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NB: One from the mouldy old vaults, this. I think it was originally supposed to be an intro to a longer piece, but I don’t really remember… it’s a bit different for me… make of it what you will… or not… It's not great, but I’ve reached total creative deadlock so I’m passed caring.
...
For thy peace I pawn my own soul. Amen…
By taking bread from the mouth of the dead man and saying a short prayer, a sin eater could swallow the dead man’s sins and take them in to himself.
I thought about this a lot, after the shooting.
It was an excommunicable offence. Because it offered absolution, without the grace of God. Or the mediation of the church.
A kind of metaphysical cannibalism, it was. A little like communion. But backwards.
My head was full of it, after the shooting. I wanted to know how it ought to be done. I wanted to know if it might be possible. If I would be able. If I could perform.
It was a grotesque occupation. But there was a desperate heroism to it. At least to my mind. It seemed half sacrificial. Half noble.
I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to work. The books only record some believed that it did. But not in what way. I wondered how it was that the sins were transferred. I wondered who it was counted them across, like abacus beads, from one man to the next. I wondered who or what kept score. And I wondered what it felt like. Were they a perceptible weight, these sins? Did they have a taste?
Of course I knew deep down that it wasn’t real. It was nonsense. Ghoulish nonsense. And I’d never have mentioned it to another living soul. But at night. At night it come back to me. Gunsound and bloodsplash. And dying and dying and dying.
At night it come back to me. Gunsound and bloodsplash and pavementdead. And then, worse, there came Hell.
It was the thought of him in Hell that did it. Knew about Hell from school. And from church. And from stepfather. It made me feel sick, the thought of it. Him in there writhing, somewhere deep down beneath my feet. Like I was walking on him while he screamed and screamed and screamed forever.
I’d lie awake nights working at his salvation like a lawyer looking for legal loopholes. But nothing would wash. You weren’t even supposed to pray for those in Hell.
I’d be on my way home from school and fighting the urge to put my ear to the ground like a Red Indian tracker. To see if I could hear him cry out, you know? There were times when I could hear him too. ‘Specially alone in the dark.
Then one day Ryan’s uncle told about the sin eaters and I started thinking and I couldn’t stop thinking and the idea took me over.
First I had no luck. But I ordered a book about funeral customs from out of the library, and it told about how it was real and how people in medieval times had used to believe in it, and it told you the prayer that the sin eaters were supposed to say. And it told you that rite with the bread and the ale.
Only problem was, he was already buried.
I thought and I thought. Would it even still work? The book did not say. It was left to my discretion and I reckoned it less likely on a man who’d lain a month under sod already. But by the same token, what was there to lose?
…
Ray looked thirsty when I opened him up, dehydrated. But otherwise not so bad. It was worse when I pried his mouth and the smell come out, somehow both sweet and stale. I had to lean on his chest to put the bread in and Ray creaked like bed springs. Felt soft and loose. I poured the Caffrey’s in to the wooden bowl and passed it over his chest. Then I drunk it down, half gagging. I said of the prayer and took the bread out of his mouth. I expected it to be damp but Ray didn’t have saliva no more. Somehow this made it worse. I bit in to the bread, then swallowed it. Sick come back up and in to my mouth and I had to hold it in, force it back down. Then I tucked Ray up again, best as I could and went round the back of the allotments. I burnt of the bowl and washed my hands in the stream. I threw the shovel in one of the sheds. I went home.
I could not sleep. I lay awake listening inside my own belly for the sound of Ray’s sins.
…
Back when people ate each other’s sins regularly, the sin eater was a thing unclean and lived alone. Scholars aren’t sure if they were thought to be evil or just unlucky. Maybe ordinary people didn’t know either. Maybe it wasn’t a conscious decision, this aversion. Maybe it was more primal that that.
And maybe they preferred it that way, those unclean things. Maybe they preferred to be alone. I think I do. I think I prefer to be alone. I am not sure why.
It occurred to me afterwards that it might have been mad, doing that for Ray, digging him up and putting the bread in his mouth and that. But I haven’t had so many nightmares since. The ones where he dies in the street and burns underground.
I wonder if I will become like Ray. I wonder if, in eating his sins I am destined to repeat them. I wonder if I will start to think like Ray. Or feel like Ray. Or act like Ray. Or look like Ray. Sometimes, on those occasions that I do still dream, it is me that dies and dies and dies.
But I do not think like Ray. And I do not feel like Ray. And I do not act like Ray. And I do not look like Ray. Only thing is I’m not sure I think or feel or act or look like anybody anymore. I am probably not damned. There probably isn’t such thing as Hell. There is probably nothing to be afraid of…
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The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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