Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Barrett came back.

The first Friday it happened, Faith had just finished with her final customer, and sat at her table for a spell, mulling over her life’s meaning as she twisted her hair into tight braids, smeared on facial packs the color of thick bottom land clay, and rubbed the ash off her ankles and legs with mineral oil. Her fingers wound her hair mechanically around into tiny curls while she thought, first of Barrett, then of his Doomsday Book, which sat beneath a Gideon Bible on her desk. Then she clicked off the ceiling light, her head burning with the tight braids, and went to bed. By and by she smelled the scent of brimstone, of old clothes scented with moisture and earth. Then: the feathery tickle of ashes in the air. She sneezed, panic bubbling in her chest. Off in the room’s northeast corner she saw a snow-white cat sidle slowly from one wall to the next. It said, “I can’t do any thing a’tall until Richard comes,” and passed through her locked door like a spirit.

A much larger cat, the size of a suckling calf, appeared at the same wall, walked the same way, and said, “I can’t do any thing a’tall until Richard comes.”

Beads of sweat burst upon Faith’s brow. Faraway she heard, or thought she heard, the rustling of graveclothes and the scraping of bare feet along the floor above the hammering of her heart. Faith lay still as a board.

In the same corner a third cat, this one the size of a pony, appeared; it swayed slowly across the room, looking at her through large, luminous, laughing eyes.

“I can’t do any thing a’tall until Richard comes.” But before disappearing, it said, “But I think he’s here now.”

She felt it. Her stomach clenched like a fist around his name. On the other side of her bed, Faith became aware of a form creeping in beside her — she heard the bedsprings groan, felt them settle under a great weight.

“Oh, God—” Her voice shook. She prayed, then glanced to the pillow beside her. It held the indentation of a head. But no head was there, none at all. Floating free in the air were Barrett’s features, just inches above the pillow: turbid, hazel eyes, a toothless smile and crooked nose. She was across the room — uncertain how she’d moved so fast — her braids unraveling in the sweat from her scalp, and her limbs shaking like a leaf. How had it happened? Spirits could not return unless their hosts had committed suicide, or were conjured at their gravesites by wereworkers who, in the new of the , and in the hours of the and , said to one of the inhabiter signs of the , , or , the following:

I conjure thee [deceased’s name] by the bloud that ranne from our Lord Jesus Christ crucified, and by the cleaving of heaven, and by the renting of the temple’s veil, and by the darkness of the sunne in the time of his death, and by the rising up of the dead in the time of his resurrection, and by the virgine Marie mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the mysterious name of God: Tetragrammaton. I conjure thee and charge thee my will be fulfilled, upon paine of everlasting condemnation: Fiat, fiat, fiat: Amen.

(All of which must be uttered in utmost piety, none of which sweet Faith remembered.) But somehow she recollected the way to exorcise haints:

“What,” she cried, “in the name of the Lord, do you want with me?”

The ghastly grin widened but did not disappear.

“ Please .!”

That mouth, that disembodied, grisly grimace in the dark — spoke. “I. still think. therefore. I am. ”

Faith clicked on the light. He was gone. But four days passed before she stopped shaking or took food. She avoided the hotel on Fridays, wandering instead through the crowded city streets until Saturday morning. But Barrett was always close by — a will-o’-the-wisp glimpsed furtively or felt intuitively in the alarm at the base of her neck before he disappeared. She changed addresses, hoping to escape him. Faith gave Mrs. Beasley twenty-four hours’ notice on Wednesday, and was out of the hotel with six hours to spare. With the money Barrett had given her she moved into the low-rent Eden Green apartments on One Hundred Thirtieth Street.

Children, there’s nothing worse than being haunted by a philosopher’s spirit — waking up in the middle of the night with your heart heaving heavy strokes to hear, next to your ear, something muttering, “You may well be free of Barrett, but not Barrett eity ,” or worse, “Riddle me this, if you’re so smart: Will an arrow ever strike its intended target if, before it can cross that distance, one-half of that distance must be crossed first, and one-half of that, and one-half of that, and one-half of that —”

Faith feared for her sanity. For months this went on, even after she’d settled in Eden Green, cut back her streetwalking to supply only what she needed to balance her budget, and enrolled in secretarial school. Even this day Barrett shadowed her as she sat across a breakfast table from a clean-shaven, fresh-smelling young man named Isaac Maxwell, her eyes searching the room for the wise man’s haint.

“Everybody wants power,” Maxwell said in a brassy voice trained, he told her, in a six-week course in public speaking. In his left hand he held the op-ed page of a morning paper, his paper, The Sentry, above his plate of cooling ham, eggs, and hash browns. “But few people understand what real power is,” he said, softer now, waving his fork and watching her closely. “It’s directly connected with ethics, with what’s good, y’know. And what’s good is what makes a man feel more powerful.” He was chuckling, his eyes crafty and his shoulders hunched. Some folks might say that Isaac Maxwell looked a bit queer, as though, at birth, he’d been unable to make up his mind about what he wanted to be. There was a little goat in his long head, the look of a cow in his moist eyes and, in his slight figure, you could see the outline of, perhaps, an upright wolf. His chin was weak and peppered with shaving scars, slightly blue at the edges. He lingered over his breakfast, scratching sleep from his eyes, the wings of his nose widening whenever he spoke. The color of his skin, it seemed to Faith, was yellow and had the same chroma as the yolk of his eggs — like urine from enflamed kidneys. Though he was only twenty-four he was balding, which explained his wig and why he tugged at its corners whenever it slipped back on his head, loose like a yarmulke. When this happened Faith looked away. This time she lowered her eyes to concentrate on his editorial, “The Contest of Wills.”

“All that garbage about black and white and gay power misses the mark,” Maxwell said. He paused, his attention remaining on his reflection just behind Faith in the broad glass of the restaurant window. There he saw his bright orange suitcoat and blue butterfly bowtie, and carefully lifted flecks of lint off his shoulders. “Faith,” he said, still looking over her shoulder, “everybody’s out for Number One— Nu-u-u-mero Uno, and anybody who tells you different is a goddamn liar. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Society’s composed of individuals, and every one of ’em’s got an individual will. Society thrives on the clash of those wills.” Faith listened from the back of her head, her chin on the heel of her right hand and a cigarette between her fingers. Maxwell’s eyes flashed for an instant. “Please,” he said sharply, “my asthma. ” She doused the cigarette, hid it in her purse, apologized, and tried to concentrate on his editorial. Which wasn’t easy. The elastic in her underwear cut into her abdomen. She was eating better these days at Maxwell’s expense and it was showing. She shifted forward in her seat, tugged at the fold of her slip, and attended to him. He said, “Power”—still studying his profile in the glass—“is what it’s all about.” He wagged his fork at her. “But every body won’t get it.” She looked up as if to say, no? “Some people are naturally weak and, to tell it like it is, deserve to be flunkies, others — like myself — are strong,” he tapped his chest with the stem of his fork, “way down deep, I mean. The weak ones go out to demonstrate, march, boycott, strike and picket — they try to change the world, you understand? The point is to use it.” He shook his head, his free hand pressed to his forehead to hold down his wig. “Those people will never know what real power is. You know what it is? You know what’s really good?”