"Manly Wade Wellman - Sin's Doorway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

Sin's Doorway
by Manly Wade Wellman


Those days and in that part of the South I tried to keep out of county seats and
other towns of any size. Sheriffs and town marshals had a way of rounding up
tattered strangers and putting them on chain gangs. That spring I followed a trail, not
much more than a footway, between two hills where the live oaks and the long-leaf
pine shouldered themselves into thickets. There would be clearings in the hollows
beyond, and a cabin or two of simple people. They'd recognized me, I hoped, for
someone sad and hungry. I'd be invited to eat corn breadтАФfried bacon too, if I was
lucky, or a stew of squirrel or rabbit. I had not eaten since the morning before, not
very heartily then. Feeling faint, I knelt to drink from a little pencil-wide stream.
When I rose, my legs were not so shaky.
Then as I tramped downhill between the path's scrub-grown borders, I heard
voices singing an old hymn. Around the bend I walked, and came almost among the
people.
There were twenty or twenty-five of them, overalled men, and women in
homespun dresses and calico sunbonnets, and some shock-headed children. They
stood bunched in front of a shabby little clapboard churchтАФI knew it was a church
by the tacked-on steeple that housed no bell. Next the church was a grassy
burying-ground, with ant-eaten wooden headboards, fenced by stakes and rails.
Nobody stood inside the fence. They all faced toward a homemade coffin of
whipsawed pine, rough and unpainted.
I hate funerals. I go to as few as I can manage. But I paused to watch this one.
Nobody looked sorry or glad, only intent. Beside the coffin stood a tall mountain
man in worn black, with a grizzled chin-tuft that lengthened his hawklike face.
Perhaps Abe Lincoln would have looked like that, if Wilkes Booth had spared him
for twenty more years. That was the preacher, I decided, for as the singing died he
began to talk. As my eyes turned toward him, I saw two figures squatting on the
ground beyond him and the coffin. For a moment I took these to be old carven
images, like figureheads from ancient sailing vessels. They looked weathered and
colorless, face, hair, and clothing. One was a bewhiskered male, the other a wrinkled
old female. Neither moved, not even their eyes blinked. But their backs were tense,
as though slighting the church. I know Southern folklore, and remembered a bit;
witches, the servants of devils, always turn their backs to the house of God.
"It was the will and prayer of Levi Brett, our departedтАФbrotherтАФ"
 The preacher had stumbled over that word as if he had disliked to speak it. "His
will," he went on, "that we call at his burial for someone to eat his sins."
I pricked up my ears at that. Sin-eatingтАФthe old English had believed in it. There
was something about it in Precious Bane, a delightful novel I hoped to read again if
ever I came among books, and had money to buy them. For pay or for gratitude, a
living person assumes the burden of sin borne by a dead one. Then a soul is free to
enter heaven, and the sin-eater has years of life in which to expiate that assumed
obligation. Once or twice I had heard rumors, just rumors, that some backcountry
Americans kept the custom.
The preacher paused again, watching his companions. Nobody stirred, except a
couple who swayed a little back, as if they disliked the suggestion.
"Levi Brett gave me money as he died," said the preacher. He produced a wallet.
"Here are one hundred dollars. That will go to the one who eats the sin. Also Levi