Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

There were chintz draperies and valances framing the old iron bed Maxwell had restored, bracket tables on both sides of the bed, and old-fashioned pillow shams. At the cluttered bedroom dresser, Maxwell tightened a triple knot in his tie, then folded the dimple in with his thumbnail. “Like I said, you’d just better get your fat ass in the kitchen and fix dinner. If I come back here with company and there’s nothing on the table—”

Behind him, Faith frowned at his reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Said, “You’ll what ?”

Maxwell sighed and threw up his hands, turning to face her. She could see he was tired, and without his wig he looked old, old. The job, the exigencies of editing, laying out picture pages, and the almost one-year postponement of his prison column were wearing him a bit thin. You could see it in his chin. It seemed to grow smaller day by day.

“I don’t want to argue,” Maxwell said tepidly. He pulled his wig off the dresser, trying to remain calm, and dusted it off. He tugged it on — backward, and Faith bent down, doubled up with laughter. He began to color, and she came to herself, angry again.

“You never want to argue!” she shouted. “Well, I do!” Then she stormed after him as he hurried away from her out into the hallway, his palms pressed over his ears, into the living room. Maxwell’s pickled-pine eighteenth-century desk was in one corner, a pair of blond beechwood Sheraton open armchairs were situated on either side of a davenport near a Biedermeier satinwood table and two Italian fruitwood chairs. Pewter and Sandwich glass accessories were on the surfaces of things and, just above the sofa against the southern wall, was a print of de Chirico’s Horses at Sea.

There, trying to ignore her, Maxwell lifted flecks of lint off his sports coat, talking in a detached way, as though to the wood-paneled walls. “I told you what to do, woman.”

“You expect me to jump whenever you say so, don’t you?!” She stood in front of him, trying to fix her eyes on his. “ Don’t you?”

“I just expect you to carry the ball sometimes,” Maxwell said sharply. “Is that asking too much?”

Nervously Faith chewed her lip. Thought: My life is not a football game. She wanted to tell him she was afraid to face company, not because of the trouble involved in fixing dinner and setting the table, or because it involved “carrying the ball” for the business guests he brought home, but because it would take her forever to make IT presentable. The fruit of her body had gone bad. Each day she looked in the mirror she saw deeper lines around IT’s mouth and darker circles under IT’s eyes. IT was beginning to lose IT’s hair rapidly from overuse of a sizzling black straightening comb; IT changed clothes three times a day but still looked terrible; IT had spare tires around IT’s waist that no amount of morning isometrics with that muscular man on daytime television could reduce. IT, she feared, was a hopeless case.

“You just get your fat ass in gear,” Maxwell said with finality. He’d taken his favorite pose, his right leg slightly forward and bent at the knee, the left knee locked, and his left hand shoved in his pocket. A model’s pose. Long ago he’d asked Faith, “How should I stand?” and presented several postures from Gentleman’s Quarterly for her as she braided her hair — his arms straight at his sides, or crossed, his feet together or parted. “Which one looks best, honey?” To get rid of him she chose the one he posed now. “Did you hear me?” Maxwell said. He looked, or so he thought, like Harry Belafonte.

In the center of the living-room floor Faith began screaming. Maxwell’s palms flew to his ears.

“That’s not going to work this time,” he shouted above her scream. He gave her his three-quarter view, said by some to be his best angle. “I won’t hear it!”

She screamed louder.

“Faith, I’m warning you! When I bring this ex-con back, you’d better—”

A sound like splintering wood came from Faith’s head. She collapsed.

There was a green meadow ringing with earth rhythms, stretching as far as her eyes could see; it was bounded on the north by the aurora borealis, on the east by the rising sun, on the south by the procession of the equinoxes, and on the west — by the Day of Judgment. It was a beautiful place. Birds darted through the air as fast as bullets. Knee-deep and dew-covered was the grass across this stretch of land, and here and there were trees. Faith felt the moisture of the ground beneath her and stood up. The grass rippled with a warm unseen wind that sent the tops of maple trees swaying, like dancers, in the breeze. The area was inhabited with all the creatures Big Todd once told her about: ax-handle hounds who lived on wood shavings in lumber camps; the bearlike Gumberoos, usually found in burnt-out forests and who, it was said, were impervious to bullets. To tell the truth, Faith found herself in the mythical land of Diddy-Wah-Diddy. It’s fairly hard to get to — the road leading to Diddy-Wah-Diddy has so many curves that a mule hauling a wagonload of fodder can eat off the rear of the wagon while he’s walking along; it’s so crooked gnats have snapped their necks going around the curves. Faith discovered behind her a tall elm with hundreds of branches bearing thick green leaves. Those leaves rustled, showering her with dew.

And then the tree spoke: “My baby’s blue. I can tell—”

Faith stepped back and shivered. “Daddy?”

“Uh, huh.”

Faith caught her breath. “But how—?”

The tree rustled again. “It’s simple, honey. I said, ‘Uh, huh,’ because that’s one of the words the Devil gave us. I like it. Lucifer was down in Hell one day, taking inventory of his damned souls. He discovered that the number was runnin’ pretty low in the fourth and fifth circles. So he flew up to Heaven and stole a few angels. He stuffed them into his mouth and nose and ears and under his arms. But when he was flyin’ back to earth somebody on the ground said, ‘You takin’ alla them angels to Hell, Devil?’ Lucifer opened his mouth and said, ‘Right,’ and all those angels fell right out and beat a straight line back to Heaven. So the Devil went back for more. That same fella said, ‘You takin’ a new batch to Hell, Devil?’ Old Lucifer jes kept his mouth shut this time. He mumbled, ‘Uh, huh.’ ”

“Not that, ” Faith said. “How can you be. a tree?”

The elm said, “Don’t let that worry you none. We all become trees, phlox, and hydrangeas as soon as we die. That’s only if you lived a righteous life, though. Ask your mother,” the tree said. “She’s right here.” One of its branches gestured toward a weeping willow to its right.

Faith said, “Momma?”

“Don’t ask me no questions,” the willow whined, “I’ve got ’bout seven million gallons of carbon dioxide to move before I—”

“You are Momma!” Faith squealed.

The elm sighed through its branches. “She don’t never wind down.” Then, with one of its broader leaves, it stroked Faith’s cheek. Said, “Would you like to be a tree? Really, you’re supposed to die first, but I think I can get it arranged for you.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. Can I be a maple tree?”

“It’s done,” said the elm.

At first, Faith felt nothing unusual. She saw the lush meadow as before. But when she tried to move, she found herself rooted to the spot. She had innumerable limbs and could feel, where her toes should have been, the slow wiggling in the ground of worms and brown ants, as busy as businessmen. She felt so natural she concluded she’d always been a maple tree, that she had slumbered, as maples do, during the long white winter when her branches were encased in ice and the meadow was sprinkled with a film of snow that looked like talcum powder, and only dreamed she was a woman. Now she was awake. Spring birds were returning from their long sojourn south to reinhabit her uppermost limbs. Goofus birds flew backward, as was their habit, and settled in her leaves, as did Phillyvamos and the single-winged, storklike Gillyfamoo birds. Wiggywams ( Melancorpus dissolvens ) — beaverlike beasts who often dissolve in their own tears — settled to sleep against her trunk. They were joined by Tripodermae ( Collapsocorpus geomobilus ) who retreated their telescopic legs and lay back on their long kangaroo tails to rest in her shade. Some birds sang, and she understood their language, as well as the obscure tongue of the other trees and slumbering beasts at the edge of the meadow. The dream was over; she was going to be all right.