Nobody wants this job. That is rather the point of it.
The family lays the loaf on the shrouded chest and the ale beside it, and they send for the one man in the parish who will come. He does not knock. He eats standing, quick, with the mourners watching him from the doorway like he is something they found in the well.
Sixpence. That is the wage. Sixpence, and every sin that poor soul carried out of the world now travels home with him under his coat.
He does this fifty, sixty times in a life. He is not invited to the wake. He is not spoken to at market.
And when it is his turn on the table, there is no one left in the county low enough to eat for him.
