Chapter Five

 

In her teens, Tessa spent a lot of time with Lucas. At his grandpa’s house, they listened to the stereo, watched a little television, or rode horses, but sometimes they settled down to listen to the old man tell stories. Usually, he started talking on a wet night while rain drummed hard on the old tin roof, or on a cold winter’s evening with a fire in the hearth. The weather enhanced the tales he told and set a mood. Some were from his past and others had been handed down from his Welsh ancestors. Tessa hadn’t forgotten The Two Cat Witches or the one about the farmer who married a nymph. Lucas’ grandfather had been an amazing storyteller but he’d never talked about sin-eaters when Tessa’d been present.

Tessa never saw any resemblance between Mr. Rowlands with his aged face cut deep with hard lines and his grandson, but now as she settled down at Lucas’ feet, she realized they looked very much alike. Age made the difference but otherwise, both men shared brilliant blue eyes and the same shade of brown hair lightened with golden highlights.

Although it got dark right after Buddy left, neither Tessa nor Lucas had bothered to turn on any lights. They ate in the growing darkness but Lucas switched on a table lamp on the lowest setting. The soft light cast shadows across his features.

“Don’t you want to sit up here?” he asked Tessa. He looked down on her with a bemused affection. “You look like a kid on the floor.” She leaned against his knees, content. “I’m fine here. I like watching your face.”

Lucas sighed, long and deep. “All right, what do you want to know?”

“Everything. I want to know why your grandpa was a sin-eater, why I didn’t know it, how you found out, and why you’re one. I need to know what it is you do and why you said sin-eating is what made you so sick.”

His eyes narrowed almost to slits. “Oh, is that all? Just everything?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“I’ll give it a shot,” Lucas said. “I don’t know where in the hell to start but I guess I’ll tell you what Granddad told me.” He leaned back and shut his eyes. “I knew he did some sin-eating gigs sometimes, but he never talked about it until the spring you were fixing to leave. I knew what you had in mind and I’d kinda thought you might ask me to go along, too, or I’d talk you into staying. You’d finished up your two years at Crowder College and I knew you’d want to do something else. I’d almost made up my mind to ask you to marry me, but Granddad must’ve known what I had in mind. I don’t know if you remember or not but by then he was about eighty-seven. His age had started to show and he’d gotten awful frail over the winter. Turned out he had cancer but he hadn’t complained, and no one knew until right before he died come November.”

“One night after I’d come home from watching you rodeo, he was waiting on the porch for me. He asked me to sit down with him and said, “Son, there’s something you gotta know. I’ve waited a long time to bring it up but I can’t wait no more. I don’t know how much longer I got in this life but when I’m gone, you gotta take over.”

Tessa took Lucas’ hand and held it. With his emotions stirred by memory, he sounded upset.

“I thought he was talking about what kind of funeral he wanted and what to do with the cows. I didn’t really want to hear any of it but he insisted. He talked all around it about family traditions and stuff until I told him, ‘Just say whatever it is you’re tap dancing around.’ So he did.”

Lucas must’ve inherited some of his grandfather’s storytelling skills because as he spoke, Tessa could see the old man as he shared the information, handed down the secret. “Here’s what he said, almost word for word, as close as I can remember it:

‘You know our family came from Wales, how my granddaddy left around the time of the great conversion where people were falling down and talking in tongues. He lit out for America because there wasn’t much left in Wales but coal mines and the land. Somehow he ended up here and he liked it. The old hills weren’t so different than the ones back home and the people came from the same stock, a blend of Irish, English, Welsh, and Scots. Before he got on a ship at Cardiff, his grandfather told him what my granddad told me and I’m about to tell you.

He told Granddad the family came from a long line of sin-eaters, the ones who take the sins away from the dead so they can enter heaven. A lot of religious people didn’t like the old custom because it came from the old days, before Christianity made it all the way to Wales and the British Isles. My granddad’s grandfather was the seventh son of a seventh son and a sin-eater, too. But as far as my grandpa knew, the Rowlands men were always sin-eaters, usually passing from grandpa to grandson.’”

Tessa listened with interest but she asked a question, “So your grandpa’s grandfather came here from Wales?”

“Yeah, so the story goes.”

“So he’d be your great-grandfather, no, great-great grandfather?”

“I think so. His name was the same as mine, though—Lucas Rowlands.”

“How did people here find out he was a sin-eater?”

Lucas smiled. “The first Lucas hadn’t been here more than a few months when a neighbor died, an old man. I guess everyone thought he was wicked and mean so his widow asked if anyone knew a sin-eater. So the other Lucas spoke up and admitted he came from a long line of them. Next thing he knew, he was the sin-eater. I wish he’d kept his mouth shut, though. It would have made my life a lot easier.”

“And so what happened to him?”

He snorted. “He lived to be an old man and when he died, my granddad took over. Lucas was the first one he served as sin-eater. I doubt my dad ever knew much about it. Sometimes I think he got lucky, dying young the way he did.”

Tessa shook her head. Dying in a fiery car crash didn’t seem fortunate to her. Lucas had been too small to remember the accident or his dad or his mom, who hightailed it out of the hills back to Wichita, leaving her son behind. “Then your mother didn’t know?”

“Probably not,” Lucas said. He’d always hated to talk about his mother. Anyway, Granddad told me it was my turn. Said he figured I knew he’d been the sin-eater and I did, but I never thought much about it. He hadn’t ever taken me with him and it didn’t seem any more of a big thing than him playing poker with his buddies or going coon huntin’ or something. But turns out, it was a major deal and my fate.”

Although he spoke in an even tone, Tessa could hear the resignation in his voice and loathed it. “It shouldn’t have to be, Lucas. Can’t you stop being the sin-eater?”

Sadness darkened his eyes as he stared down at her. His mouth twisted to one corner as he replied, “No, I don’t think so. Honey, I carry all the sins of everyone I’ve ever served on my soul. I can’t get rid of them, and since sin-eaters are almost extinct, I reckon I’ll go straight to hell when I die.”

“Why? They’re not your sins.”

Lucas exhaled a long, slow breath. “Yeah, but they’re on my soul so it counts. Any chance of finding a sin-eater willing to do for me what I’ve done for others is just about impossible. If there’s another way, I haven’t found it yet.”

“We need to find it, then.” Tessa failed to realize she said we until the words were out.

“That’s sweet of you, honey, but it’s probably not happening. I didn’t mind, not much, for a long time.”

“But you do now, don’t you?”

“Yeah. I do because you’re back.”

Sadness, heavy and harsh, weighed her spirit down like stones. Tessa laid her head across his knees. “Tell me the rest. I guess after your granddad died, you ate his sins and then everyone knew, huh?”

“Yeah,” Lucas replied. “He’d told me how it would be, what I had to do. He taught what to say, how to sin-eat. I still hadn’t swallowed all of it yet, and I figured we’d talk about it. But the next day, you told me you were heading off to Nashville. Everything hit me like a one-two punch. It seemed as if my future died so I did the stupidest thing I could come up with and robbed the liquor store. Then I drank too much and crashed. I think I was trying to follow in my daddy’s footsteps but I lived.”

Memories rushed over Tessa like a strong gust of wind. “When I heard what you’d done, I thought it was all because of me,” she told him in a low voice, thick with hurt. “I was so afraid you’d die, Lucas. I got to the hospital when you were still in the ER and waited. Then I stayed for hours so I could see you but you pushed me away. I thought I’d hurt you so bad you didn’t want me anymore.”

“Honey,” Lucas said in a choked voice. “I loved you so I set you free. Who’d want to be the sin-eater’s wife? I wanted you to go realize your dreams and forget me.”

Tears cascaded down her cheeks as she wept. “I never did.”I haven’t ever made it big but I couldn’t forget you. If you’d just told me the truth…”

His tone shifted into a snarl. “What? You’d stayed here. Didn’t you hear your brother? People don’t want to be around the sin-eater. I’m their nightmare, living and breathing. I’m a reminder of death and their loved ones who’ve passed away. I’m sin, their sin on top of my own. Most people tolerate me but some really hate me. A few will leave the room if I walk into it. I have few friends and a lot more enemies.”

He spoke truth and she knew it, but it wasn’t fair. “But they use you when they want your services!”

“Yeah, they do.”

“How often do you sin-eat?”

“Whenever someone asks,” he told her. “Maybe four or five times a year, sometimes less. I’ve traveled away from here a few times to be the sin-eater someplace else. Since you’ve been gone and I started, I’ve done it about forty times, I think. I figure if I live to be as old as my granddaddy, I’ll do about a hundred or so,” Lucas added. “But I don’t think I’ll do as many as he did. I won’t last as long.”

Tessa lifted her head and gazed into his face. “Why would you say such a thing? Of course you will.”

“I doubt it,” he told her. “I won’t make old bones. Granddad got sick, too, after sin-eating. I didn’t know that’s what it was when I was a kid, but he told me. But he never was as sick as I get. Every time I do a sinner, I’m sicker for longer. And it takes more time to get over it.”

She believed him. In the dim light of the single lamp, Lucas still appeared haggard. And he’d been very ill in her opinion. “You call it ‘sin sickness.’ Explain what you mean and why you got so sick.”

His eyes reflected anguish beyond words. “I’ll try, Tessa. It’s not easy to explain. I eat the person’s sins and it means I take them onto my soul. It’s kind of like putting on another shirt or two, someone else’s over mine. But the sins are represented in the food so when I eat the sin, I literally take all the bad things someone’s done and put them into my body. I start getting sick almost as soon as I’ve swallowed the last bite.”

“The first thing is my body tries to reject the foreign matter and it fights against it with fever, usually a high one. My body responds the way it does to a flu bug with fever, achiness, headache, and sore muscles. Then, on top of that, the sin affects my guts like poison. It tears up my stomach. The worse sins make more pain. I’ve had average stomachaches from it right up to the most terrible belly pains you can imagine. Severe cramps, sharp pains like broken glass shredding my innards, you name it, and I’ve had it. At the same time, the fever drains my strength and energy.”

“When the sin sickness passes, I’m worn out and weak, not fit to do anything. It used to last a few hours, then I’d feel better, but these days it last twenty-four hours sometimes, plus another twelve until I’m really back to normal. Calvin Bates must’ve been a rotten old bastard, worse than I thought, because his sins were bad ones and near about killed me.”

“I know,” Tessa said as she grasped both his hands tight in hers. “I’m worried. You don’t look well yet.”

He made a face. “I’ll be okay by morning if I get some sleep. I told you I’d be all right, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Tessa answered around a knot of unshed tears in her throat.

“I will be.”

Although Lucas didn’t say them, Tessa heard the unspoken words, this time. Tired, anxious, and afraid, she couldn’t hold back her tears. When he saw she wept, Lucas pulled Tessa onto his lap. He folded her against his body and held her close. Her head rested against Lucas’ bare chest as she vented all her turbulent emotions. She wept as Lucas stroked her back. His arms provided the comfort she sought, and in his embrace, Tessa knew she’d come home.

Seven years of auditions and bravado, one mundane job after another, friends who failed to grasp her essence, the exotic and yet forever foreign bustle of Nashville faded into the past. This was where she belonged. Lucas offered momentary security and bliss. Just like in the fairy tales, there’d be a happy ending.

She savored the moment until reality sank into her consciousness. Her beloved Lucas wasn’t a prince riding a white stallion, and they weren’t headed into a perfect sunset toward happily ever after. Tessa wasn’t a princess, fairy tale, or otherwise.

Her man was a sin-eater, something few in the modern world had ever heard about and fewer believed. Sin-eaters were the stuff of dark legend, often shunned and misunderstood. She wasn’t a country star, just a woman who tried too hard to be someone else. Her voice resonated and reminded people of Patsy Cline, but maybe she should’ve made her own music. Maybe she still could.

But life loomed ahead filled with potential disaster. Tessa had no doubt Lucas still loved her and her feelings hadn’t ever changed. Love didn’t seem like enough to change anything. Instead of thinking about Snow White waking at her true love’s kiss, she thought more of Romeo and Juliet’s tragic end. Love didn’t always deliver happiness.

Tessa listened to the steady sound of Lucas’ heart and a stray thought crept into her mind. If sin-eaters didn’t have wives, there wouldn’t have been a long line of Rowlands, one generation after another to serve in the role.

“Lucas,” she said.

“What, honey girl?”

“Your grandfather must’ve had a wife, right.”

“Uh-huh.” He sounded drowsy.

“And the other Lucas, he had one, too?”

“Yeah, they did.”

“So sin-eaters marry and have families, don’t they?”

His sigh heaved his chest enough to almost dislodge her. “I guess, but it didn’t go so well for the ones who did.” Somehow it didn’t surprise Tessa. “What happened?”

“Old Lucas’ bride delivered a baby, then died,” Lucas said. “But the son grew up to marry and have kids. Their oldest boy would be my granddad. He married a schoolteacher, a woman who came to teach country school ‘round here from up around Jefferson City. Everyone says she was a pretty woman and smart. I’ve got a picture of her somewhere I can show you later, if you want.”

She’d love to see it but right now she needed information so she prodded him, “And?”

“She died, too.”

Tessa pressed the point. “How?”

“Well, I’ll get to that. They had four kids, my dad was the youngest. The oldest girl married at sixteen, moved off to New Mexico, and never wrote home. She’d found out what her daddy did and couldn’t handle it. They had another girl but she died at birth. Harry came along next but drowned in Elk River when he was eight. My daddy grew up, married my mama, and you know what happened to him. But after Harry died, my granma, she went a little crazy because she couldn’t stand losing her boy. Some say it was an accident, some say she did it on purpose, but she took a walk down a railroad track. The train came along and hit her.”

The sadness in his voice made Tessa ache and she wished she’d never asked. His arms tightened and after a long silence, Lucas said, “Tragedy follows sin-eaters around. I got more sad stories all the way back to Wales. Losing people you love is the worst, but taking on all the sins is almost as bad. Eating sin is one thing, but when it’s your granddad’s or someone close, its worse when you know everything terrible they did or thought. It’s hard to forget.”

His broken voice brought home the idea he didn’t just suffer in his body from sin-eating but in his soul and heart. Tessa couldn’t begin to imagine how it’d feel to know the sins of your near and dear. She’d struggled for years to deal with the family secrets she’d learned, including her mother’s high school affair with a teacher and her dad’s juvenile record. But both were small things compared to knowing the darkest places of another human heart.

“Lucas, it sounds like a living hell.”

He snorted. “It is. And it’s why you have to go back to Nashville as soon as you can before I destroy your life, too.”

“I don’t want to go.” Right now, Nashville seemed a million miles away, another reality like a distant dream. “I love you, Lucas, and I don’t want to give you up for any reason.”

“Honey, I love you, too,” Lucas said. “Don’t you think I want to keep you here and never let you walk out the door? It’s like living again to have you here and to know you never quit loving me. But it’s also why you have to go, Tessa Lou.”

“I won’t go,” she cried. “I won’t.”

Lucas said nothing, just held her deep into the night as their tears mingled into a river of shared grief. The last thing she saw before sleep pulled her into darkness was his face.