Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

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“You just lost your good thing,” Maxwell sobbed, and he hurried out the open door.

Faith gave herself completely to her misery. Her face was wet and felt twice its normal size. She lifted her hands to her eyes and saw blood. As she stumbled to the bathroom she could hear him in the kitchen, tearing open the top of a beer can and talking to himself. More than ever she felt dirty, coated with the weight of her actions; but beneath that encrustation was a strange vacuum, an emptiness into which her thoughts plummeted. She gathered up her clothes and shoved them into a traveling bag. On the way out she passed the kitchen, where Maxwell, his head bent low over a beer can, sat at the table, smoking his asthma cigarettes and coughing, his mind shut up tight. He looked up at her, his eyes blurred and searching her face. Who is this?

And I? she thought. Faith wiped at her face with a tissue, and said, “I’m sorry—”

Maxwell’s throat tore with a horrible sound. He threw back his head and stood up. She could bear it no longer.

“Good-bye.”

Chicago seemed darker than she could ever recall having seen it. The sky was deep purple and clotted with black clouds whirling west over a craggy skyline. On the El, Faith checked her purse and found close to three hundred dollars there. Instinct sent her to the South Side, to Sixty-third Street, where she returned to Hotel Sinclair. At the desk she rang the bell on the counter, and Mrs. Beasley appeared from a back room, her hair in yellow curlers.

“Child,” she said, “you look like you were in a stick fight, and everybody had a stick but you!”

There was some truth in that. “It was more like a football game,” she said. She set her bag on the floor and opened the register on the desk. Room 4-D was empty.

“I haven’t been able to rent that room since you left,” Mrs. Beasley said. “Folks complained all the time about ghost cats as big as Guernsey cows walking ’cross the floor all night.”

“That’s all right,” Faith said. She knew she could sleep in a rat-infested sewer and not miss a wink tonight. “Can I have it back?”

“Sure, if you ain’t afraid one of them spirits will take over that child.”

Faith looked down at herself and smoothed her dress over the curvature of her stomach. “You can tell?”

Mrs. Beasley laughed. “You kidding? It looks like you’ve got a battleship and half the Russian army in there.”

Faith could not laugh, not now; or in the days, the months that followed when Mrs. Beasley, who supported Faith in exchange for help around the hotel, tried to cheer her. Until the eighth month she was miserable, barely eating enough to keep herself, let alone the baby, alive. Being alone was unbearable. Could she, if another man came along, start again? For Faith the answer was obvious: there was nothing to live for but the baby who would rise phoenix like from her wreckage. Often, Mrs. Beasley caught her held by the spell of her round belly in the bathroom mirror on the hotel’s fourth floor. Faith, naked to her waist, would look at the old woman’s reflection without turning and say, “I’m ugly. ”

Mrs. Beasley slapped her behind and upbraided her. “There ain’t nothing as beautiful as a woman about to give birth!”

That was comforting, but hard to believe. She saw herself with the detachment a stranger might have — the stretch marks extending from her sides to her navel, her swollen breasts too delicate to touch. “Will I look like I did before when it’s all over?”

“Come away from that mirror,” Mrs. Beasley said. “There’ll be marks on your belly, ’course, and for a while you’ll feel like a whole mountain passed through you. But that ain’t nothin’. I raised seven kids and I was okay. It happens to everybody that way—”

Faith waited, marking her days. And as the time grew near she grew afraid, most afraid. Her breasts swelled even more, felt even more sensitive beneath her fingertips — from her neck down she felt clogged and clotted with life. It alarmed her. The thing was possessing her entirely, inhabiting her body like the vengeful spirits of the dead. It would come bursting from her as a chicken does from its egg, destroying its shell, stealing the last of her life to feed its own. Fine. Whether she died for it or somehow survived, whether it tore her apart or gave her new strength, or if — later, when it was grown — it came to turn on her, to deny her as Richard Barrett’s children had done to him, then that, too, was all right. Just fine. She would love it — yes — even if it choked her dead in childbirth.

On the first day of snowfall in November, she lay across the moist mattress in 4-D, doubled over with labor pains quick enough to kill, she thought, a cow. They followed one another only minutes apart: it was coming — kicking itself free from her like a full-grown god bursting from the sea. She could see its brown face blurred under water, rising up with barnacles and slime to break the surface of her skin.

She screamed, her tongue caught in her throat. “Momma!”

“I’m right here,” Mrs. Beasley said softly. “You lay back and fight it, y’hear. I’m right here. I’ve done this before. I had a pregnant woman without no husband down in room five-C once and—”

The room whirled around her head, bright like the eye of the sun at its center, dull at its dark edges. She was certain she could hear the child murmuring inside her, but she could barely make out its words. It was, she thought, calling her name. Mrs. Beasley brought pans of hot water beside her bed, spread towels beneath her, and talked in a cooing voice, the content of which was lost to Faith forever.

“Press your muscles down,” she said.

There was no pain like this pain. Hadn’t Lavidia said that again and again? There was no suffering like the suffering of creation. She could feel the strange pressure caused within her by the child’s thoughts, its pulse; she could hear its tiny heart throbbing as loud as a gong. Life floated between feces and urine: what was it about?

“Bite on this.” Mrs. Beasley shoved the wooden handle of a rusty kitchen knife between Faith’s teeth, which sank in, clear to the metal beneath. She heard all sorts of breathing in an eerie concert — her own, quick and labored; the child’s, soft and like that of a sleeping dog; Mrs. Beasley’s, deep and as heavy as the wind.

The woman was exuding sweat, talking to herself in some crazy, sanctified, secret language of storefront churches until she shouted, “I see its head!”

Deep, silent screams rolled off Faith’s tongue: a bolt of white lightning cut jagged paths before her eyes. Then there was darkness.

“The lights went out!” Mrs. Beasley shouted.

She was caught somewhere between life and death, this girl, the baby not yet born, but breathing in the air of the darkened room.

“Don’t move,” she heard the woman say. “I’ll get us a candle from downstairs.”

She could not move. She imagined herself dead, or at the bottom of the sea. The child was not completely free from her, and the image flashed across her mind of a huge momma cockroach dragging her egg behind her on the floor. The smell of blood and birth was everywhere. Faith was barely conscious when Mrs. Beasley bounded back into the room with a thick homemade candle stuck in the neck of a wine flask. She placed it on the floor, then tugged at the baby’s head; the rest slipped out into her hands.

“It’s a girl,” she sighed. There came then a slapping sound, and a burst of breath. “You hear that?” Mrs. Beasley laughed.

Faith smiled. She closed her eyes, and Mrs. Beasley finished her work. That done, she placed the baby in a dry towel, then into Faith’s left arm. She held the candle close.