Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

It was Sunday morning. Everyone was in church, or still in bed in that tiny Kentucky town where Big Todd Cross found himself meditating over a game of solitaire and rum in an empty saloon. He drank, feeling miserable for having wounded a young boy too full of piss and vinegar the night before. But his reputation was always getting him in trouble; besides, the boy had been caught cheating at cards. All around Todd this morning were chairs turned upside down on round wooden tables. A balding old Negro in coveralls drifted around the room with a wet mop and pail, scrubbing at the blood stains near the bar. He stopped, leaned on the bar, and said to Todd, “That was Jim Slaughter’s boy you shot — he’ll be coming after you ’fore long.” He shook his head soberly, said, “Slaughter’s mean; he’ll drive you like a flash o’ lightning through a gooseberry bush.” Before Todd could reply, the door behind him burst open: Slaughter stormed in. Todd tried to remain cool, tensing himself as still as a cigar-store Indian. He watched Slaughter from the corner of his eyes. Children, Jim Slaughter was a huge barrel-chested man, with a beard hanging to his belt. He had a shotgun; he shoved it straight into Todd’s back.

“Cross,” he shouted, “I’m going to send you straight to West Hell!”

“Damn,” Todd whispered, “why you want to come in here and make me look bad?” And Todd took another drink.

Click.

Todd began to sweat.

Slaughter, too, poured sweat. Really, he didn’t want to do this, but some vague sense of honor was at stake. “You’re a player, eh? A gambler ?” he snarled. “Well, I wanna see you play fo’ your life, I wanna see you win it back from this gun barrel!” He motioned with a nod of his head to the terrified janitor to sit across from Todd. Said, “Willis, you’re gonna play this sonuvabitch and beat him, or I’ll blow your brains out!”

“Suh?” Willis stammered.

“And you,” Slaughter growled at Todd. “I’ll kill you if you lose.” He cut the cards with his free hand and returned behind Todd with the gun. “Play!” he shouted.

The plastic cards kept slipping from Big Todd’s trembling hands. Sweat blinded his eyes. But, by and by, he realized he was winning the game. He looked across the table at Willis. Todd’s heart sank. Poor Willis was pale; he clutched at his heart, and Todd could hear the old man whimpering and sobbing like a child. An emptiness filled Todd, a space so wide he felt himself fall therein and the gulf between himself and the old janitor evaporate like smoke. Todd misplayed his hand.

“What’re you doing?” Slaughter cried over Todd’s left shoulder. “Ya had that hand — ya had him beat!” Slaughter shuffled the cards again, and dealt another hand.

Todd sighed. He blew that one, too.

“Stop that!” Slaughter screamed.

Todd kept losing. Then he started to laugh, and big clear tears dropped from Willis’s eyes.

“You’re crazy,” Slaughter said.

“Yeh.”

“I got the right — the duty to kill ya now!”

“Sho.”

But he didn’t. Dazed, Slaughter lowered his gun to his side and stumbled, scratching his head, from the saloon. Todd and Willis, as soon as Slaughter was gone, broke into the whisky barrels in the basement and drank themselves blind.

Crowell smiled at Faith and said, “I guess that was okay,” and gave her an extra five dollars. He slept with her until morning, but before drifting off, he flung his arm around her waist, whispering, “It’s a shame the world isn’t really like that, isn’t it?”

She could not sleep that night and hated him for saying that, for calling into question that which she longed to believe. This disquietude — it followed her day and night like a stray dog, a curse, or damnation. It bothered her so that Faith could not eat the following day, or rest, and, finally, withdrew in desperation from her purse a circular she’d found on a bus the week before:

Why is there suffering? Is there a possibility of rebirth and hope in this life? Are you tired of living apart from the Truth? Are you tired of asking questions like this? Let us answer them for you. Come to The Church of Continual Light, 64th and Stony Island.

She went, giving herself completely to the urge to again be, if not free, at least saved. Though married in her childhood to God, she’d been a bad wife, had taken another lover: the Good Thing. But Faith, as she rode the bus south, consoled herself with the cleanliness that penitence possibly could bring. She found the Church of Continual Light wedged between a crumbling old brownstone and a bakery. Outside, she stood in the snow, shivering and listening as the singsong chants within merged in a single dreamy hum; she closed her eyes until the lights from inside lulled her with images and cloudy shapes forced along her eyelids. Reverend Brown had spoken of that shadowy, senseless, Cimmerian world where groping things collided like blind, hungry moles: she was there. Suffocating in it. Lost.

“Hallelujah!”

The cry rang inside, again and again, driven by a belief, a security she longed to have. Faith cracked open the door; she timidly peeked in. The storefront church must at one time have been a delicatessen; it smelled of raw salmon and catfish. It was packed. Toward the rear where she stood, snow dripping from her coat, were old, old men in green and gray workclothes and, farther up, fat, chubby women who clapped their hands and stomped their heavy rectangular feet. They stopped, even as the wet-eyed women on the wooden moaning bench went still when a lean-fleshed man in black pounded his podium at the front of the room. In his right hand he held a Bible, in his left — a big fistful of thunder:

“I gave my heart to know wisdom, to know madness and folly,” he said, “and I’ve seen all the wonders under the sun and— behold —all is vanity. ”

Silently Faith stepped to the last row of chairs. The minister’s voice thrilled her; she felt safe again, at ease and acquainted with the anxious, sweating faces around the room.

Up front, the minister folded his hands. Intoned, “I know what’s in your hearts, brothers — I know, because I’ve been there, I’ve seen it myself. The whole world’s been there, because every one of us has to cross that deep sea of questionin’ by himself. You think you’re the center of the whole world at first, you think it whorls around you like the planets around the sun — don’t you?”

“Yes, Lord!” a woman shouted.

“But one day, you come across someone else who thinks just the very same thing. You’ve got to fight then, to do battle over who’s gonna be supreme, you or that other fellah, ’cause that’s the way we men are — strugglin’ against each other with our wills, our dreams. ” The minister’s mouth opened. Faith caught her breath. His mouth was bright red inside, the color of fresh blood. “And you both lose!” he boomed. “You both see neither one of you have any thin’ to do with what pushes the world along. What, then?” he said. “Where do you turn, then, brothers — sisters, what do you seek?”

Pensively Faith pushed forward in her seat. She bit her fingernails.

“You look beyond — both you and that other fellah, and see that the world’s moved by somethin’ bigger than either one of you — somethin’ more than you’ll ever be, but somethin’ you must know, must be like if you’re ever to be free—”

“Yes,” Faith whispered. Her nerves and brain hummed; she gave herself to the enchantment. “Yes—”

“And,” he said, “you go on lookin’ for it. You look all over the earth! You look to the South, to the East, some of you even came up North to find it, but you never do see it, do you ?”