Lilybet merely smiled as she sat on a moss-covered boulder, her blue eyes clear and filled with knowledge of me.
“Gervase Odara thinks you’re a taint,” I said stubbornly.
“She thinks I’m worse than that.”
“But it’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair. It’s difficult. From the moment you draw your first breath to the last.”
“Why does it have to be that way?”
“Because men are stubborn. They wanted their own way, and God allowed them to have it.”
“And so Fagan and I must suffer.”
“As all suffer. It’s one long test of faith, refining you for what you were meant to be.”
“And what’s that?”
“Find out.”
“Why can’t I know now? Why can’t ye just tell me?”
“Because you’re stubborn, too. You still refuse to understand, even when the truth is all around you in everything you see from the depths of the earth to the stars in the heavens.”
All the anger went fromme, andmy throat tightened with grief. “I don’t want to be stubborn, Lilybet. I want to understand.”
“You will find all the pieces, and God will bring them to light.”
“When will that be?”
“In his time.”
It didn’t take me long to find all the flowers I needed, and Fagan was where I’d left him, peering through the vines. “She’s still inside. She’s stoked up the fire. See the smoke?”
I sat and worked quickly, making splits in the stems and tucking others through until I had made a garland for her hair. I kept thinking about all Lilybet had said to me, making sense of none of it. I looked at my handiwork and hoped Bletsung Mac-leod would like it better than Mama had. “It’s done.”
“It’s a fine thing, Cadi.” His words pleased me enough to make me blush. “Did your ma teach ye how to do it?”
“Granny taught me.”
Gathering our courage, we went out into the open at the base of Dead Man’s Mountain and approached the small cabin. “Helllloooo!” Fagan called and I held the wreath so that Blet-sung Macleod would see it. When she didn’t come out of her house, Fagan called out bolder, “Heellllooo!”
My heart jumped. “The curtain moved.”
“Come on then. Don’t hang back.” Fagan motioned to me as he walked toward the house. “We brung ye summat, ma’am!”
“I don’t want nothin’. Go away!”
“We’re just being neighborly!”
“I said, ‘Go away!’”
My shoulders drooped, but Fagan stood his ground, jaw tense. “We ain’t leaving until ye come out and talk to us!” He sounded more like his father than I had ever heard him before.
“Fagan,” I whispered, mortified. There was enough on my head without him making it worse.
“I told ye to stay away, Cadi Forbes, and now ye come back and bring this rude boy with ye! Git on! Git out o’ here!”
Fagan blushed dark red. “I ain’t meaning to be rude, ma’am, but we—Cadi and me, that is—need to talk to ye. We don’t mean ye no harm.” He nudged me. “Tell her!”
“We mean ye no harm, ma’am!” I called out to confirm his declaration. “And we brung ye summat.”
After a long moment, Bletsung Macleod opened the door and came out onto the front porch. She was now dressed in a worn dark skirt and faded blue shirtwaist, her hair gathered into a hasty braid. “Why can’t ye leave well enow alone, Cadi Forbes?” she said in a despairing tone. “Why can’t ye stay away from this godforsaken place?”
“I gotta put the pieces together.” I knew as I spoke that it made no sense to anyone, not even me. Fagan looked at me quizzically, but didn’t say nothing.
Bletsung Macleod stayed in the shadows, standing near a post. She reminded me of the doe, ready to bound away at the first hint of danger. And it seemed odd, her being growed up and all. Seeing her like that made all my own fears seep away, and I was filled instead with a strange tenderness and pity toward her. “She’s afeared of us, Fagan.”
He sensed it too. “We’ll go slowly.”
As we came closer, she glanced quickly toward the forest, her movements tense of a moment. I looked toward the forest, too, wondering if she had seen something like a bear or a painter, but nothing was there out of the ordinary that I could see. So Fagan and I kept acomin’ ahead until we was standing to the right of her front steps. I laid the flower garland on the porch at her feet and then backed away.
Bending, she picked it up and looked at it. She touched the purple flower petals, then gazed at me, perplexed. “Thank ye, Cadi.” It sounded almost a question. Her gaze moved to Fagan, studying him with a faint frown. “What be your name, lad?”
“Fagan, ma’am. Fagan Kai.”
If anything, she grew more wary. “Brogan Kai’s son?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ye dunna look like him.”
“No, ma’am. People say I look more like my ma.”
Tilting her head, she studied him. “Aye, ’tis true. Ye have your mother’s eyes.” Her mouth tipped sadly. “How be Iona these days?”
“She don’t complain.”
“Reckon she wouldn’t.” Bletsung Macleod glanced toward the forest again and then stepped forward, one slender, work-worn hand resting lightly on the rail. “She got what she wanted.” She sighed and looked down at us again. She didn’t ask why we had come. She wasn’t going to make it that easy.
Fagan forgot all about the sin eater. “How do ye come by knowing my mother?”
“Everybody knows everybody in this valley.” Her voice was heart-weary.
“I never heard of ye until a few months ago.”
I wondered if Fagan knew how belligerent he sounded.
Closing her eyes, Bletsung Macleod lowered her head.
“Why ye saying things to hurt her?” I whispered fiercely.
Fagan’s face jerked with pain. “I ain’t trying to hurt her. I just want to know the truth.” He looked up at the woman on the porch. “People say ye might have killed your own ma and pa.”
She raised her head and looked at him, blue eyes dark with pain. “That so? What else do they say?”
Convinced Fagan had made a fine mess of our visit, I clutched his shirtsleeve, hoping the feel of my hand might give him pause. It didn’t.
“Some say ye’re crazy.”
She just stood silent now, looking between us.
“Cadi here says ye’re a bee charmer, and she thinks ye might know summat about the sin eater.”
I could feel Bletsung Macleod’s gaze fix upon me then. Troubled, she searched my face. “How old be ye, Cadi?”
“Ten, ma’am.”
“Are ye ill? Do ye have a tumor or summat that’s drawing the life from ye?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then go on home and forget about the sin eater.”
“I can’t.”
Fagan stepped forward. “She has to talk to him, and so do I.”
“He won’t let ye near him.”
“I have to ask him summat.”
Her eyes flashed. “Questions! Sticking your nose in where it’s none of your business. And what for? So ye con carry more rumors like your folks? Well, I won’t help ye!” She started to turn away.
“I reckon if ye won’t help us, we’ll find the sin eater for ourselves,” Fagan said, chin jutting.
Bletsung Macleod turned to us again and leaned forward so that the sun shone on her face. She did look half crazed. “You leave him be! Stop hunting him like he was an animal with no feelings!” She looked square at me. “For the love of mercy, Cadi Forbes, he’s taken the sins of your granny on himself. Ye near got done in by a painter once, dinna ye? And he would have taken all your sins on him then, too. Can’t ye be thankful for him and leave the mon be?”
Covering my face with my hands, I sobbed. Fagan put his arms around me, holding me close like Iwan sometimes did. “Ye’ve no call to talk to her like that and
make her cry!”
“You’re her friend, Fagan Kai. Make her see reason,” she said wearily and went back inside the house. Both of us heard the bar drop heavily into place.
Fagan tried to cheer me up on the long walk home, but some feelings have to ease on their own. You can’t talk them out or forget. Sometimes you can’t even make sense of them. You just gotta walk on through.
I was not of a mind for hunting with Fagan. I didn’t care to fish or pick flowers or do anything else but what my mind was determined to do. So when we come to Kai Creek, I told him I was going home.
As I walked through the woods, it came to me like a blinding flash of summer lightning: The only way Bletsung Macleod could’ve known about the painter was if the sin eater himself had told her.
Fagan went back with me three days running and then balked and went hunting. “She don’t know nothing about the sin eater.”
I followed after him for a while, hoping to change his mind, and then went back, taking up my vigil again behind the curtain of mountain laurel. I dozed off in the heavy moist warmth of the afternoon. When I woke, I saw Bletsung Macleod leaning out her window. I moved closer, wondering what she was doing talking to thin air.
Then I saw him. A man, sitting below her window.
Bletsung Macleod didn’t look down at him, and he sat low down, head bowed. Was it a hat he was wearing? No, it was a hood!
My heart quickened, and I slunk along the edge of dense greens, careful not to set anything moving.
Bletsung looked out toward the mountains as she spoke. Though I was able to get closer, I was too far off to hear anything. She spoke and then listened. I wished I could hear what they were saying to each other. They seemed in no hurry to end their conversation. No one had died, so it was for certain she wasn’t telling him he was needed at another funeral.
Heart thumping, I watched, intrigued by their camaraderie, wondering at it.
Bletsung Macleod stopped talking and listened a long while. Her lips moved again, and then she leaned further out the window, reaching down to him. He raised his hand toward hers. Their fingers were the barest inches apart when he withdrew. He stood and started quickly toward the forest. I saw he was slipping away again, and it was no telling how long it’d be before he came back now he knew I was watching for him.
“Sin Eater!” I cried out. I was through the vines and running. “Sin Eater! Wait! Wait!”
The man ran.
“Cadi, no!” Bletsung Macleod intercepted me, catching me before I reached the woods. “Cadi, no. You mustn’t . . .” Tears were running down her cheeks. “Oh, child, child . . .”
Struggling and kicking, I gained my freedom and ran into the shadows, chasing after him, crying out for him to stop, to wait for me.
He would not.
I kept running, pushing through the tangled branches until I was utterly lost in the rhododendrons. Out of breath, I stopped and looked around me. I listened, hoping to hear some sound from him as he climbed higher, hiding among the crags above me.
Nothing.
“Sin Eater, where are you?” My lungs were burning, my heart racing.
Silence.
“I ain’t going back until I talk to you!” I kept on, forcing my way through the snarls of green. Higher and higher I climbed, crying, lost and frightened. And determined.
Panting, I stopped again. “Please. I have to talk to you!” A streak of white lit the gray-clouded sky, and my skin tingled. The patter of rain splattered the leaves and thunder rolled. “Sin Eater! Sin Eater!”
“I’m here.”
I turned sharply toward the sound of his voice lost somewhere in the heavy rhododendrons. He was close, so close. “I can’t see you.” I pushed my way through several branches.
“Ye can talk from where ye stand.”
I stood still but a moment. “I left some preserves out for ye on Granny’s grave, but ye never came back.”
“I dinna know of your kindness toward me.”
“They ain’t there anymore. Fagan broke the jar. I’ll get ye more if ye want. Mama has a shelf of jars. She won’t miss one.”
“No, don’t do that. I’m not in want.”
No, he had fresh bread and honey from Bletsung Macleod.
“Jam goes good with bread.”
I heard the rustling of branches and knew he was the same distance from me as he had been before. Each step I took, he was a step further off, maybe two.
Sorrow gripped me. “Ye talk to Bletsung Macleod. Why won’t ye talk to me?”
“We’re talking, ain’t we?” There was gentle humor in the words.
His voice came from another direction now. Turning again, I kept on. I paid no heed to the direction I was going, and only vaguely noticed that the going was easier. “Would ye take my sins away, Sin Eater?”
“Ye know I will, Cadi. When the time comes. Unless I’m gone. Then there’ll be another to take my place.”
“I mean now.”
“It ain’t done that way, darlin’.”
I stopped, heartbroken. “But why not?What con I do to show I’m sorry? I’d do anything.” He was silent so long, I thought he had left me there alone. “Is there no forgiveness for one such as me, Sin Eater? What con I do to make up for what I did?”
“Ye con do right from here on, Cadi. That’s what ye do. Ye help other people without thinking about the cost to yourself.
Ye live your life to please God Almighty. And ye hope, Cadi. Ye hope and ye pray that in the end he’ll forgive you. Ye try to get by on that.”
He sounded so grievous sad, my throat and chest tightened.
“I try, Sin Eater, I try so hard, but that don’t change what’s been done already.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I’m sorry to be asking ye to take on more, Sin Eater, but I don’t know who else con help me. And I canna go to the man of God with my sins upon me.”
“What man of God?”
“The stranger who’s come into the valley. He’s down by the river. He came up by the Narrows and speaks in the name of the Lord.” The sin eater said nothing for so long, I called out to him again. “Where are you?”
“I haven’t left ye, Cadi, my dear. Be still and hear me out.”
“I’m listening.”
“If I try and take your sins away, will ye do summat for me in return, Cadi Forbes?”
“Anything!” My heart raced. “I’ll do anything!”
“Tomorrow, ye come back. Bletsung Macleod will show ye the path. Bring me what’s necessary for the ceremony. I’ll eat the bread and drink the wine and say the prayer, and we’ll see what God will allow.”
I began to shake, emotions suddenly at war within me. Hope. Joy. Fear.
“And whatever happens, Cadi, ye have to promise me ye’ll do whatever I ask of ye. Will ye now?”
“I promise.”
“I’ve your word on it?”
“Yes! I promise! I cross my heart and hope to die, Sin Eater. I’ll do whatever ye ask.”
There was a still quiet for a long moment, and then he spoke softly. “Keep walking, Cadi. A few more steps. Do ye see the path?”
“Yes.”
“Until tomorrow then, and God have mercy on us both.” I heard him no more after that.
The path led me down the mountain to Bletsung Macleod’s small meadow. It went straight to the space beneath her window. She was framed there, watching for me. As soon as I appeared at the edge of the woods, she came out to meet me. I thought she meant to take me to task for hitting and kicking her. She had the right.
“He let ye speak with him?”
I raised my eyes and saw no anger. “Yes, ma’am. I reckon he figured I’d never leave off following him unless he did.”
“Do ye feel the better for it?”
“Some, ma’am, but I’ll feel even better tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“He said to come back with bread and wine.”
“Oh.” Lifting her head, she g
azed up at the mountain, troubled.
“I’m sorry I kicked ye, Miz Macleod. I had to talk to the sin eater. I just had to . . .”
She looked down at me again and ran her hand gently over my hair. “I forgive ye, Cadi. I understand.” Her eyes grew moist with tears. “We all have to do what we must do. You go on home now.” As I walked away, she called out to me. “Cadi? Ye con come down to the cabin tomorrow, if ye like. After ye talk to the sin eater. I’ll have honey cakes ready for you.”
Her invitation surprised and touched me deeply. “Thank ye kindly, ma’am.” I raced off happily. All I needed now to complete my quest was the necessary things for the ceremony. And I knew who might be called upon to give them to me.
“Now, what would ye be wanting wine and bread for, I wonder,” Miz Elda said with a dry smile. “Think ye’ve found the sin eater, do ye?”
“I have! He lives on Dead Man’s Mountain, just like ye said he did.”
“Don’t go spreading around who told ye. Brogan Kai’ll take offense at my meddlin’. Did Fagan see him, too?”
“Fagan gave up and went hunting.”
“More’s the pity, but then again, maybe that boy’ll bring me another plump squirrel for my cook pot.”
“I could bring ye some salt pork and smoked venison, if ye’d like.”
“Ye could, aye? Ye gonna ask permission this time or just steal it out from under yer mama’s nose like ye did those berry preserves?”
I blushed. My sins were ever before me. “I’ll ask. I promise.”
“Ye could ask ’em for wine and bread, too.”
The heat drained from my face. “No, ma’am, I couldn’t.”
Miz Elda took my hand. “Maybe askin’ ’em would give ’em a sign how deep ye hurt inside.”
“They know.” Mama must believe it was right for me to suffer. But I could see she was suffering, too, and it was a suffering I had brought upon her.
The old woman patted my hand tenderly. “Reckon they got their own guilt to carry, Cadi.”
I frowned, wondering at her words. “Mama and Papa ain’t never done nothing wrong.”
“You don’t think so?”
I pulled my hand from hers. “I know so.”
“Honey chile, ye dunna ken nothin’ yet about this valley or the people in it.” She looked away from me, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “Don’t matter though. No matter how deep the truth gets buried, it always comes to light.”