tore at a heel of bread with his teeth.

Wiping his face on one arm, with the other he thrust his open palm at the woman nearest him. She pressed a coin into it spitefully and he took his leave. Everything was gray: the rain and fog, the stone tower, the mourners, the corpse, the countervailing ambivalences between the widow and the horrid man. Swithering is the Scots word for it—to be of two minds, in two realities at once: grudging and grateful, faithful and doubtful, broken and beatified—caught between a mirage and an apocalypse. The theater of it was breathtaking, the bolt of drama. I was fully awake. It was over in ten, maybe fifteen seconds.

I knew him at once.

The scene triggered a memory of a paragraph I’dread 12 years before in mortuary school, from The History of American Funeral Directing, by Robert Habenstein and William Lamers. I have that first edition, by Bulfin Printers of Milwaukee circa 1955.

The paragraph in Chapter III, page 128, at the bottom reads:

A nod should be given to customs that disappeared. Puckle tells of a curious functionary, a sort of male scapegoat called the “sin-eater.” It was believed in some places that by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of beer over a corpse, and by accepting a six-pence, a man was able to take unto himself the sins of the deceased, whose ghost thereafter would no longer wander.

The “Puckle” referenced was Bertram S. Puckle, a British scholar, whose Funeral Customs, Their Origin and Development would