Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Faith had been witness to her mother’s struggle with the doctor’s story. Lavidia lay in bed, taciturn, frowning, and looking nauseous long after her virus ended, refusing food, pouting, and sleeping without rest. In the end, she transformed the story to destroy its content. What persisted in her mind was the reference to breathing: “I’m fifty-five today,” she announced on her birthday to Faith, “and that means I’ve almost took four hundred million breaths; it’s God’s will. Everybody’s got a certain number to draw ’fore they die. That’s His way. ”

And so it went until she drew her four hundred millionth. Standing there in the dry weeds before Lavidia’s headstone, Faith had been unable to cry. Why cry? It — the struggle to complete life’s monotonous movement — had ended for her mother. For her, as for Lynch, all that could matter were the absolutely perfect moments when one’s breathing was the heaviest — great quantities of oxygen flooded the brain, gorged the cells. In battle, in ecstasy, in love, each click, click, click of the body’s machinery came through with clarity. Discharge was what was good. Release. Life’s meaning, if it had any meaning at all, was defined by death. Death alone.

But was that beautiful?

Parallel to but a world away from her mother’s headstone was that of Big Todd. It read:

TODD CROSS

Carpe diem, quam minimum

credula postero

Faith, as a child, had often asked her mother the meaning of the words engraved beneath her father’s name, but Lavidia avoided the question entirely: “Your father was a fool.”

She had touched the headstone. That rubbing of the moist moss and the stone’s cool surface against her fingertips were what the inscription meant. She was certain.

But also this:

The intimations ever on the tip of her tongue that never broke free into words; the sudden rush of rippling warmth through her skin whenever she stood on the highest hillslopes of Hatten County and peered across its smooth verdant fields and corrugated farmlands, whenever she stepped barefoot in darkness from her bed and peeped through the farmhouse window frosted white by winter to see timorous barts and ewes searching among moonflower vines in the yard for food. That was what it meant: all of it — the shivering animals and drifts of snow beneath a blue band of sky; all creation would have been sad if she missed its appearance, for the naked, twisting trees and bushes cared for her, responded to her admiration and — it was true — languished when she herself was sad. So sweet were the songs of the field birds in the time of Sweet Grain that she, if she could have located a dragon, would have tasted its blood and flesh, as the conjure doctors advise, to fathom their language. While Hatten County harbored no dragons that anyone knew of, it did have the old werewitch (though some saw her as a necessary evil like auto accidents and yearly locust), and stranger things still. Those words on the headstone were themselves strange; but strangeness was essential to what Big Todd preached.

Remembering:

Screeds of speech, shrapnel-like faces spinning again before her eyes like hail in the heart of a storm. She remembered Big Todd filling their kitchen table with fruits and sweetmeats and, for the dinner hour, encouraging discussions. Lavidia, given to silence as she shoveled sliced beets and potatoes into her mouth, rarely found the mealtime appropriate for talking. But Todd, pausing with his cheeks burgeoning like old luggage crammed with underwear, would grin and nod at Faith, his eyes half-lidded as he retold tales he’d heard in town from Crazy Lewis, the cobbler, or Paddlefoot Dean, who sat a daily vigil on the doorsteps of the town’s only drugstore. Once, between his second and third helpings of beef gumbo, he decided to explain why men and women were different. Faith had raised the question after seeing, earlier that day, the unashamed mating of two Hampshire hogs in the mud. It thoroughly confused her, being somehow strange, rare, yet revealing as something kept secret from her for years. And Alpha told her that in town there lived a lonely widower, Needem Dewey, who longed for the affections of the flighty blacksmith’s daughter, the most beautiful girl in town. He sought audience with the Swamp Woman, and received from her the formula for a love potion. Following her directions, Needem lifted dirt from his loved one’s footprints, mixed it with his own clipped toenails and essence of pomegranate. And ate it. Immediately he knew of the Swamp Woman’s trickery. It was a love potion, all right. But for the use of women. And for years thereafter young boys from the mill crowded like bogflies around poor Needem’s door. Yes, love was strange. And Big Todd kept it mysterious.

Time was, he said, when all animals had no sex. Unsex, he called it, because they all had the same male and female equipment, and could mate perfectly well with themselves like tapeworms do today. That situation didn’t last long. A god, some god, any god (or, maybe, Big Todd himself, who felt godlike when spinning metaphysical yarns) decided, as gods are wont to do, that things would be more interesting (and wasn’t that what life was all about?) if he split all those animals in twain. Which he did. But not only that: he flung them around the world so none of the animals could find their proper halves, not without a lot of searching. It stood to reason that living half-lives like that wasn’t pleasant at all. Everything on the earth — birds, beasts, grubworms, and especially men — were and still are incredibly lonesome, and suffer a lot until their lost halves are found. So, Todd concluded, leaning back in his seat and rubbing his stomach like a flesh-fed Druid, such was sex. That ever-so-often feeling that rolled across your brain like fog; it was nothing more than the call to hunt for your other half. Bad marriages, or ruined love affairs, were nothing but two wrong halves coming together. “Square pegs in round holes,” he said. And he laughed.

Lavidia howled.

She lobbed an car of corn across the table — it hit him on his forehead.

“Why you tellin’ lies to this child?”

Todd was cool. With his napkin he wiped his face. “Ain’t no harm—”

“No harm !” Lavidia wailed. “You’re going to pump this child fulla lies, and the world’s goin’ to eat her alive! Faith,” she said, “you’ll learn about sex soon enough. Love is perfect till somebody pulls back the bedcovers on you—”

“Stop that!” Now Todd was furious. Faith had never seen him so angry, his monkey up, his mouth greasy with gumbo and twisted across his clenched teeth. His fork bent slowly in his fist. She sat between them, her head revolving from left to right as first her father, then Lavidia stood up shouting, like soon-to-battle stags. She was sorry she’d asked about sex, but knew they argued this way often. When she couldn’t sleep, she’d tiptoe to their bedroom at the rear of the farmhouse, only to find her father all naked and hairless like a salamander, pleading with Lavidia, who pretended, and rather poorly, to be asleep or sick. Todd would finish the argument by storming from the house. His usual tactic. He would snatch his jacket from the rack at the front door, wearing it inside out so spirits would leave his person be, and disappear for long walks alone. Faith would steal out the back door, searching for him and, if she was lucky, she would see his outline against the road. For a long time he would say nothing while they walked. This was disturbing, for she was used to him telling her tales as she walked with him, and could egg him on with, “Tell me another mile.” But after arguments with Lavidia he would be withdrawn and moody, unable to conjure even though she chattered nervously and sang his favorite work songs to him, songs he had heard on chain gangs, in cotton fields. Finally, he would smile, laugh as she imagined shamans did, and tell her something outrageous. Or he’d talk about haints, though this was dangerous and would attract them just as sure as liquor on your clothes brings them at your heels.