The Last Meal
You don’t have to believe in the thing to be a sin eater. You do have to be desperate, however, which is what I am. My impending feast, at the far end of the nave from my assigned station (just inside the church door and no farther) is surrounded by the keening family that hired me. It isn’t much different from all the others – a lacquered catafalque, lined with limp black crepe; the gleaming coffin; the arsenic-laden corpse, waxy like a pudding in the candles’ glow; and my portion, like a candied cherry on top: the lumpy oaten bread resting on his chest. Unlike all the others, though, this one won’t go down easily.
The bread certainly never tastes like it has served its intended purpose and soaked up the hoarded sins of a lifetime, three score and ten years’ white lies and petty treason. In truth, it usually tastes like sawdust or plaster. Spare every expense when insuring grandad’s afterlife, I guess. Or maybe they can’t stomach the detestable sin eater receiving proper nourishment. I’m only to consume what I’m paid to consume: the sins of the newly unburdened soul, which now wings its way more swiftly to heaven due to my intercession.
At least the bread tastes of something. I can feel the nothingness of the original sin eater’s body on my tongue even now, though it’s been years since I’ve been permitted to take communion. Perhaps it’s heresy for a creature to fatten itself on worldly iniquities conjointly with the incorruptible body and the blood. Or perhaps, given my precipitous tumble from polite society, I simply no longer fit into the gentlefolk’s notions of the natural order. Any road, they only tolerate me in this church during funerals, or I’d get regular meals taking communion instead of hoping someone kicks the bucket every week.
But toleration is wanting, so here I am, and after a comfortable decline into senescence, so is he—he being the man whose vices put me here. Treacherous git, transmuting himself into a public scourge of loose women after putting me in the family way. I’ve never said who gave me my son Johnny, and his father never deigned to speak to me again but once, pronouncing his judgment from the bench at the debtor’s court. There weren’t many trades for women of my new class, but there were few barriers to membership in my present profession’s guild.
But that’s a decade past, and now I’m to eat chalky bread from the selfsame bastard’s lifeless chest. All to convince his surviving children (bar one) that everything will be forgiven in the next place, wherever that may be. Thank the god they’re blubbering to for the coins on his eyes, and thank it twice that those eyes were the only thing Johnny got from his dad.
The priest finishes mumbling into the book and the lamentations die down a bit, so it’s my turn. It seems the eldest son has been chosen to propel me into the distasteful ritual; he approaches me in his tailored finery, presses a coin into my palm, and then escorts me to the coffin to receive my supper. The bereaved study the church floor with varying degrees of absorption, presumably pretending I hadn’t once walked among them, tutored them in Latin, left my calling card with their manservants. Defying the urge to snatch up the loaf and dash it into his hollowed chest, I lift it gently. What they would say if they knew I’d gripped that chest long before his eyes rolled back for the last time! Subduing a smile, I retreat to my perch just inside the door to perform the deed. I work my jaws convincingly; I’m unsure how clearly they see me at this distance. The bread hides safely in my skirt.
After a plausible interval, I return to the coffin and the sullen sods around it and pronounce the well-worn words: “the ease and rest of the soul departed, for which I will pawn my own soul,” resisting the temptation to add “though I’ve no more soul than he, who harried the mother of his child into penury, hobbling the innocent to evade the cost.” But they play at a lot of things to maintain the self-deception of their class, so I’ll playact with them.
Now my part is done, and I’ll cease from troubling their memories. I pass back down the nave, theoretically carrying within me his lifetime of sins, myself among them. But I’ve carried one of them for a long time, so even if I believed in the thing, it’d hardly add to the load.
And so I push open the iron-strapped door and step into a humid Welsh summer night. A waxing moon lights my path along the bog, away back to Johnny. Tonight’s coin, added to the other sin-wages, should be enough to book passage for Johnny and me to my cousin’s in Ireland. If she can teach me to spin flax, I could perhaps earn enough to send Johnny to America, where sins aren’t stored away to be eaten but are left out in the open to enrich the soil with the rest of the manure.
Stopping for a rest near a waterlogged thicket on the edge of the inky wood, I reach for the burden in the pocket of my skirt. The crusty edges catch on the pocket’s mouth and break off, dusting the unbleached calico, but I’ve got the larger part of the bread out, turning it over in my hands in the moonlight. With a flick of the wrist, I toss it into the thicket. It makes a splash like a stone dropped into a well; this land can keep these sins for me.
Gregory Jones (he/him) studied literature and history while growing up in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He lives in Albuquerque by way of Philadelphia and Baltimore. His work has appeared in _Ligeia_.