Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

“He did ?” Faith cried. “Daddy was hurt?”

“Naw, he wasn’t hurt — jes caught in that old ’ooman’s magic spell. ‘Do you give up?’ I said, and he cried, ‘Naw!’ But I knew he had, and was jes too damn proud to admit hit.” Jones looked up cautiously and said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” Faith said. But she thought: Big Todd’s grave was not in a cemetery but behind their farmhouse — Alpha had lied. But he’d lied well.

“So,” Jones continued, “when he stopped turnin’ he fell down, and started tearin’ tufts of graveyard grass up with his fists. He shook his head, looked up at me real peaceful-like, and said, ‘Ain’t nobody beat me in life or death, and anybody who come as close as you did deserves to have my daughter.’ Then he started laughin’, and ’fore I could say ’nother word he was gone.”

Faith fought a sinking feeling in her solar plexus and a chill that seemed to be not on her skin but beneath it. She felt like a bird ensorceled by the eyes of a cat, and hung on Jones’s slow, melodious speech. “He really said that?”

Jones nodded. Said: “Believe hit. I swore that nothin’ was gonna keep Alpha Jones from his honey if I could help hit, not even dead folks. I didn’t count on your momma, though.” He whistled through his square teeth. “Live folks can be a lot scarier than dead folks sometimes. ”

Faith stood up, returning to the painting of the werewitch, allowing her thoughts to move along its surface. Liar! she thought. But it stood to reason that if Todd approved of any one courting her, it would have to be a storyteller like himself. Someone strong, a giant, a Great Fool among frightened ones, a weaver of words and delicious little lies to woo other people and live by. She started, but remained still. Jones had come up behind her, barefoot and silent, and folded his forearms around her waist.

“Hang me up for bear meat if I ain’t been empty inside without you, Faith. ”

She hung her head, fighting the warm feeling that sprang between her skin and his. Who else could say something as silly as that — bear meat, indeed! — and make you believe in it? Like Todd, he was just an overgrown boy — long, apelike arms and hard black flesh hiding a mind that could create fabulous lies and believe in them. And, though it was wrong, she believed in them too. “Alpha, I’m married. I’ve been married for a year, and Isaac is good to me. ” She stopped, afraid to pursue that last thought any further. “It would be a sin—”

“Shoot! Life is short, sweetheart — you got to seize the day. Hit’d be a sin not to.” He placed his rough face next to hers. “I wouldn’t bet a huckleberry to a persimmon if you ain’t the only gal that ever meant somethin’ to me. ”

“Alpha, please—” She couldn’t think. “Please—”

“I know you’ve seen lots of ripstavers since you knew me, but I’ll be shot if I didn’t pray like a horse to cross paths with you again. Without you I’d be as dead as a catfish on a sandbank.”

Jones tasted the inside of her mouth, and she his: warm, as she’d expected, faintly sweet, as she’d hoped. Then she was weightless in his arms, floating toward the soiled mattress. The thought of making love disturbed her. It had never worked out before. It had to be an exchange, give and take. With Arnold Tippis, Faith had felt the energy released between them stifled in this natural expression; rather, it had all come one way — she had been unreal to him, a thing in which to violently unload that energy, that tension Dr. Lynch spoke of; and Crowell had been hardly better with his hasty mechanical approach to the matter. Maxwell, before they’d ended sex together and he moved to sleep on the sofa, had wanted passively to receive that energy, to be acted upon like soft clay. And with all the others — sheer horror. Yet now as Jones’s shadow fell across her it was somehow different; the energy was released, displaced, and sent shuddering back and forth between them, in the desired exchange. Alpha projected the image of himself in her, as she did within him until they seemed to exist, not as two people, but one. Or, stranger still, as nothing. It was crazy, but she thought of high-school math at the moment their images melted, drifted, and were transformed; she thought of herself, Faith Cross, as one lonely pole in the universe — FC, and Jones as another — AOH with he a + and she a — when their rhythm touched its telos:

AOH: FC

Stillness.

Beside him, her pulse beats slipped slowly beneath his own, her chest fell as his rose, rose as his fell, and Faith refound just a bit of the enchantment of her childhood in being a woman. There was a twilight feeling like that of sleep in her body; and in her mind — the frieze of a frost-sprinkled earth, naked brown tamaracks twisting into a sky of milk-white clouds. Jones, lying on his back, closed his eyes sleepily, flung his left wrist across his brow, and sang,

“Here’s to hit, the birds do hit,

The bees do hit, too, and die;

Dogs do hit and get hung to hit,

So why not you and I?”

By and by he rose, pulled on his trousers, and started preparing dinner. He spread a tablecloth (really a large rag made from sewn-together work shirts) on the bare floor beside the bed, and within a few hours had it covered with plates of collard greens and baked bread. As they ate, Faith told Jones of her search, its inception, its untimely end. For once her tale did not fall on deaf ears. As she unraveled it, he ate faster, as though it made him hungrier, and when she brought everything up to date, he reached across the tablecloth and held both her hands in his own.

“Things ain’t hardly ever like they seem — not even me,” he said. “But they usually come out for the best.” The muscles in his face grew slack, his eyes calm. He told a story:

When Alpha Omega Jones was passing through South Carolina on his way North, he ran short on money and stopped to work on a tenant farm. The bossman looked him over, said, “You’re pretty healthy lookin’—how long you wanna work?”

“Just a week,” Jones said.

And he signed up for just that long. Seven days later, he went to draw his pay. The bossman was in his shack near the fields where he employed about fifty men in picking cotton. He scanned his books and shook his head. “Ah been feedin’ you for ’bout a week,” he said, “and I figure that you et up alla your salary plus ’bout ten dollars mo’.” He spread his hands, palms up, and grinned. “You’ve got to give me another week’s work.”

Since it was all there on paper and looked official, Jones did not object. He went back out into the sun, back to his place in the fields, not suspecting anything until an old Negro named Junior collapsed right beside him. Jones propped Junior up. The old man’s throat rattled. He said, “You better run, boy. You’d better run hard, and hide y’self! That man’s kept me here for five years—” And he died. Another worker stood beside Jones, shivering. “Junior’s the seventh one to die this month. You can’t run ’way. The bossman’s got a weak heart, but he comes after you anyway, with a gun and a whip and alla his dogs. He whops you, and if you run ’way, he won’t give you no food.”

The owner of the fields charged out of his shack and stopped beside them. He kicked Junior with the heel of his boot, rolling him over to see if he was dead. He scowled, wiped his brow with a red handkerchief, and thought for a minute. He turned to Jones. “Bury him right here.”

“I can’t do no mo’ work,” Jones said. “I got psychic powers.” He bugged his eyes at the bossman and placed the tips of his fingers to his dark brow. “Ever now and then these spells come over me — I get visions, I get weak and see through things, and can’t do a lick of work.”