The Last Sin Eater (7 page)

“I can’t bear it.”

“There’s the truth of it. Ye want
me
to bear the load.”

“I never said that.”

“Ye dinna have to. Every time ye turn your back on me, you’re saying it.”

“Ye don’t even try to understand.”

“Then
make
me understand. Explain it to me.”

“It shudna have been Elen!”

“Ye’d rather it’d been Cadi. Is that what you’re saying?”

Mama started crying soft, broken sobs.

“Fia,” Papa said, his tone changed. I could tell by it that she was tearing his heart out with her grief. “Fia, ye canna go on this way.” His voice softened so that I only heard the gentle murmur as he tried to console Mama.

She would not be comforted.

It should have been me and not Elen. That was the thing of it. I knew it would have been right had it been me. For in truth, it was my doing, the tragedy that had befallen us. Leastwise, I could have prevented it. Miz Elda tried to excuse me because I was a child and I was thoughtless. Would that it were that simple. I hadn’t intended harm to come to Elen. I had simply wished her away.

Long after Mama and Papa were sleeping, I lay awake thinking about my sin, troubled into my soul, held captive by the terrible guilt. I wanted to tell Elen I was sorry. I’d been so happy when she’d been born, but hated her when she took Mama’s love away from me. It only got worse.

“Take care of Elen, Cadi,” Mama would say. “Watch out for our little angel.” And when Elen would cry, “Give her your doll, Cadi. It won’t hurt to let her play with it awhile.”

My throat was tight with sorrow. I sat up for a long while whispering to Lilybet. “Do ye think she con hear me, Lilybet? Papa said being sorry ain’t enow, but I’d like her to know. She never done nothing terrible wrong, and I was mean. I dinna want her following me. And that morning—”

“Who ye be talking to, Cadi?” Papa asked from across the room.

Looking over, I saw the large, dark shape of him sitting up in bed. “Lilybet.”

“Tell her to leave.”

My breath came out softly and I hung my head. “She’s gone, Papa.”

“I don’t want ye talking to her anymore. Do ye ken what I’m saying to ye?” He was angry.

Tears welled. “Yes, Papa.”

“Never again. Do ye hear?”

“I hear, Papa.” And I knew even as I said it, I didn’t mean I wouldn’t do it.

“Time ye stop acting like ye’re crazy. Now, go to sleep.”

Burrowing beneath the blankets once more, I closed my eyes.

“He doesn’t understand, Cadi,” Lilybet said softly. “Someday he and your mama will understand all of this. And so will you.”

Clinging to that promise, I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

S I X

Papa was up before dawn. He went out to milk the cow, awakening Iwan when he came back in. Mama filled them with porridge before they left to work in the fields, leaving me to clean up the dishes while she went out to work in the garden. I finished quick as I could and stole a jar of berry preserves from the back of the shelf. Setting it on the table, I rearranged the others so it wouldn’t be missed. I peered out the door to make sure no one was looking, then ducked out. I hurried down the steps, slipped around the side of the house, and darted up the hill into the forest. I hid the jar among some ferns where I could fetch it later.

After I fed the chickens, Mama set me to work pulling more weeds while she went down to tote water for washing. Papa had set up the big iron pot outside for her. She poured in bucket after bucket of clear creek water, then dipped each article of clothing until it was soaked. Rubbing soap onto the soiled spots, she scrubbed each garment up and down on her washboard. I toted water up the hill and poured it into the rinse barrel.

The sun was well up before the clothes were rinsed and the pot and barrel emptied a bucketful at a time around the seedlings coming up. Mama pulled up some potatoes, carrots, and onions and put them in her basket, which she held out to me. “Wash ’em in the creek while I get salt pork.” Soon as I took it, she headed off for the springhouse where Papa kept the meat.

Mama had the pot over the fire and the salt pork soaking by the time I got back from our creek. She was punching down the bread dough she’d made that morning before doing the wash. I set the basket on the table and stood watching her, wishing for a kind word. She glanced at me as though my presence discomforted her and dabbed beads of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Summer was just outside the door, heating up fast. Papa and Iwan were likely done with the fieldwork and fishing by now.

“Go on with ye,” Mama said, still not looking at me.

I fetched the jar of stolen preserves and headed straight for the family cemetery. Filled with dread, I entered the gate. My fears soon departed in the quiet. Green grass had already sprouted on the mound of rich earth over Granny Forbes. A smooth, multicolored river stone the size of a large pumpkin had been placed at the head of her resting place. By Papa, I reckoned. Putting the jar of preserves on it, I sat, raised my knees, and buried my head in my arms. Most of the time, my grief was tolerable. Then, sometimes unexpected, it welled up until it fair choked me.

Lilybet came and sat next to me. “She wasn’t afraid to die, Katrina Anice. She was tired.”

“It was too hard living in a house filled with sorrow and silence. She wanted peace. Now she has it.”

“Yes, she does,” said Lilybet.

“Only I wish she hadn’t gone.”

“She couldn’t help you.”

“Remember that last day when she was so quiet? She was thinking back over her life, wasn’t she? She missed seeing the spring beauties at Bearwallow for herself.”

“She missed more than that, Katrina Anice.”

Weary, I lay down beside the earthen mound and ran my hand over the sprouts of grass coming up from the earth blanket that covered Granny. I wondered what it would be like to sleep for eternity. Would she dream? Some nights I went to sleep so tired; then I woke up without a remembered thought for the hours that had passed. Was death like that? A dreamless sleep from which no one awakened until Judgment Day? Would time pass like a blink of an eye the way a dreamless night passed? Or was death a troubled sleep, filled with confusing dreams?

“What is it like, Lilybet?”

“I don’t know anything of death, Katrina Anice. I only know life. Turn your heart toward that.”

“Death is all around me. It’s right here with me.” Not just inside the gate of the cemetery, but all around us.

“So is life. You must choose.”

Lilybet bewildered me. Sometimes she seemed a child much like me, and at other times older than even Miz Elda. There was something she was trying to show me, something important, something that would change everything, but I could not grasp it no matter how hard I tried. And I was tired, too tired from the night before to want to do much serious thinking on anything anyway. I thought perhaps she didn’t understand my meaning about death, for it was a feeling deep inside me. Even down in Kai Valley meadowlands, with the sun shining upon me, I could feel the dark forces surrounding us all. The sin I had committed was terrible, but there was more—so much more beyond my understanding. Part of me wanted to find whatever it was I was looking for, and another loathed the mere thought of changing anything.

I likened it to the gathering of clouds and the heavy air pressing down before the skies opened up and the jagged shafts of light struck the mountains. Sometimes the air was so full of power, my hair would stand on end and my skin tingle. God was in it, but there were others, too. Taints and demons, Granny always said. And I stood betwixt—hell so close I could feel the blackened pull of it, and heaven so distant . . .

Somehow, someway, the sin eater held the answers to all of it. If only I could find him.

Leaving the berry preserves behind, I went out the gate and hid among the ferns where I could see the sin eater when he came, but he would not see me.

And there I waited.

And waited as the day grew warmer and warmer.

Yawning, I lay on my back, knees up and hands behind my head, and gazed through the canopy of green to the blue sky beyond. Birds flitted from branch to branch, chirping and twitching this way and that before swooping off. And the heat came down through the trees, weighting my eyelids. Curling on my side toward the cemetery, I bent one fern frond down so that I could see through to where I’d left the jar of preserves. If the sin eater came, I’d see him straightaway. All this from the comfort of my soft, forest bed.

I awakened a long while later when a stream of light touched my face. Disoriented and still drowsy, I wondered what I was doing sleeping on the ground. Then remembering, I clambered to my knees and leaned forward, parting the ferns cautiously. The jar of preserves was still where I had placed it. Dejected, I let the fronds snap back. It was a vain hope that the sin eater would come so soon. If he came at all.

I left my post and went to Miz Elda.

“Any luck?” she said from where she was sitting in the shade on her porch. I didn’t have to ask her what she meant.

“No, ma’am. It’s a mighty big mountain, and he don’t want to be found.”

“So ye’ve given up already. God made the world in six days, and ye can’t even find one measly soul on a mountain in eight.”

“I ain’t giving up. I put preserves on Granny’s grave just like she done.”

“Stole ’em, did ye?”

I hung my head.

“If it ain’t yers, it ain’t much of an offering. Just like when ye brung me flowers from me own meadow.”

The heat of shame came up in my face, burning plain for her to see. My eyes felt hot and my throat tight. “I don’t have nothing to give,” I said in my own defense.

“Ye just ain’t thought on it much yet.” Leaning back, she closed her eyes and rocked slowly.

My spirit was cast down within me. I walked the rows of her vegetable garden, plucking a weed here and there, and then wandered off again. Without even thinking on it, I ended up back at the river and followed it right up to the Narrows and the tree bridge where I’d been forbidden to venture.

I could not seem to helpmyself. For as long as I could remember, the place had drawn me. The trail out of our valley lay on the other side. To get to it, you crossed over the river in Kai Valley where it shallowed. The Narrows was a deadly place, but beautiful, too. The rush and tumble of the water swirling over the rocks and pouring down into the deep pool below the falls had always beguiled me. Iwan was the first to show me the Narrows and the falls, though Mama was terrible angry with him for doing so. It was dangerous, and it was also “the doorway to the outside world.” Being good, Iwan never took me back again. He didn’t have to, for I went on me own. I’d lay on my stomach and peer over the edge, my heart racing at the sound of the water’s roar.

I had long wondered about the trail on the other side. The first time I’d ventured across the tree bridge had been the year Elen was born. I was six and Mama had no time for me. To my way of thinking, I’d been loaded down with her chores as well as my own while she cuddled and cooed over my baby sister. I had never been so scared as that day when I inched my way across the tree bridge. I imagined myself falling into that swirling torrent, tossed around and pulled down to smash against the rocks before plunging over the falls. I was shaking so bad I sat straddling the tree and worked my way across that way.

The second time, I was eight and showed more courage.

I crossed over the Narrows dozens of times after that, venturing down the trail to the pool below the falls. It was a magical place with ferns, azaleas, rhododendrons, and towering pine.

The pool was deep and blue, the water cold and clear. Gathering in the rocky basin, it surged over more rocks, turning to the south and racing on. To the sea, Papa said. Our river, like all others, ran to the sea.

Papa and Iwan had followed that river last year. They were gone five days and came back with nothing to show for their journey.

The air was heavier still, the clouds darkening. Lightning flashed in the distance, followed by a roll of thunder. It would rain soon, as it often did on sultry afternoons. The rain never lasted, just fell long enough to drench the mountains and raise a mist come morning.

Standing above the falls, I saw someone below kneeling on the mossy bank and bending over the water for a drink. Drawing back, I hid myself among the low-hanging blooming serviceberry tree. I thought he was an Indian at first, for I’d heard they wore their hair long and dressed in buckskins. Then he leaned back and straightened up, and I saw he was tan like Papa and wore a beard. He wiped the moisture from it and cocked his head as he looked up in my direction, like he sensed I was there.

I drew back quickly, but not so far I couldn’t watch as he headed up the steep trail that would bring him into our valley.

Curiosity made me scamper across the tree bridge and dive into the thick bushes on the other side. Who was he? And why was he coming? Other than Lilybet, I’d never known a stranger to enter our cove, and I wanted a closer look.

The stranger came up the steep incline. As he came up the trail, head high, I could see his lips were moving. When he reached the top, he paused and looked down at the falls and then up along the course of the river through the Narrows. I could hear him then, for he spoke loudly, his right hand stretched out above and before him.

“The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars! Yea—” he turned away from me, his hands rising as he looked up. His voice rose again, and gooseflesh rose upon me—“The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness . . . the voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests; and in his temple doth every one speak of his glory. . . .”

Shuddering, I shrank back further into the fronds and cascading branches, crouching there, holding still. My heart pounded. Could this be God come to our highland? And if not, was he someone sent by the Almighty himself?

Turning, the man started along the path toward our valley, his voice coming on stronger with each step. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwel-leth therein. ” He moved away so that I could not hear. I crept through the brush above him, straining my ears, terrified to get too close lest his eyes turn upon me.

“Lift up your hearts, O ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting door and the King of glory shall come in! Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty! The Lord mighty in battle! The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory!”

The wild-haired man stopped and thrust his hands high.

Head back, his voice rose again. “Hear me when I call, O God! Lord Jesus, hear my prayer! Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my God and King; for unto thee and thee alone I pray. You are a God that hath no pleasure in wickedness, and there is wickedness in these mountains. Oh, yea, Lord, neither shall evil dwell with thee. The foolish shall not stand in thy sight. Thou hatest all workers of iniquity. Thou shalt destroy evildoers!”

Lightning flashed close by, making the hair on my head rise and chills course down my body even as the sky rumbled an answer to the man. Retreating, I pressed my way as quickly as I could through the undergrowth above the trail.

He must have heard, for he called out, “Who’s up there?”

Terrified, I hastened my flight. Leaping to the trail, I ran for the tree bridge. I must have made plenty of noise in my flight, for he followed after me. I thought sure he would send a lightning bolt to strike me dead.

“Child,
wait!”

I leaped nearly as high as my heart did. Four bounding steps took me across the tree bridge to the other side, another four plunged me into the forest. I hid there in the shadows, shaking and watching fearfully as he stood on the other side of the Narrows. His lips moved. Perhaps he was calling down some curse of God upon my head. Panting, heart racing, I closed my eyes and clutched the tree behind which I hid and waited for the lightning to strike.