown. The nightgowns were silk, she told me, pooped from worms. When I heard that, I brought her a sack’s worth of earthworms and presented them to her in our special crockery. I thought it was a fine gift, but she threw it back at me, worms and all, and sent me to bed with nothing to eat, unless I cared to eat the worms.

  I imagine the worms in the earth all around my mother eating her now.

  Thinking ill of the dead: roast pigeon.

 
My mother’s folk were Daffreys. A name like the color inside a bruised apple. All of us with the same hair, black and with the feel of sheep’s wool bred for mutton not yarn. All of us with the same half smile and the same cleft in the cheek like a nail paring.

  When I was small, I never much saw my Daffrey kin. Da said they weren’t like us. He meant they weren’t goodly folk. He didn’t say it exactly, but I knew.

  One year after my mother died, my Daffrey granddam arrived with two big men, my uncles. She pointed a finger warped like a birch twig at me. “Learned something new about this one. We’ll be taking her now.”

  Da tried to fight them. “She’s mine by law.”

  “Is she now?” said my granddam.

  It was the only time I heard Da swear.

  Grains of barley on the grave,

  The blasphemer’s soul is saved.

  He was no match for my uncles. It took only one strike for him to fall. And that’s how I came to live with the Daffreys for the turn of a year. As black a year as ever there was.

  The Daffrey house was down by the river on a spot where the earth sank and squelched under every step. The first week during my year with the Daffreys, my granddam kept me tied by a leash to the kitchen table to be sure I didn’t run away. She was turned in and hard like an old walnut, the meat all black and sour inside.

  “Your uncle’s going to get your sire to pay up and then we’ll live high and fancy-like,” she said.

  Da didn’t have money for high and fancy, but I said nothing.

  And then my cousins came. Two boys of an age with me. They came with a sack just the size for hoodman-blind. It went over my head, and the boys’ hands were on me quick as a whip, pulling off my clothes, even my undershift. I yanked at the hood to get it off, but one boy held it in place. When I was bare, they put their hands all over, even between my legs. I tripped in my struggling, landing hard on the hearthstone. I heard footfalls, and my granddam’s voice loud and rough, and then I was alone. The hood came off my face, tears and snot leaving two snail trails along the inside. My granddam cut my leash then, but promised she’d tie me up again and let the boys have at me if I tried to leave the kitchen.

  I always hated the cleft in my cheek because of the Daffreys, hated having their mark on me.

  “But you did them one better,” Da told me after he got me back. “For you have a cleft on your chin too. None of them can boast that. It’s a very rare thing, a cleft on the chin. Not two folk in twenty have such a thing.”

  I turn my ring when I miss my da, sometimes so much it cuts the flesh.

  * * *

  A week passes in the jail and another round of girls go off to the courthouse. They seem hopeful, nervous, bewildered. I feel older, wiser. Then, just as the last one is leaving the cell door, the turnkey calls, “May Owens.”

  And suddenly I’m hopeful, nervous, bewildered, too. “What news?” I ask.

  The turnkey just looks away.

  There’s two new faith Makermen in black robes standing by the side door of the court today. I wonder if they’re here to pray for us. The recorder runs through all the girls. Just like before, he says their crime and asks if there’s any folk to speak for them. The sisters who worked in the kitchens have to pay a fine, but they’ll go home today.

  The recorder waits until the end, until all the sentences are pronounced, to call my name. This time he rushes it. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t even look up. He just says something about communion. Or commuted. My sentence is commuted. I only follow that I am not to be hanged or fined. I am to be given a different punishment. There’s a murmur through the other girls. Blood thumps up the back of my skull. It thumps in my ears. A small, green hope buds in my heart. One of the sisters nods encouragingly, and I smile back. So I don’t quite catch it when he says, “To become a sin eater.”

  “Pardon?” I call stupidly. As if recorders wait on girls’ questions.

  The recorder motions to the Makermen. Something glints in the first one’s hand. The other carries a small box and a forked stick. They walk toward me, and suddenly I want nothing more than to pull a bedsheet over my face and hide. The first Makerman raises a heavy brass collar with a large sloping S hanging from its front and a thick lock in the back. Holding the collar above my head, he says old words:

  The sin eater walks among us,

  Unseen, unheard.

  Sins of our flesh become sins of hers,

  Following her to the grave.

  Unseen, unheard,

  The sin eater walks among us.

  The Makerman places the collar around my neck. It’s heavy and cold, except where his hands touched it, and I have a sudden image of a horse’s bit, like next he might slide it up into my mouth. But it’s worse, what happens next. The second Makerman takes hold of the collar’s lock and shoves the shackle in. Even my guts feel the wards catch.

  I grab at the collar. My fingers work their way around, feeling for the lock. I pull with all the strength I’ve got. With strong washerwoman arms. Thick, calloused fingers. The brass cuts into my neck, but still I pull. I pull so hard I topple myself right over. It’s stuck fast.

  I start to cry out “Why me?” but the moment the words take shape in the air, voices all around rise up together, saying the Maker’s Prayer:

  Maker mine, forever of the sun’s light,

  Miracles be wrought from your name.

  Protect us sinners,

  Now and at the hour of our deaths.

  I try again, raising my voice against theirs, “Please!” But I can barely hear the sounds in my own throat. They’ve been swallowed by the Maker’s Prayer. None can hear me. None will listen.

  The first Makerman’s eyes are on the ceiling, but when he talks, I can tell it’s for me to hear. “The sin eater bears the sins of all folk in silence to her grave. She alone may never confess and be absolved. However, if she serves faithfully in true piety and obedience to the Maker’s will, Eve will not be able to claim the sin eater when she dies. Her soul will rise to the Maker. But the Maker knows all. She must obey in every thought and every act her whole life through.”

  “May it be,” says the second Makerman, and all the folk in the room say it too, like when you finish a prayer.

  Then the second Makerman opens his box. Inside are a needle, a bottle of ink, and a pair of tongs like a smithy uses. I start to scramble off the bench, but the second Makerman takes his stick and catches my neck in its fork. He pushes me against the wall so I’m trapped like a scold in the stocks. The first Makerman picks up the tongs, pries open my mouth, and takes hold of my tongue.

  It takes a good long while to ink the S into my tongue with his needle. Long enough for my tongue to get so dry I hardly feel the pricks any longer. Long enough for my sobs to fritter away into little gasps and then to hiccups. When they’ve finished, the Makermen let me go. My tongue is throbbing and thick in my mouth, and I can taste blood and the foul ink that has forever marked me as a sin eater. This is what I’ll be until my death.

  The girl next to me scoots away as if my flesh has begun to blacken and blister, like I’m plagued. The others, whose faces had earlier opened to me in wonder, encouragement, and envy, drop away like leeches full of blood. It’s the last time they look at me. It’s the last time nearly anyfolk does.

  2. LAMB’S HEAD

  WHEN I STUMBLE into the road, folk look and look away. Some scutter off. I scutter too. Down into the ditch, dodging puddles and beggars.

  After the collar was placed on me, everyfolk in the courtroom turned away. All I could think on was the throbbing of my tongue, so it took a moment to know they were waiting. It took a moment more to know they were waiting for me. My feet were light as clouds and my collar weighted like stone. Tipping like a drunk woman, I walked by the other girls, their eyes on the ground. I walked by the recorder, his eyes on his parchment. By the Makermen, their eyes toward the sky.

  * * *

  Seeing my house after weeks away, a great lump grows
in my chest. When did it get so run-down? The shingles are pebbled with rot, and the front shutter hangs askew. The garden weeds have grown nearly to the window ledges like they might eat the house whole. I laugh at the sight. Da always said, Know where you’re from. Mine is shabby indeed.

  I want to run away. Run off to another town where no folk know me, and pretend I was never made a sin eater. Could I do it? Brave the murderers and thieves along the roads? But anywhere I’d go, folk’d know I didn’t belong. I’d be swept up by a constable to be whipped and burned through the ear like the girls in jail. Or worse, be swept up by folk like my Daffrey kin and tied to a table or made to whore. Then I remember the collar and the S tattooed onto my tongue. I’m marked. No matter where I go, I’m a sin eater.

  There’s a scuffle behind the shutter as I step up to my old door. It’s blocked when I try to push it open.

  “This is my home!” I cry. In an instant, my tongue is throbbing again, and I taste blood. Whoever’s taken over my home says nothing back.

  Bessie comes out from next door to see what the clamor is. “Why, that’s May’s voice, is it?” But when she sees me her jaw closes and opens like a newt eating a fly.

  “Bessie,” I say, tears wetting my cheeks from the pain of my tongue.

  Bessie shrieks and begins the Maker’s Prayer. Her hand pushes out in front of her as if for protection.

  Lee steps out the kitchen door. “But that’s May,” she says. “She’s got a—Mother! Do you see what’s around her neck?”

  “You do not see her, Lee!” Lee’s eyes fall to the ground. “If she speaks to you, you must silence her with your holiest prayers. No matter what she says.”

  “But, Bessie,” I say. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “What’s wrong with her tongue?” Lee cries. “There’s a snake on her tongue!”