Chapter One

The Wrong Sin

I am what is known as a Sin Eater by trade, and one rule matters: you must be told the sin and whose it is.

This day a frightened man broke it, politely, and I took his money anyway.

And it is killing me still.

Sin Eater is the newspapers' word, and the newspapers are welcome to it. On the riverfront, where the work was learned, the word is toting: I tote things off of people, for pay. A taking begins at the river: the water for it is drawn the same morning, by the hands that will use it. So on a Tuesday late in March, nineteen twenty-six, I took a clean water bucket down to the Mississippi early and brought the river home in it.

The streetlamps were lit when I set out and would still be lit at noon. St. Louis feeds on soft coal all winter and breathes itself back in; there are mornings the sun is a thing you take the paper's word for. That morning the smoke lay over the air like a lid — soot, sulfur, struck matches — and gritted in my throat the whole way down.

I live in the Valley, at Twentieth and Chestnut, in a rented room over Boehm's tobacco. The river is a long walk east, and the walk is mine.

Bertha Waller had her door propped at Twenty-first, wash-steam rolling out over the step and a baby on her hip who had voted against being there. She put her hand up — you stop for that hand — and passed me the child to get at the pins in her mouth, never breaking off the conversation she was running with somebody deeper in the house.

"Bare-headed," she said around the last pin. "A woman with all that auburn hung out loose in this smoke — you'll be washing it Friday and blaming me after. And your freckles are up. In March, with no sun in this town since Christmas."

The child had business of her own: one fist in my collar, two fingers flat on the scar under my jaw, and she went at the green eyes like a knot she meant to have out before her mother wanted her back. Whatever she was working to settle about my face, Bertha settled it in that doorway before I could walk, her own way, and has not gone back over it since. She took the child, said quit that without saying what to quit, and shut the door on her own steam.

At that hour Market Street belongs to people bound somewhere for somebody else. The day-work women walked east ahead of me, aprons rolled, going to houses that would let them out after dark. Men stood at the barber's wall to learn whether a truck would want them. Show bills for the Booker T. hung wet at their corners. Somewhere overhead a piano ran the same eight bars of a rag, went wrong in the same place, and walked back for it. The lunch counters pushed pork and coffee into the street, and I wanted nothing of it.

Somewhere past Fourteenth the street changes hands. No sign says so; it is in the shopfronts, and in what a man coming toward you elects to do with his eyes. I kept my errand out in front of me. A client was due on my stairs at two, a stove wanted bringing up before him, and everything between me and two o'clock was walking.

The riverfront is granite blocks stood on end, a slope of standing stones that walks down into the river and keeps walking under it. Steel barges in federal paint, and at the foot of Chestnut a crew taking flour off a wharfboat over the stage plank. Forty years of tobacco spit has freckled the stones brown at the waterline. The water ran high, cold, and in a hurry — you draw from water that is going somewhere, never from water that stands. I put the bucket under at the low edge, and the cold walked up my wrist and waited with me.

My hands came out of that river red to the knuckle and stayed red most of the way home. They are not hands that recommend me; the stove, the shelling tables, and the river have each kept a piece of them.

The mate on the wharfboat has known me since I was a girl finding out what a load is. He tipped his chin around his chaw — "Roux" — and went back into his manifest. But one of the crew was new, barge-line new, and he read me the whole time the bucket was filling: boots, coat, the miles behind me, and then the hair — and at the hair he arrived, and quit traveling. He stood holding his conclusion the way a man holds a crate nobody will take off his hands. Then he asked the open air, not quietly, what a white woman wanted with river water.

I had one second to decide whether to set him straight. The State of Missouri has me down colored, whatever a stranger settles from my hair, and no good answer waits in either direction; I have had my whole life to weigh that second, and it has never come lighter. "Drawing water," I said — the half of the question I could afford. He went over me again, hat to hem, and came to a different verdict; he touched his cap to the verdict, not to me, and shouldered his bag of flour.

Nothing was said that a court could hear. I climbed the stones with the bucket full, and something had been taken off me on that plank that I could not have named to claim it back.

The crew kept a yellow dog, and the dog was working the stage plank — out with the empty trip, back with the loaded one, keeping the men's own step. A stage plank has spring in it; break time with the spring and you go into the river with whatever is on your shoulder. Here was a dog that had learned the step and kept it, for no wage and no flour, and never once looked at the water. I watched it longer than a woman with a two o'clock has any business watching anything. Nobody taught it.

A silver half dollar is sewn into the hem of my coat. It rode at my ankle the whole way home, the small steady drag it has always been; a carried thing keeps you posted.

The building I live in has held tobacco so long the brick has given up being anything else. The stairwell is dark and sweet with it — so is my room, my clothes, the hair Bertha wants covered. In March it is the warmest stairwell on the block.

The chapter goes on. The rest of the book is in the audiobook.