Black Water

by Bobby Norman

  Lootie still had a deathgrip on Roach’s pant leg.

  “Dahlin’, I thoughtchu said you hadn’t et. If ya ain’t, you mus’ be hongry. You’d like somethin’ t’eat, wuncha?”

  Roach nudged Lootie from the back.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am,” Cob cackled. “Ain’t ‘at jes th’sweetest. I c’d jes hug you in half.”

  Roach felt Lootie press into him when Cob again approached with her hand helt out, scared to death the old woman was gonna try to hug her in half. Lootie just looked at her hand. “Lootie!” Roach said, and gave her a sharp nudge.

  Lootie took Cob’s hand, shocked and appalled by the cold, clammy, waxey touch. Cob led the way to the door. Roach started to follow but Cob turned her black orbs on him. “You’ll wait outchere.”

  Catching Roach’s reaction, Lootie started to balk. “I want my daddy t’come with me.”

  “I blieve it might be bettah if I went in with ‘er,” Roach said, while a nervous smile twitched his face, “If it’s awright.”

  “It ain’t,” Cob said, leaving no doubt. “I b’lieve…it’d be bettah…if you’s t‘wait. Outchere.”

  Roach gave it half a moment’s thought while the witch gave him the evil eye, and, finally, he got down on one knee in front of Lootie. “It’s awright. You go on in with Cob ‘n I’ll be right out here, and after you meet th’othah lady ‘n eat a bite….” He looked up at Cob like maybe he was reconsidering their agreement. But then, steeling his resolve, “You have a bite…then we’ll take th’med’cine ‘n go back home.”

  Lootie was more scared than she’d ever been in her short little life. There was somethin’ about Cob, besides the obvious, and whoever, or whatever it was in the shack, that made her head itch.

  Roach clenched his jaw. “Lootie! Listen t’me! If you don’t do what th’lady wants, we don’t get th’med’cine, and Pearl needs it…bad.”

  Lootie’s love for her mother and the need for the medicine was stronger than her fear of the unknown, and so, without taking her tear-laden eyes off Roach, allowed Cob to pull her through the door and into the dark recesses of the shack. From just inside the door, she watched Roach wringing his hat in his hand.

  “I’ll be right heah.”

  He waved, Lootie thought, like he was wavin’ goodbye, and the door closed.

  CHAPTER 9

  The door latch clicked, and the Hound from Hell took it as an invitation to pick up the bone and take up his duties back at the door. Roach saw it hop-stepping his way so he thought he might like to go somers else to wait and moved off to the shade of a tree a good thirty yards from the front door. Devil Doggie got to the very spot Roach had vacated and whumphed onto the dusty ground. Roach looked at the hateful thing and thought for sure the animal’s earlier surly sneer was now more a kind of a smile.

  Cob tugged Lootie through the shack. Because her eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the darkness, Lootie couldn’t see the candles themselves, just the flames of the dozen or so set about the room. They looked like they’s floating. Neither did it register to her that they’d all bent toward her, like compass needles, the second she came through the door. Cob had, though, and wondered: were they bending...or bowing? It was just one more proof of Lootie’s dark royalty.

  Slowly, her eyes adjusting, Lootie saw that the only other light was what knifed in through the loose, splintery skeleton of weathered, hand-hewn planks poorly passing for walls. The hovel was so decrepit it looked like the dust-ladened cobwebs in the corners were helpin’ hold it together. Besides the dark, there were unfamiliar smells. Thick, smoke smells. They weren’t like the smoke at home from the wood stove, though, but stronger, and they burned her eyes, her nose, and her throat. She swept her free hand from side to side like a blind man with a stick to keep from bumpin’ into somethin’ while Cob hauled her through the shack. They came to a stop when Lootie’s shins banged into somethin’. Instinctively, she put her hand down to keep from fallin’ over, but jerked it back when she touched somethin’ cold. Somethin’ not wood, or metal, or glass.

  She found herself at the foot of a narrow cot just off the floor. She knew she was comin’ to see some sickly somebody, but she didn’t know she was gonna be accompanied by four other age-ravaged, toothless old biddies sittin’ on rickety little chairs alongside the cot, two to a side, all dressed in black shawls draped over their scarce-haired skulls. They were all cocked away, lookin’ at her like she was a double-headed, stubby-legged fetus floatin’ in a jar in a carnival freak show. Lootie wondered if they might be family members. Cob said the lady’s kids hadn’t showed yet, so maybe they were her sisters or cousins, or even friends.

  She couldn’t tell what they were sayin’, but they were quietly mumblin’ to theirselves, and as her eyes got more used to the dark, she saw they were fiddlin’ with somethin’—necklaces with little crosses on ’em. The necklaces looked like they were made up of black beans.

  Cob took one of the candles from a shelf and brought it in front of Lootie’s face, clamped her fingers onto Lootie’s chin and turned her head this way and that. The old women moved their faces all around to get a good gawk. Lootie didn’t know Cob was givin’ ’em the opportunity to peruse the scars and the blind eye she’d told ’em so much about. The desiccated old lizards, who’d never laid eyes on Lootie, knew far more about her than she knew about herself.

  After starin’ and weighin’ for a few seconds, they looked at each other, then, as if coming to a mutual agreement, turned their creaky, turkey-wattled necks to Cob and nodded. Cob smiled and nodded back, like she was relieved. She let go of Lootie’s chin and put the candle back on the shelf.

  Lootie’s eyes were finally used to the dark, and she saw, layin’ on the cot, the purpose for this strange gathering. The lady’s eyes and cheeks were sunk way down in the skull that seemed to be shielded by no more than a thin layer of parchment. She was laid straight out, her head on a little pillow, her emaciated, meatless arms straight down to her sides. Her hands were horribly twisted, like tree roots, all knuckles and joints. She had a kind of rag looped from the top of her head, down to and tied under her chin. Her flappy cheeks puffed in and out as she pulled in hard-fought breath.

  Lookin’ down her body, it hit Lootie that the cold thing she’d touched with her hand had been the old thing’s bare foot. Although she couldn’t tell what color it was—black, blue, or purple—she could see it was much darker than the rest of her leg. The hem of the dress they had her in only went down to just below her knee. Knee. As in singular. Her other leg was gone.

  If this was the lady Cob had been talkin’ about, there wasn’t any way she was gonna know Lootie was there, let alone eat with her. The poor old hag had the death rattles and the room was filled with the rancid, musty smell of a body takin’ a long time to die, yet had wait only moments to live.

  It was when Lootie’s eyes 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 punis
hable 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 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.

  CHAPTER 11

  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.