Black Water (8 page)

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.

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 herself.

Cob knew they were at a crossroads. There was one alternate course she could take, but she would much rather not. If Lootie failed to eat the bread, Cob would kill her, right there, right then, and use ever precious drop of her blood and various body parts for future spells and curses. She was worth far more alive, but if Cob had to….

She took Lootie by the shoulders and jerked her around with no pretense of niceness. “No! They ain’t no ‘No, thankee, Ma’am, I ain’t hongry n’more!’ You will eat th’bread. We went t’all th’trouble o’ bakin’ it jes f’you. All we want is f’you t’eat one bite. ‘At’s all! One bite!” When Lootie hesitated, Cob pinched her chin, jerked her face up to hers, looked deep in Lootie’s eyes, threateningly, and warned, “If you don’t eat it, they won’t be any med’cine f’yer poah, sick mothah ‘n if not gettin’ it’s th’cause of ‘er death, you hafta live with ‘at all th’rest o’ yer days.” She reached over to a shelf, snatched up the small, corked vial, and helt it out to show Lootie. “This is it!” Lootie watched her set it back on the shelf. Cob chinned to the bread. “Pick it up, Lootie. You don’t hafta eat all of it. One bite’ll be enough. It was baked f’you! You hafta pick it up ‘n you alone hafta eat it.”

Lootie looked at the vial one more time, then edged to the old lady’s side and cautiously reached for the loaf. The last thing she wanted was to accidentally touch the old woman. Lifting the hard-crusted loaf, she brought it to her mouth, and as she did, she noticed that, depending on which one she looked at, the four old crones were either holdin’ their breath or breathin’ like they’d been runnin’ up a hill. They gaped at her like she was a bug in a jar, crossed theirselves, pinchin’ and fingerin’ the bean necklaces with the little crosses.

Lootie opened her mouth and raked her upper teeth over the bread’s hard corner and broke off a piece. She started to chew.

Immediately, a coldness swept through the room, clenching teeth and turning expelled breath to a foggy vapor.

The one-legged sack of bones on the cot gasped and gurgled.

The four old ladies pulled their scrawny arms under their shawls, and lookin’ from one to the other, wrapped them tightly around their shoulders.

The last breath slowly bubbled from the old woman’s withered, pulpy lungs.

Cob looked around the room and at the walls that were growin’ a ghostly crop of hoarfrost like mold on an old peach. She turned her attention to the dirty window when she heard it crackin’ and watched it freeze over from the outside in, shuttin’ out even more light than what little there’d already been. Then the door creaked like a bone bein’ twisted. This was more than she’d been expecting. The feeling invading the room reeked of evil. And more...the absence of life. Eternal nothingness. Any happiness or peace embedded in their souls leached out.

Then it hit Lootie, the saltiest, most bitter anything she’d ever tasted. She scrunched up her face, bent over, and started to spit.

“NO!” Cob demanded, and quicker than a snake, grabbed the hair at the back of Lootie’s head with one cold hand and clapped the other over her mouth. “EAT IT!”

Lootie tried to peel Cob’s hand from her mouth, but Cob flailed her around like a rag doll. Hot yellow urine dribbled down Lootie’s leg and splattered, hissing, on the cold floor, creating the only warmth in the room—a swirling, lip-curling steaminess.

“EAT IT, DAMN YOU!” Cob demanded, takin’ a second to look at the steam, considering the unknown, but possible, ramifications of breathing it in. “Don’tchu dare spit it out!”

Being jerked so violently, Lootie dropped the rest of the loaf on the floor, and the hags gasped, clenchin’ their fisted hands around their shawls, their breath comin’ in quick little puffs. That was it! If Lootie spit it out, it was all for naught. The remainder of the loaf hittin’ the floor had ruined it, and there was no time left for Cob to either bake another or find another sacrifice. And never, as long as she lived, one as unique as Lootie Komes.

Having no other choice with Cob’s cold hand clamped over her face, Lootie swallowed.

“Swaller it!” Cob demanded, venomously. Lootie tried to nod, to let her know she had. Having felt the movement, Cob removed her hand, then jerked Lootie’s face to hers. “Ju swaller it?” She knew she had, though. The room’d already started to get warmer—the ice on the window was receding from the center out. Fright-induced tears ran down Lootie’s cheeks. Cob grabbed her by the ears, yanked her face even closer, and yelled, “Answer me! Ju swaller it?”

“Yes,” Lootie said.

Cob wrenched Lootie’s head back and ordered her, “Open yer mouth!” Warmer or not, she wasn’t gonna take any chances. When Lootie didn’t comply, Cob slapped her on the face four or five times. “Open! Open! Open!”

Shocked, Lootie opened her mouth and Cob rummaged all through it with a foul-tasting finger. The horrified quartet huddled around the cot had stopped breathin’. Satisfied the bread had been swallowed, Cob nodded to the others, let go of Lootie’s hair, collapsed to one of the two vacated chairs, and wiped her finger on her dress. Exhausted, she put her elbows on her knees and hung her head while she got aholt of herself. Hardly the time or the place, she’d damn near taken the Lord’s name in vain.

“I don’t wanna eat no more,” Lootie said, choking back sobs. “Please.”

“Oh, quit actin’ like a baby,” Cob hissed. “You don’t hafta eat no more.” She huffed and puffed like she’d just won a wrestlin’ match with the Dark Lord hisself. Then, realizing the deed’d been accomplished, she sat up, shook it off, looked to the other old ladies, and cackled, “I’m gettin’ too damn old f’this shit.” She stood up and grabbed the vial off the shelf and thrust it into Lootie’s hand. “You do have a sistah now.” She pushed Lootie toward the door, and as she opened it, the light streaming in momentarily blinded her.

Roach was waitin’ under the tree, but jumped to his feet when he saw the shack door jerk open. The Devil Dog was still standing guard. Cob dragged Lootie outside, kicked the beast into makin’ room, leaned down, and took Lootie by the shoulders. “Someday, little sistah, we’ll see one’nothah ‘gin.”

Working up a false bravado now that she was back outside in the bright sunshine, the ordeal behind her and Roach standin’ not too far off, Lootie turned on Cob and with a fist full o’ clench and a face full o’ grit, “I ain’tchur sistah!”

Cob exploded with gurgly laughter and without even a “Goodbye,” a “Thank You Very Much” or a heart-felt “Go t’Hell,” spun around, stepped back into the shack and slammed the door.

The Devil Dog hadn’t moved off far enough for Roach to feel comfortable, so he beckoned the whimpering Lootie to the tree. The bright sunshine blinded her so bad it almost hurt. She had to cover her eyes with her forearm, and when she got to him, he took the vial from her hand. “This th’med’cine?” Lootie ground her knuckles in her eyes and nodded. “You awright?” he added, putting the vial in his pants pocket.

“I’m cold ‘n th’light hurts m’eyes.”

“That’s cause it was dark inside. You’ll get used to it in a minute.” He picked up his coat off the ground, laid it over her shoulders, and took her by the hand, shocked at how cold it was. He looked back over his shoulder at the shack and the triple-legged terror gnawin’ on the bone. “Let’s go.”

He hadn’t dragged her a hundred yards when she started gaggin’. She was bent over, kneading her cramping stomach. She scrunched her eyes shut and told Roach, “Papa, I’m gonna be sick.”

“Try t’hold it down. I wanna keep movin’ as long as we can. I wanna get home ’fore sundown.” Too, the futher he could get from the witch and her yellow-fanged minion, the better. He started to pull her along, but she slapped her hand to her mouth and fell to her knees. Her body contorted and she wretched like her guts were gonna come out. Roach knelt to her, pattin’ her on the back. That and givin’ her his coat was a whole gob of concern for Roach. When the attack finally abated she raised her head, and when Roach saw her eyes, he fell back and scuttled off like a spider.

Her hair was plastered to her head, she was deathly pale, lips purple, and her one good eye was no longer brown, but black as liquid tar and fathomless as Cob’s. There was somethin’ else, too. The pact made between Roach and the witch wasn’t anything he woulda put much stock in. It was simply tit for tat. The medicine that could possibly save Pearl’s life in exchange for a simple favor, and when she told him what it was, he couldn’t believe it.

That was all?

Naturally, Roach had heard all the goosebumply tales about witches, spells, hexes, haints, and nasty child-gobblin’, wooly and scaly boogers inhabiting the swamp. He thought most of ’em were silly. Some he wasn’t so sure about. He did believe in witches. Hell, there was mention of them in the Bible. But he didn’t believe in Sin Eaters. Stories o’ folks consuming the sins of the dyin’, takin’ on the weight of their life’s transgressions before they went to meet their maker, all ceremoniously baked into a loaf of bitter, salted bread. And as the story went, the Sin Eater’s unpardonable soul was sentenced eternally to a fiery Hell and no reprieve. There was no such thing as a Sin Eater for a Sin Eater.

Puckie! They were great stories when you wanted to scare the Hell out o’ skittery niggers and little kids…that was always fun, but anybody with a lick o’ sense knew they were nothin’ more than that. If he had to put Lootie through some backwater superstition to get the medicine needed to cure Pearl, it was worth it.

Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. The child in front of him was still Lootie, but not. There was a hardness, a coldness, an oldness, in her face. Still the child, but not the child. Well, whatever it was, it was over and done now, and they had the medicine. They’d be home in three or four hours, and in a couple o’ days everthing’d be better, back to regular. It’d all work out. He got Lootie back on her feet and for the next few miles he kept tellin’ hisself it’ll work out. It’ll work out. It’ll work out.

They got home just before the sun set, and bangin’ in the front door, all excited that he had the medicine, Roach saw that Pearl was layin’ just as he’d left her that mornin’. If the sun had been up, or if he’d helt a lantern to her, if he’d taken a good look at her before he and Lootie left, he woulda seen it was already too late. And now, unlike the old woman on the cot in Cob’s shack, Pearl’s mouth hung open, her jaw hung over like it’d slipped out o’ joint, and her half-closed eyes were lookin’ at the ceilin’ but not seein’ it. Flies buzzed around her face and in and out of her mouth. Her nose. Her ears. Lootie’s black eye blinked in empathy as one of the hateful things walked right acrost Pearl’s half-open right eye. She’d already started turnin’, stinkin’. Lootie recognized the smell. Just like where Cob lived.

The next mornin’, Roach hitched up the mules and took the wagon into Oledeux. He had to make arrangements for the undertaker man to come out and fix up the body for buryin’ and the preacher to say the words. Lootie noticed he’d said
the body
instead of
Pearl
. She didn’t wanna be left alone. She asked if she could go with him but he told her he didn’t think it’d be a good idea. He didn’t want the body left alone. What’d he think, somebody’d steal it? He told her he’d be gone no longer than he had to.

They’d covered the body with an old sheet so they wouldn’t have to look at it. Too, it helped keep the flies off. Covered or not, though, Lootie wasn’t settin’ foot past the door frame until Roach come back. Lootie may have loved her, but a dead body was a dead body was a dead body. She just sat on the porch in the sun, her clammy little hands in her lap, nervously holdin’ onto each other, or practicin’ writin’ her name in the dirt with a stick. Ever so often she’d get up and walk in the direction Roach would be comin’ back from, hopin’ to hear the harness, the wheels, or a bray. For the first time in her life, she was lookin’ for’ard to seein’ him.