The world of the book
St. Louis, 1926
A French city that became an American one and never quite forgave it. The breweries are shut and the liquor has gone underground; the smoke is so thick the streetlights burn at noon.
The city
A company that renders bone and a political machine run the city between them.
The police answer to the Governor of Missouri, not to the city. And on the ground where the 1904 World's Fair stood, a street of families has lived since the Fair.
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.
Chapter one
The trade
Toting
“Sin eater” is the newspapers' word. Where the work was learned, on the riverfront, it is toting: taking what a person carries out of them, for pay, and carrying it yourself.
The one rule
You must be told the sin, and whose it is. The client names it and gives it.
River water
A taking begins at the river. The water is drawn the same morning, by the hands that will use it, from water that is going somewhere.
Nothing is free
A gift makes a claim on whoever takes it. A sale closes clean. The price is never waived.
What it costs
Nothing taken disappears. After a heavy taking comes black water, fever, and the knees and the hip.
The mark
The trade stains the gums black and never the teeth. A toter learns to keep her mouth closed.
What a sin tastes of
Sins have a taste. To Odile, murder is copper and river mud.
Places
Where the book walks
The Valley
Chestnut Valley, inside the larger Mill Creek Valley: the working city. Odile's rooms are over Boehm's tobacco shop, with her own street door and her own stair, and the smell of his tobacco comes up through the floor all night.
The riverfront
Granite blocks stood on end, a slope of standing stones that walks down into the Mississippi and keeps walking under it. Where the trade was learned.
The old fairgrounds
The ground of the 1904 World's Fair, twenty-odd years on.