"Brown,.Mary.-.Unicorn's.Ring.2.-.1994.-.Pigs.Don't.Fly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Mary)

everything went as quiet as if someone had shut a door.
"Ah, hmmm, yes. This is a sad occasion, very sad." He shook his head solemnly,
and the rest of them did likewise or nodded as they thought fit. "We meet here
to mourn the sudden passing of someone who, er, someone who was . .."
"With whom we shared a common interest?" suggested the clerk.
"Yes, yes of course. Very neatly put. ... As I was saying, Mistress Margaret
hereЧ"
"Margaret? Isabella," said the miller.
"Not Isabella," said the butcher. "Susan."
"Elizabeth," said the clerk. "Or Bess for short."
"I thought she was Alice," said the tailor.
"Maude, for sure ..."
"No, EllenЧ"
"I'm sure she said MaryЧ"
"Katherine!"
"Sukey ..."
I stared at them in bewilderment. It didn't seem as though they were talking
about her at all: how could she possibly be ten different people? Then, like an
echo, came my mother's voice: "In my position I have to be all things to all
men, daughter. ..."
The mayor turned to me. "What was your mother's real name?"
24 Mary Brown
I shmgged my shoulders helplessly. "I never asked her. To me she was justЧjust
Mama." I would not cry....
"Well," said the priest snappily, "You will have to decide on something if I am
to bury her tomorrow morning. At first light, you said?"
They had obviously been discussing it on the way here.
"It would be ... more discreet," said the mayor, lamely. "Less fuss the better,
I say."
"Aye," said the butcher. "What's over, is over."
"What I want to know is,'1 said the priest, "who's paying?"
They all looked at me. I shook my head. I knew there were a few coins for
essentials in Mama's box, but not near enough to pay for a burial and Mass.
"I don't think she ever thought about dying," I said. This was true. Death had
never oeen part of our conversations. She had been so full of life and living
there had been no room for death. I thought about it for a moment more, then I
knew what she would have said. "I believe she would have trusted you, all of
you, to share her dying as you shared her living."
I could see they didn t like it, but there were grudging nods of assent,
"What about a sin-eater?" said the priest suddenly. "She died unshriven. Masses
for a year and a day might do it, but ..."
More money. "There isn't one hereabouts," said the mayor worriedly. "I suppose
if we could find someone willing we should have to find a few more coins, butЧ"
"I'll do it," I said. "She was my mother." I couldn't leave her in Purgatory for
a year, even if I was scared to death of the burden. "What do I do?"
But no one seemed very sure, not even the priest. In the end he suggested I take
a hunk of bread, place it on my mother's chest and pray for her sins to pass
from one to the other. Then I had to eat the bread.
It near choked me, and once I had forced it down I was assailed by the most
intolerable sense of burdening, as though I had been squashed head down in a