Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

“Pray with me,” Brown said.

Startled, she withdrew her hand. Brown’s words had not come from his lips; like smoke, they had risen from the room itself, flowing from silence, returning to it, at first everywhere — surrounding them both — then gone. Her eyes in desperation sought familiar details in the smooth grain of the kitchen door where as a child she could often see the faces of jinn, mermen, and fairy queens that filled her father’s make-believe world. Faith studied the room and held her breath (“You’ll live longer holding your breath,” Lavidia had often said). The kitchen remained beyond her: out there. Inaccessible to love, to need. Out there. Its chairs and tables appeared tiny, as though made for and by dwarfs. The walls receded from her, meeting at apexes a dizzy distance away.

The reverend stroked his squared jaw with sharp, mechanical motions and laughed uneasily, perhaps frightened, for Faith was said to have funny ways like her father. “It’s always hard at first. always.”

“Momma told me to get myself a good thing,” Faith said softly. Then she asked, “What do you think she meant?”

Reverend Brown smiled as broad as a Halloween pumpkin and seemed to swell in her vision. He stepped around the table behind Faith, floorboards groaning against his weight, and placed both his hands on her shoulders. “Faith, you know what the good thing is. You’ve known ever since your father died.” His fingers tightened, holding her hunched over the table. “Don’t you remember what happened to you?”

Brown’s hard calluses met her skin, the rough texture of his fingers squeezing from her the nightmare she had hidden from herself long ago. Faith closed her eyes against remembrance. But it ascended — the images, clear as crystal, hurtling before her mind, her ears filling with the words of the messenger: God called Todd Cross.

She’d heard it first while playing during recess in the schoolyard. Children were everywhere, fighting, laughing, exchanging frogs and funny-shaped stones, and Faith had thought someone, perhaps Alpha Omega Jones, who’d said he cared about her, was trying to talk about her father in the cruel way of grown-ups. She turned toward the sound, expecting the next call to be about her mother’s virtue or her own eyes, which people said were uneven, or her legs, often mocked by some children as skinny. Over the heads of the other children Faith saw fat Eula May Jenkins, her mother’s neighbor, wheezing near her teacher in the doorway of the schoolhouse, her face drawn into itself like a prune, crying, “Death sneezed Todd Cross stiff as a board.” The woman’s huge frame shook, she wailed, she balled her fists. “Lavidia found him half an hour ago at the edge of the woods. Don’t it figure the way he acted and all? Didn’t I tell you them crazy ideas would catch up to him sooner or later?”

Faith broke away from the other children and ran. Eula May Jenkins called after her, but she pressed her palms to her ears and hurried home. Fifteen minutes later she stood breathlessly watching the farmhouse from afar. People crowded the small front porch and spoke in excited voices. A strange woman called to her from the yard, but Faith turned, her shoes flying from her feet, and raced for the woods. When she reached the crowd at the border of the woods she was barefoot and breathless. She shoved her way through a maze of legs and stopped, aware of her father’s smell on the air: tobacco and sweat. Both his bare feet swung above from a pine tree. Caught from her waist from behind, Faith was carried away.

She had been only six then, and by nightfall most of her fear was spent. What truly upset her after seeing her father’s dangling, ashy legs was that everyone now expected something from her. But no one said what it was. Many visitors came to the farmhouse and told her to be brave, to pray. Brave about what, pray to whom? Lavidia shaved her head and told her, “Your daddy sneezed his soul away — it’s just.” Faith accepted this without further questioning. It was believable, for life was filled with stranger things, as her father had repeatedly told her. She remembered his saying, “Everything that is is right, or it wouldn’t be.” During the wake Faith, thinking of this, even smiled.

Concern for Faith’s peculiar reaction brought Reverend Brown, younger then and indefatigable, on regular visits to the farmhouse. He would park his old Plymouth close to the porch and sit late at night with Lavidia as she smoked and spit and rocked in the moonlight, telling her of the great spirit man who would soon speak to sinners in their county. Faith would sit close to her mother, dozing after a big dinner, thinking of her father and Alpha, who made her laugh, and only half hearing the plans for her salvation.

The day after one such visit her mother dressed her in white and took her miles from home to an enormous tent in the fields behind town. Faith had been excited — it was a circus tent, tall as timber, with flaps that spread like wings. Big Todd, she remembered, had worked in a circus, had been part of its world and found what he called his calling there. Mightn’t she, too? Before they reached the entrance Faith could hear singing inside and the clash of tambourines. But it struck her as they entered that this place held no entertainment. Old men and wasted women she recognized as tireless sharecroppers and maids sang from chairs lining the interior of the tent; some spoke hurriedly, biting their tongues, in the lost language, while others spun like tops through the aisles. They had not come to see an event; they had come to be one.

Faith pulled against Lavidia, who slapped her lightly and dragged her inside to the front row, where Eula May Jenkins — not a neighbor now, or a bearer of grief, or a whisperer of rumors, but a silent dancer — beat the soles of her bare feet against the ground. Beside her two women held Alpha Omega Jones in his chair. He, the boy who loved her even then, was almost unrecognizable. His face was crimson, twisted, his lips parted, screaming emptiness, and his limbs jerked in all directions, blurred like fluttering batwings. Down the row, deep in meditation, a cripple mashed an off-key accordion; leathery old men in barley-stained overalls bent forward in their seats to hear Reverend Alexander Magnus, the spirit man, at the front of the tent. He stood head and shoulders above the others in the tent, over seven feet tall if a foot, intimidating them with his size and deep sonorous voice. When he gestured — raising his big square hands into the air and pointing toward the sky or shoving them out with his fingers curled back like claws — they could catch their breaths and hold them for what seemed like an hour. Magnus paced and pointed at people in the front row, his face shut and sweating. “Children, you are crooked and ulcerous, you are cancerous and weak. You are damned from birth and distant from the source of all good. You are as dust and excrement to Him. You are as the groveling mole and eyeless maggot before the power that pardons your trespasses and prevents your death. You are nothing! In due time, it is written, your feet shall slide and the unsteady floor of your life shall give way. Shall it be tonight?” He looked left, his eyebrows arched, toying with their fear. “Or tomorrow?”—looking right, his eyes wide, sly. “You are damned for delighting in this world. Your tongues savor fatback and burgoo, your flesh hungers for other flesh.” Magnus stopped to stare into the face of a farmer and his wife. They shrank back, silent, and he shouted, “Worms will be your supper soon!

“Sinner, have you ever tortured a spider? Have you ever held it over a smoking fire on its silky web, sick of its slimy form, feeling — deep in your heart — that you’d let it drop and watch it burn? Have you ever stalked and cornered a fly for the trespass of buzzing in your car? Brother Spider,” he said to Alpha, “Sister Fly,” to Lavidia, “Sinners!” to everyone in the tent, “your life is supported by a perfect being who watches you with disgust, just like you watch chinches and waterbugs, slugs and lice, knowing that if you have the cheek to go too far, then— whop! ” Magnus slapped his hands together like a cannon shot. “But He loves you still ( I don’t know why!). Nothing else explains why you didn’t drop into hell in your pajamas last night. Nothing you have done, do now or will do shall save you. Not even innocence can save you.” (Herewith Faith shuddered and grabbed Lavidia’s clammy hand.) “Witness crib death and the diseases of childhood. Witness the fury of storms, floods, droughts, lightning, hail, the dangers of machinery, earthquakes, plagues, famines and poisoned food, senseless slaughter, recessions, depressions, bloodshed, revolutions, civil wars, and the eventual destruction that creeps closer and closer to your front door. It’s here now. Can you feel it — death moving ghoul-like in the dark? Maybe tonight when you put out your candles, close your eyes, and start to sleep lightly, maybe then you’ll feel death down your spine and come full awake with a start, sweat streaming in your clothes, your eyes searching the darkness of your bedroom until you see the red eyes of the Devil riveted on you; over there, brothers — in that far corner, tiny red eyes just to the right of your chamber pot.” Magnus laughed at the thought of it. No one else said a mumbling word. “He’ll shove his claw down your throat, fish up your soul and steal away, lame and hunchbacked, leaving no tracks for your family and friends to find you — the real you, brothers, because it’ll be shoved, gibbering and pale, into Satan’s big black traveling bag. Pay attention! My prayers can’t save you then. He’ll toss you like so much trash into rivers brimming with blood and burning corpses. All the filth and offal ever to pass through the bodies of birds and beasts and men will fill your mouths. The fire there is forever,” he said in a hushed voice. “It boils the blood in your veins and bakes your brain like a biscuit; it blackens your skin so you’d think you’re white right now. You’ll smell your hair burn, brothers — light a strand right now and see how it stinks; you’ll hear the howl of demons forever: ‘ Were you not saved? ’ And you will call on Him. Who will not hear. Torment for eternity, brothers — because you loved this illusion, this fire-wheel we call the world!”