Sin Eater: A Novel Read online

  Was it worth it? I want to ask. I ask it silently to the wall behind her head.

  What choice did she have? the wall says back.

  After the list is finished, the Sin Eater turns her bulk, lifts her skirts, and steps down the stairs as easy as if she were at a dance. I climb down each stair slow and wary, my heart in my throat, catching my balance with every step.

  The door closes behind us. Behind me and my first Recitation. If I live a long life, I might have sixty years more of this. Sixty years of hearing folk’s sins. Not their joys or their blessings, just their sins. I stand outside the house, while this knowledge digs down into my heart.

  I’m there but a moment before the Sin Eater reaches back and pulls me by the ear down the road.

  We go next to a lane where guildsmen live. Houses neat and clean, you can tell even from the outside. I know which one we’re heading to because a man stands in the doorway openly weeping like I don’t know what. His smock’s white with flour and brown with blood. The Sin Eater goes right past him into the house.

  A midwife kneels next to a woman on a bed, one of the midwife’s hands on the woman’s chest, the other squeezing a bundle between her legs. Everything smells like blood. An infant squalls suddenly off in the corner where an old body hushes it gentle-like.

  The Sin Eater sits down. The midwife manages not to touch her but keeps to both her tasks: feeling the heart beating, staunching the blood flow between the legs.

  ‘The Unseen is now seen,’ says the Sin Eater. ‘The Unheard is now heard. The sins of your flesh become the sins of mine to be borne to my grave in silence. Speak.’

  The woman’s chest barely rises, and her lips only make hollow sounds.

  ‘I sent a boy to the midwife and the sin eater, as you do,’ says the smocked man from the doorway. The husband, he must be. ‘I never thought she’d need it.’

  ‘My own girl, don’t leave us,’ cries the old body holding the babe. The granddam. The baby shrieks in agreement.

  ‘I never thought she’d need it,’ says the husband again.

  The Sin Eater waits, her ear by the new mother’s mouth, but the lips don’t move.

  ‘She’s passing,’ says the midwife.

  So the Sin Eater names the foods for the Simple Eating, the one for those who depart before the sin eater can hear the Recitation. ‘Salt for pride, cream for envy, leeks for lies of omission, garlic for miserliness and bread for the sin we are born with. When the food is et, your sins will be mine. I will bear them in silence to my grave.’ She starts to make the sign across the woman’s shoulders and hips.

  ‘Must add dried plum,’ the smocked husband says quick. ‘She was my brother’s wife before mine.’ The Sin Eater nods. It’s incest, even if they are married kin, not blood kin, and just as sinful in the eyes of the Maker. Most folk’s eyes too. I’ve never seen folk who’ve done it. I made jests, same as all the other children, when Lee or some other would do something foolish. Made jests about how her parents must have been sister and brother. I look down at the mother, newly passed. This is what incest looks like. The granddam stares dumbly at her daughter on the bed.

  On our way down the road, a boy runs up alongside us. He keeps his eyes straight ahead. ‘Sin Eater’s called to Caris Cooper in Southside,’ he tells us. The Sin Eater huffs her breath. It’s not talking exactly, but it tells the boy she heard. The boy scampers off.

  The Sin Eater turns off the main road. We walk until houses get scarcer and gardens commoner. Soon we are in the country. I’m so hungry I feel like a hard fruit’s lodged in my belly. I knot my hands and rub it.

  She looks at me and nods with her head towards the road ahead. Mayhap there’s an Eating coming. Just thinking of the word eating, I drool so much I have to clamp my lips shut and swallow. Then I remember the food will be somefolk’s sins, and the drool reverses, and I have to keep my jaw shut so as not to retch. I want to eat so badly. Yet the cost.

  The sin eater takes on the sins of others, so says the Maker’s Book. (Or, so the Makermen say the Book says. I know some letters, but only how they fit to make two words: May and Owens.) The Maker’s Book says the sins are lifted from the sinner and placed on the sin eater’s soul. I always pictured that my own coffin would be nearly bare. Even when I stole the bread, it was only roast pigeon added to the Simple Eating on the pine board.

  And now . . . The thought stops me short, right in the middle of the road like an ass. Whatever sins we’ll find at the Eating, if I eat, will become mine. And I won’t shed them. I’ll take them to my judgement. How has it taken me so long to see this? There’s a choking sound behind me. I start to turn, but it comes again, closer. It’s not behind me. It’s my own throat, closing up. My rib bones shrink in, too, like a too-tight shift with no place left for breath. The Sin Eater looks at me again – at my eyes, my lips, my throat – like a cunning woman assessing which herbs she might need to heal me. Then it comes, her hand straight across my cheek with a great smack. I stumble and nearly fall. She doesn’t pause to see if I right myself.

  The main room’s been cleared for the coffin. The goodwife stands by the wall, a neighbour’s hand on her for comfort. The coffin’s well joined. On it are bowls of porridge, cream, and boiled eggs. There’s a plate with leeks, a pile of salt, a small loaf of bread, and a pot of honey. In the moment it takes my eyes to see the food, my belly makes the choice. I will eat. It’s not the choice I want. A small voice says, Think of your da. He would never. But then the other voice, shouting through my belly and up into my heart drowns out the little voice. And I know that questions about sin and souls are for Makermen, not hungry girls. My soul will pay whatever price it must, because that price is later and eating is now. Shame blooms across my chest.

  I remind myself of the Makerman’s words when I was made a sin eater. If I serve faithfully enough, I might join the Maker when I die. The words rub up against the shame but don’t much ease it.

  A stool has already been placed in front of the coffin. The Sin Eater sits down and begins. No words. No nothing. Despite her girth, she eats carefully, cracking the egg, peeling it with nimble fingers, until it’s glossy and white. She dips the small end into the salt and takes a tiny bite, chewing so long it must be mush in her mouth. I summon the courage to reach out for the bread. No, the porridge. No, the honey. The goodwife sweeps behind me, and a stool hits lightly against my knee backs. A seat for me.

  ‘Thank ye kind—’ I start out of habit. The Sin Eater wheels on me with bullish eyes. I clench my jaws together. She turns back to the coffin. I pull my stool nearer. I reach out for the bread, but the Sin Eater’s hand stops mine. She gives me, instead, the other egg.

  I peel it badly, stripping the wobbly white along with the brown shell, until an irregular round remains, the pale yellow yolk peeking through on one side. I dip it shakily in salt and stuff it between my lips. My tongue burns with its touch, so I chew roughly with my side teeth, swallowing before it’s half mashed. I can feel the Sin Eater’s disapproval, but I eat it in just the one bite. Then wait, my hands shaking, ready for her to tell me what’s next.

  She finishes her egg. She sits on the stool. She takes a breath. The moment seems like it will never end. Finally, her hand goes out for the bread. Thank the Maker, the bread! She rips it in two, then lifts the lid on the honey pot and drizzles half on my bread and half on hers, spreading it so thin that it coats it all without even dripping off.

  My whole body shivers with the sweet, and I feel an itch inside both ears. I eat it like a dog eats meat, in great swallows, then wait, while she chews bite after tiny bite.

  Think of your da, the little voice starts.

  I will never have another hungry day! my belly screams. I will never spend another gnawing hour!

  Next comes the leek, stringy and sharp. Finally the porridge, spoonful by spoonful. I scrape the bowl of every last oat. When I’m done, I sit back like her. She takes a breath and says, ‘The sins are now mine. I bear them in silence to my grave.’<
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  She stays as still as a picture. I wait. Her hand rises and lands atop my leg with a slap, and then I know why we wait.

  ‘I . . . The sins are now mine . . .’ I begin, my voice sounding high and faraway. ‘I bear them in silence to my grave.’

  I expect to feel something, a change. Same as when I got my monthly courses. Then, all I felt were cramps. Now, it’s much the same, a cramp in my belly from so much food after so little. And a stinging on my tongue. I fear I may retch. She eyes me when she stands and barely shakes her head, but I see it. I must keep the food down.

  The goodwife drops a few coins into the Sin Eater’s hand as we go, careful to avoid her touch.

  Two steps outside, I’m puking by the road. She takes hold of my ear again.

  ‘I can’t help it!’ I squeal as another retch rocks up from my guts. Her fist hits my chin on an upswing, and my teeth slam together so hard, I fear they will shatter.

  I must not speak.

  She pulls me on down the road, and I have to swallow half the mess in my mouth. The rest dribbles down my chin as I bob along behind her.

  She lets me go when we are back in town. By then, the waves in my belly are no longer crashing upward. She looks me over again, eyeing me fully, but this time waiting. I sniff and nod. She nods back. It’s the first care she’s shown.

  ‘None knew the old woman,’ a neighbour says too loud. Perhaps to explain why the body’s started to rot. Or why there’s no coffin.

  ‘If only we knew who her folk were,’ another neighbour says with wide eyes, but I can tell she’s not honest. It must have taken them days to find the body. And then only by the stream of rats and other vermin filing in. It’s her funeral procession.

  All about the room are the signs of a cunning woman – marjoram and sage drying in the window, a clyster pipe for constipation on a little wooden shelf, mandrake root and a dead dove for a love charm it looks like the dead woman was lately making. Gracie Manners said some cunning women use baby’s blood in love charms, but my mother told me that was all donkey paddies. Love charms are white magic, my mother said. Only black magic uses blood. Blood and other nasty things like hairs plucked under a full moon or wax poppets. I look for signs of black magic in the room, but don’t see any.

  The neighbours have laid out the salt, leek, garlic, and bread for the Simple Eating. None brought cream.

  ‘I brought the salt,’ huffs one neighbour through a kerchief pressed to her nose. ‘And the leek.’ She eyes the others. Who eye her back. Cream comes dear in early spring.

  Finally a neighbour goes and collects a saucer of milk.

  Miserliness: garlic.

  When we sit, the neighbours take their chance to leave their guilt behind with the ants. It’s good they leave because I puke over and over at the foot of the body just from the smell. Only greenish-yellow bile comes out, speckled with blood from my branded tongue, yet my guts go on. In between, the Sin Eater hands me bites of food. It’s a fool’s show: bite and puke, bite and puke. All the while, she licks every drop of milk from the saucer, chews every crumb of bread. The crush of the leek between her teeth, dry and shrivelled as it is, sends me into greater retches with its onion stink. Finally she says the words to end and makes the Maker’s sign over the rotting body.

  We climb down two sets of stairs. I never knew you could climb so many stairs in a day. A neighbour holds out a penny as we go into the gathering dusk. My legs wobble like a newborn calf’s, but I follow. Because where else can I go?

  I nearly weep when she stops at a merchant’s house. We aren’t done. Why must we do so many Recitations and Eatings in one day? I ask the house.

  Because souls do not wait upon young women like you, it says back. You wait upon them.

  Red hangings line the hall like long tongues. It’s a colour I’ve never seen in cloth. The woad blue woven around the red I know well. Woad blue is the colour of common folk’s clothes because woad dye is cheap and bears up through years of washing. But this bright, rich red. I thought it was just a colour of the body – the inside of an open mouth, chapped lips, a cunny.

  The coffin sits in a large wood-panelled room hung with paintings and lit by sconces of fat, beeswax candles. I startle when one painting moves, before I see it’s just a looking glass. My black hair is slack. My eyes are small, black stones. But my square face is pink. My lips too, bright as the hangings on the walls. Must be the retching.

  Fetching retching, I tell the looking glass.

  I open my mouth to see my tongue. A black S weaves down it like a snake, just as Lee said. The tongue around the S is red and puffy. It’s monstrous. I’m monstrous. I turn away from the looking glass.

  Then an odd thing happens. A maid comes into the room to dust, as if it were an ordinary day. She finishes one sconce and moves to the mantel. Even at the cunning woman’s Eating there was some feeling. The feeling was guilt felt by miserly neighbours, but it was feeling. Here, none attend the coffin. None cry in the corner. There’s just the maid, going about her duties. I look at the Sin Eater. She’s looking at the food.

  Spread on the coffin are some foods I know: mustard seed for lying, gristle for wrath, bitter greens for not saying your prayers. There are also some sins I don’t know: what looks to be a dried crab apple stuffed with mushrooms. But to one side is a sin I know because it’s whispered about in haunting stories told to scare folk. A lamb’s head, stewed in its mother’s milk. Forcing oneself on a child.

  I begin to shake again. From somewhere deep. If I knew where my soul lived, I would say it comes from there. The Sin Eater pauses too, but her pause is quick. Then she sits on the stool and eats.

  I watch as she works through the mustard seed, crunching the tiny shells. She saves the last several. Holds them out in her hand for me.

  I should run. Run out of the door and go back to the jail. Beg to be hung with only my own sins and the few I’ve eaten today to weigh down my soul.

  Instead, I stand like a wooden post, so she grabs me easily, pulling me across her body like a child to be spanked. She digs fat fingers into the corners of my lips, and prises my jaws apart. And then she feeds me. Me coughing as the mustard seeds catch in my throat, her holding my mouth and nose until I swallow. Then the stuffed crab apple. Then a slab of lamb’s head she rips apart with her own teeth. Milk dribbles down my chin, down the same curves the puke traced before, the same curves the puke will follow after. She holds my nose and mouth. And, weak, I now know, truly weak, I swallow. I swallow, instead of letting her pinching fingers kill me. I swallow. And now I am what he was. His sin is mine.

  3. BREAD

  THIS TIME I sit with her, but on an upended split of wood because there’s just the one stool. We’re at her home. She passes the jug. I drink. It doesn’t matter that I’ll puke it up. That seems to be the way of things now. Enough gets in me that my thoughts glaze over now and again before snapping back to our poor, grey truth.

  We took it from him, I say to the fire. We should not have done!

  Great sobs quake through my ribs. She passes the jug.

  Why would he admit it? I ask the hearth stones. Why not just take the Simple Eating and be forgiven pride, envy, miserliness, lies?

  The stones answer, The Maker would know. The Maker would punish him to live in Eve’s land under the earth.

  Why would the family cook the food? I ask the wood floor.

  The wood says back, A family’s duty. They deliver him out of this world as he was delivered into it: as blemishless as can be.

  The jug hits the floor, fallen from her hand. I turn to it, then her. She is badly drunk. Or mayhap I am. Her eyes flutter like a toad’s in the sun. They flash open suddenly, and her hand shoots out to my cheek, pushing my eyes away.

  It’s me, I think stupidly. She growls, then laughs. She grabs at my collar, her thick fingers following it around until they find the S in front. Her face gets calm. Then she hiccups and falls off the stool.

  She’s laughing. Her humping body sha
kes and cackles. Her great breasts heave above her belly. Yes, she is broken in a way I think even Da couldn’t fix. I touch his ring on my finger. With what I’ve done can I still call myself his daughter? Mayhap I’m something different now.

  I lie back on the wood floor. The ceiling is wooden too. Am I on the ceiling or am I on the floor? I try to lift my head, but it falls back with a crack. My feet are very warm. They must be close to the hearth. I’m still asking my questions, mumbling them to the wood planks, when I fall asleep.

  Sometime in the night after the fire’s gone cold, I feel her against my back. My eyes are wet, and my chest aches with ragged breaths. I must be crying. Her arms come around mine, cradling me. She holds me there, like you do an animal when you want to make it calm, soft shushes coming from her lips. My breath comes smoother, and I fall back into sleep with her holding me.

  In the morning we stagger about like lepers, unsure our limbs will hold. My belly is empty and nettled. She drinks a gallon of water direct from the ewer in unending gulps. It turns my belly just to see. Only horses and pigs drink plain water. She burps and gropes for her woollen shawl. But she waits for me. Hands me my own shawl. Something has changed. We’re together now. We are us.

  The boys outside call their messages until there’s just one small boy left. ‘The great mill,’ is all he says. He’s lost the rest of his words. His eyes look up, as if to find his message on the roof. The Sin Eater and I start down the lane. As we near the turn, finally, a reedy voice follows after, ‘By the great mill, Eating for Goodwife Stow!’

  We go to a Recitation straightaway. A nervous-eyed housekeeper answers the door to a cluttered two-storeyed home. She makes the Maker’s sign across her shoulders and hips when we pass as if we’re a catching illness. It sours me towards her.

  We follow a loud, wet cough to the hearth where an old body, hair tucked in a brown coif, sits before the fire. On the wall is a shelf with more books than I’ve ever seen in one house. Eight, I count. I can’t even fathom the number of words it’d take to fill them. Or how many years to read them.