The Last Sin Eater (25 page)

“And when we put ourselves in his charge, we became just like him.”

Fagan was pale and still, saying nothing as he waited for her to tell the rest, the whole of it, no matter how deep it hurt.

Miz Elda looked from him to me. Leaning forward, she began working at the bird as though she desperately needed something to do with her hands. “When we come up into this valley, I thought I’d never seen nothing more beautiful. Splashes of color everywhere. Yellow tulip trees, the orange-red maples, and puffs of white dogwood and serviceberry along the river, the lavender of the Judas tree against the brown forest floor where new leaf growth was coming up. Gorawen called it the God-green of spring.”

“Granny Forbes was with ye?”

“Aye, child, Gorawen was among the first, and your grandfather Ian with her. And your mama’s mother and father, too, darlin’. God rest their poor souls. Seven families in all come up with Laochailand Kai. We came up the trail past the falls and along the Narrows into the valley. It took our breath away, it did. I remember feeling so happy. I was filled with such a feeling of hope. And then we reached the Indian village and the children came running toward us, greeting us.”

She withdrew her hands from the work and clenched them until her knuckles were white.

“The chief came out and walked right up to Laochailand Kai, hand extended in welcome. For ye see, Laochailand Kai had been up here before and made friends with them. They was all happy to see him come back. For he had charmed them, too. They didn’t know—” Her voice broke and she stopped.

Fagan reached out again and put both his hands over hers, caressing them gently, encouraging her, though his expression was filled with sorrow. “If we confess, the Lord is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

She opened her mouth as though in surprise. Tears filled her eyes and poured down her cheeks. And she went ahead swiftly and told the rest. “Laochailand Kai shook the chief’s hand with one of his hands and drew a gun with the other. He shot the man square in the face. He had a second gun tucked in his belt and drew it, killing another, all the while shouting for our men to burn the hogans. All hell broke loose around us. The women and children were screaming. Men fell dead or wounded. Some nights I can still hear ’em screaming. And Donal and Ian and all the rest were fighting for our lives.

“When it was over, Laochailand Kai sent the men out hunting for the women and children who’d run off to hide. Then he went round and clubbed the wounded to death. All but one, the chief’s own son. When the men brought the others back, Laochailand Kai wanted them shot dead. Donal refused and so did the rest. None of them had the stomach to murder women and children in cold blood. So Laochailand Kai tied them together, one after another and took ’em to the Narrows. He shot the chief’s son to death there, and when the young man fell, he took the rest with him down into the river. They all went over the falls.”

I didn’t want to believe her. With everything in me, I fought against it. Yet a still quiet voice within my soul said it was true. Every word of it was true.

“It’s all right now, Granny,” Fagan said gently. “It won’t have the power over ye it did.”

“I’ve been so afeared of God knowin’.”

“God always knew. He saw.”

“I reckon he did,” she said brokenly. “There ain’t never been a single moment’s peace since that day. For all the beauty of this place, what we done has been like a terrible ugly scar upon the land. None of us has prospered. Many have fallen by the way. Two families are all dead and gone, wiped out by sickness. And the melancholy has run down into the blood of our children.”

I thought of my mother. Had I been the only cause of her sorrow?

Fagan looked at me, and I could almost see the thoughts in his blue eyes. We had become like that, he and I, our minds moving in the same direction. Or maybe it was the Lord within us giving us like minds as he taught us the truth and brought us through it. For the thing I’d dreaded most had come to pass.
All
had sinned. Not just Fagan’s kin, but my own as well, and others besides. No one was better than another. All shared the legacy of murder.

But I knew something else. I knew it so deep within me, my soul sang with the knowledge and thanksgiving of it: Jesus Christ had redeemed me. Without him, I would be the same as they, locked in a prison of guilt and shame, afraid of death, terrified of being buried with my sins still upon my head. “But for Jesus, but for Jesus . . .” I said and could say no more.

“Ye believe what we told ye about Jesus, don’t ye, Granny?” Fagan said.

“Aye, I believe ye, every word.”

“And do ye accept him as your own dear Savior and Lord?”

“I do, though I’m unworthy to speak his name.”

“Say it, Granny.”

“I can’t.”

“None of us are worthy. He died for us, Granny. He was nailed to the cross for everything ye just told us.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said softly and wept. “Oh, precious Savior, my Lord.”

Fagan rose and put his arms around his grandmother. “Ye can lay your burdens down now, Granny. Ye can give them all to him, and he’ll give ye rest.”

“Oh, I’m tired, so tired,” she said softly. “I could sleep a month of Sundays.”

“I’ll help ye to bed.”

“Shouldn’t ye baptize me? Ye said the man did so with you.”

He helped her to her feet. “There’s time enough tomorrow.”

“She could be dead in the morning,” I said.

“Cadi!” Fagan looked at me as though I’d grown horns.

“Well, it’s the truth! Besides that, she can’t walk all the way down to the river. She ain’t strong enough to make it.”

“Will you shut up?!”

“I reckon the good Lord’s called her to tell things as they are,” Miz Elda told Fagan. “There’s a bucket there by the door, lad. Might as well baptize me now as take a chance I won’t be breathing come morning.”

“She didn’t mean it. Did ye, Cadi?”

I went for the bucket.

“Go on now,” Miz Elda said. She sat down again and folded her hands in her lap. “Douse me good. We’ll all feel better for it.”

“Ye’re sure?” Fagan said.

“She said so, didn’t she? Do it!”

Her frail body shuddered as Fagan turned the bucket. She was having some kind of fit, sputtering, gasping, choking. For a whole minute we both thought she was dying of the shock of all that water being poured over her poor old head. And then I realized she wasn’t dying at all. She was cackling. No, not cackling,
laughing!

“Well,” she said when she could get her breath back. “That woke me up.”

Fagan and I hugged her as we all three laughed together, joyous in our newborn freedom. We had the feeling of wings and tongues of fire upon our heads. Our souls sang with exultation.

All the while, outside, the darkness gathered.

We’d come down off Dead Man’s Mountain to learn the truth, and we had. But just a part of it. We’d only just taken hold and pulled the tail of the beast.

And as the first thread in the tapestry loosened and came undone, the dragon awakened.

T W E N T Y - O N E

Miz Elda stuffed the turkey wiht tried bread, crumbled herbs, and roasted chestnuts while I washed the floor with the water puddled from her baptism—though most of it had seeped through the cracks, dripping down beneath her cabin. Fagan went outside to chop and tote firewood, stacking it on the porch next to the front door where it’d be easier for Miz Elda to fetch. It was nightfall before we sat down together to give thanks to Jesus for seeing us through the day and giving us a fine turkey for supper. It was a far sight from Miz Elda’s usual repast of chicken soup and biscuits from Gervase Odara. “A pity she ain’t come today,” Miz Elda said. “She could join us. The last time I seen such a fine meal laid out was the day of Go-rawen’s funeral, and I had no stomach for it then.”

I lowered my head, feeling the grip of loss again and wondering about the fate of my poor Granny who’d never heard the gospel.

Miz Elda leaned over and tipped my chin. “Don’t ye go worrying yourself about her, chile.” She brushed my cheek tenderly and patted my hand. She leaned back again, smiling. “The last few years we was able to get together, yer granny and I talked about what might happen. Neither of us thought Sim Gillivray could do nothing to save our souls from our sins, no matter how willing the poor lad was.”

“But she never heard the gospel.”

“Maybe not in so many words, but thinking on it now, I feel a peace about her. Gorawen said more than once she cudna see how a God who had created so much beauty could not offer us a way back to him no matter what we done. And he did, didn’t he? Jesus is the way back. Yer granny sensed it, for she was one to sit on her porch and look out and see the wonder of it all, wasn’t she? And she had a thankful heart.”

I thought of Granny sending me off to find the wonder for myself up on the outcropping of rocks overlooking the valley, in the fields of wildflowers, down by the river where the dogwoods bloomed. All through the years she’d appealed to what she called my questing spirit. And I wondered now if she hadn’t been sending me out to find the miracle of God’s works round about me.

“Oh, will ye look at that, now?” she’d say, and I’d look up to see the flocks of passenger pigeons like smoke on the horizon heading south. “Every year, they head south. Ye can set time by ’em. I wonder where God sends ’em?”

On a warm day when I’d be bone-deep in my sorrows, she’d say, “I’d love to have a few smooth stones from the riverbed. Ye think ye’ve got time to go for me since I can’t make it myself these days?” And I’d go—and I’d watch the rainbow trout with their white fins and bright red-and-pink sides as they spawned in the tail of a pool and in the side riffles away from the current. Life, it was, being renewed year after year.

In spring, Granny would send me off to pick bluets, violets, and windflowers. As the weeks passed, she’d ask for yellow lady’s slippers and bleeding hearts, then roses and white rhododendron clusters that grew along the stream. She’d always seem to know the day when the mayflies danced and died. When I’d come back from whatever venture she’d sent me on, she’d talk about how life was precious.

“Don’t let a day go by without seeing some wonder in it, Cadi. Stop moping around the house wishing for things to change between ye and yer mama. Go out and see what’s there for ye.”

God was there.

God was everywhere.

It dawned on me then that that was why I could never find comfort from the sin eater. It wasn’t for him to give. The gift I needed had already been given; the evidence of it was all around me, everywhere I looked, even in the air I breathed. For hadn’t it been God himself who had given me life and breath?

I kept thinking about Granny. I remembered how we’d sit on the porch, melting and waiting for the hot summer day to end in the relief of nightfall. In the thankful cool, we’d stare up into the infinite black sky with glitters twinkling while the lightning bugs sparkled like fallen stars in the woods round about us.

In the fall, Granny’d send me off to capture one monarch butterfly from the thousands that migrated. She’d hold the jar a long while just looking at the pretty thing. “From a worm this came. Don’t that beat all?” And then she’d take the top off the jar and watch it flutter away.

First frost had been an event to Granny Forbes, for with it came the high mountain gold and the soft winds that stirred up blizzards of red, pink, orange, and yellow leaves swirling. “The maple’s always last to give up its color,” she’d always say. The maple that grew near our cabin was like a red blaze against the encroaching winter gray skies, its leaves like crimson sparks on the dead brown ground.

Granny would sit by the window during winter and look out at the snow heaping or watch the icicles’ slow growth from the eaves of the front porch. They’d catch the sunlight and cast a rainbow radiance. Granny was ever hoarding bread crumbs and sending me out to toss them about near the window so that she could watch the towhees, titmice, red cardinals, and mourning doves foraging for the bits of food in the vast white. During the ice storms and long bleak nights of winter, she’d tell me the mountains were like sleeping giants that’d come awake again soon. “God’ll see to it.”

And God did. Those mountains always did wake up, without fail. Year after year, the earth came back to life again with what Granny called “God-green.” She always said no matter how much you watered, you couldn’t get the same color that came with a single rain of the life-bearing water of heaven.

Now I knew why it happened that way, what Granny was trying to show me in words she didn’t have. It was no accident, no coincidence, that the seasons came round and round year after year. It was the Lord speaking to us all and showing us over and over again the birth, life, death, and resurrection of his only begotten Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, our Lord. It was like a best-loved story being told day after day with each sunrise and sunset, year after year with the seasons, down through the ages since time began.

I knew after hearing the word of the Lord, I’d never walk anywhere again without seeing Jesus as a babe in the new-green of spring. I’d never see a field in all its glory without thinking how he lived his life for us in the royal robes of every summer wildflower. I’d ever see the greatness of his love in the beautiful sacrifice in the brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows of fall, and winter white would always speak to me of his death. And then spring again, his resurrection, life eternal.

Lo, I am with you always.

You are, Lord. You are.The quickening in my soul told me so.

“She saw, Cadi,” Miz Elda said. “I’m going to believe that the Lord who can do anything he pleases opened her mind and heart and showed her the way home.”

Peace filled me, a peace not coming from Miz Elda’s consol ing words or of my own feeble, childish reasonings, but a gift from God himself—God who is just, God who is merciful, God who can do the impossible. I just knew I didn’t need to worry about Granny anymore. It was all taken care of, whatever become of her. For the Lord is God, and Jesus knew her heart. No, I didn’t have to worry at all.

We finished our eating, cleaned up the dishes, and went to bed. Once or twice I awakened to the hoot owl outside and Miz Elda’s snoring beside me. Fagan, who was sleeping on the floor, got up just before dawn and went outside to sit on the porch steps, his head in his hands.

Miz Elda roused when I got up. We didn’t say much. We was all heavy, thinking about what was ahead.

“We’d better be going back soon,” Fagan said, but I could see something else was troubling him. I guessed I knew what it was and was proved right when he finally talked about it as we was eating porridge Miz Elda made us.

“Seems like some have the eyes to see while others are blind,” Fagan said.

“Your pa, ye mean,” I said, seeing his hurt. It’s strange how a person can take such a beating from someone and still love him so much. Fagan hated what his father was, but he still loved him. I reckon that’s the way God is. Loving us enough to send Jesus, but hating the way we live. Hating the sin, not the sinner.

“Pa. And others. Why don’t they wonder? Why can’t they see it round about the way ol’ Miz Forbes did?”

“Why couldn’t ye?”

He turned and looked at his grandmother. “But I did!”

“Aye, ye did, lad, but don’t be too proud about it. It weren’t hunger and thirst that took ye down to the river. Ye went because yer father told ye not to go, pure and simple.” When he looked down and didn’t answer, she looked at me. “And why’d ye go, Cadi?”

“I went ’cause Sim Gillivray made me promise. He said he wouldn’t even try to take away my sins unless I gave my word first.”

“So there ye have it, aye? It weren’t humble reasons that made either of ye go. It wasn’t ’cause either of you was any better than anyone else. Even later, aye? Fagan, you wanted to be different from your father, and Cadi, you wanted to be relieved of your terrible guilt.”

“What was your reason?” Fagan said.

“I’m facing death and don’t want to burn in hell.” She gave a laugh. “Seems to me, it’s pure selfishness that brings us within hearing distance of the truth, and then God has his way with us, don’t he? He knows the ones already that’ll come looking for him, and he even lights the way. It all begins and ends with him. So I reckon God’s going to get done with us whatever he wants done.”

I felt the portent of her words. She’d been thinking a long time, and it all seemed clear and laid out straight ahead in her mind. But not in mine. “What do ye think God wants us to do?”

“Speak the truth, do what’s right, and take what comes.”

“We will,” Fagan said, “Soon as my pa cools off, we’ll come back down from Dead Man’s Mountain and start telling people what the man by the river said.”

Miz Elda shook her head. “Nope. That won’t do.”

“What do ye mean?” he said. “We have to tell them.”

“That ye do, but ye won’t say nothing if ye go back on the mountain. Not now.”

“I give ye my word.”

“Ye already give yer word to God, boy. The minute ye went into the river with that man ye knew things would never be the same. Didn’t ye? What’ll happen if ye go back on that now?”

“I ain’t going back on it!”

“Not yet. But don’t ye see? Just going back up on that moun- tain’s breaking your word. Ye go back and the truth will end right here.”

“How ye figure that?” he said, eyes hot.

“Well, now, think about it some. Don’t ye reckon it was God opened the way for ye to come down here to me in the first place? He led Cadi into that cave so she’d find the pictures telling of the blackest sin that’s held this valley in darkness all these years. Why do ye think he did that?”

He looked away from her piercing stare. “We can’t do anything now.”

“Oh yes ye can! Ye’ve already started doing the Lord’s work. And ye’ll keep right on with it!”

Fagan turned, agitated. “We’ve got to wait awhile! Pa’s too riled. Ma says he ain’t thinking straight. Ye can see what he did to me. What d’ya think’ll happen to Cadi if she stands with me against him? One blow and she’d be dead.”

“Maybe, but that don’t matter.”

I gulped, staying well out of it. I was hoping Fagan would win in this battle of wills and yet feared Miz Elda’s words and reason would sway him.

“How can ye say that, Granny? Ye love her as much as I do.”

My mouth fell open as I looked at him. He
loved
me? He loved
me?

“Listen to yer granny now, boy. Yer thinking’s askewed. Ye ain’t alone anymore, are ye? It ain’t ye against yer pa now, is it? If God can raise Jesus, don’t ye think he can look after ye and Cadi, too? Ain’t he already looked after ye? Ye two have been
chosen
to be his witnesses, and
this
is the day the Lord made. Not tomorrow or the day after. Not next week or next month or next year.
Now!”

Fagan was pale. “Maybe you’re right, but Pa wouldn’t give us time enough to tell more than a few.”

I was learning to recognize when it was God speaking through someone. He repeats himself. He says it over and over because we’re so stubborn and stupid and unwilling. And scared. Even when he tells us not to be afraid, we set our mind about it, worrying and fretting about every little thing. I was shaken by what God expected us to do.

“Cadi could tell her folks and Iwan,” Miz Elda said. She probably thought that would be easy, but I reckoned telling those I loved most about the Lord would be the hardest of all, especially considering they’d most likely thought I’d been bad enough to be cast into hell. How were they going to understand the goodness and love of God from the likes of me? And if they refused to listen, what then? It’d feel like I failed ’em again and sent ’em straight to hell. Because they’d know the truth and have no excuses.

“We’ve already told Bletsung and Ma.” Clearly Fagan was thinking about it, just like I feared. I thought he’d give a bigger fight against Miz Elda’s proclamation. But
no.
He heard the Holy Spirit in what she said, and he was going forward no matter the cost to either of us.

And seeing how he said he loved me, I knew I’d follow him to the death, if need be.