Free Black Water by Bobby Norman

worked their way back up the old woman’s body that she noticed the little loaf of bread, the size of a muffin, restin’ on the wretch’s slatted chest, risin’ and lowerin’ with each wheezie breath. It was the wheezin’ that made Lootie look at the old woman’s face. She almost took a step back. Somebody’d already placed pennies on her eyes. Pearl’d told Lootie about the pennies. How they were put on the eyes of the dead. How they were payment for the ferryman to take the souls across The River. But it was frightening to see ’em on one who wasn’t yet dead.
    Lootie jumped when Cob nudged her toward the old woman, and the two women on the closest side of the cot stood up and moved off a little to give her room. She felt Cob’s hand at her back, pushing.
    “Eat th’bread, Lootie,” she said, her voice catchin’.
    Lootie helt back. “No, thankee, Ma’am, I ain’t hongry no more.”
    The Old Testament priests made sacrificial offerings to God, a God of Abstinence, using the unblemished calf, kid goat, or lamb as payment of a sort for the forgiveness of sins; and any sign of a blemish, an affront, was punishable by an instant, fiery death.
    There was another world, ruled by another Supreme Being, some say lesser than God, but they’d be sorely in error. He was a God of Indulgence and went by many names. Beelzebub. Scratch. Lucifer. Satan. For the forgiveness of sins in His domain, there was also the requirement of a sacrifice. One blemished. When Cob learned that Lootie’d been struck and marked by lightnin’ while still in the albino’s womb, it was all she could do to maintain control.
    Like the Christians watching for the return of The Messiah and the Plains Indians for the White Buffalo, Cob and her ilk waited for the likes of a Lootie Komes. Cob had been paid exceptional money—twenty times the going rate—for today’s holy, but unholy, ritual. The oathing and chanting of the spells had all been baked into the bitter bread, and the recipient, the sacrifice, the blemished...
    —The Sin Eater—
    …was, at that very moment, standing alongside the bed in the guise of an innocent little girl.
     

 
CHAPTER 10
     
    Cob’d lied. The old woman’s children had come to see her, and it was they who surrounded her now. That putrid, vile old bitch on the cot was their hated mother and that putrid, wiry-haired slash below her belly had been their entrance into sixty years, give or take, of Hell on Earth. She wasn’t somebody they loved, honored, respected, admired, or revered, but one they hated hated hated and were deathly in fear of. Their lives had been soaked and saturated with the physical and psychological tortures lovingly and joyously administered by the dried out husk laid out between ’em.
    They continued to carry her surname because no man would have ’em. All four had a different father, and all four men had died horrible deaths, their need over and done, before their daughters had taken their first breath. The first died of a broken neck, falling in a well. The second screamed to death in a barn fire. The third, supposedly trampled by a horse, and the fourth…well, he’d merely disappeared. When the old woman was dead, her remains would be hacked and burned, the bones pulverized to dust and spread to the four corners.
    So why all the effort to ensure she went to Heaven instead of a more just sentence to an eternal, fiery Hell? Because of the belief that the Hellish could be conjured, revived, even from death.
    Her imprisonment behind the Pearly Gates was worth the weighty cost of an innocent’s soul.
    When Lootie said, “No, thankee, Ma’am, I ain’t hongry no more,” the old women had gasped, clutched their bean necklaces and looked to Cob. Do something! was etched on their faces. After being sanctified and placed on the old woman’s chest, the bread couldn’t even be touched by anyone other than the one sacrificed or it lost its power. Lootie had to take the bread and eat it