Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Tippis peeled his fingers from her forearm, rose, and crossed the room to the window. Her eye followed his movements; she heard every word he said. But the words were meaningless. She wanted to die, was thankful that it was a possibility. It made her laugh inside her head: there was freedom after all. Death was a peculiar thing, the boundary event through which all others were defined and delimited. You never believed it was going to happen when you lived; it only happened to others, and you went dutifully to their funerals, suspecting that you might escape their fate and live forever. Not now — she was going to become sand and stone, perhaps a maple or oak, or maybe she’d just be allowed to rest.

“Are you afraid of dying?” Tippis said, his back to her. “It doesn’t make any sense that suddenly we should be no more. Why should we be if we have to not be!” His shoulders hunched, pushing his head up like a jack-in-the-box. Behind him, laughter came from Faith. Fresh perspiration broke out on Tippis’s face as he looked at her — a red open mouth of serrated teeth, a pink eye in a black head. He inched toward the door, his head tucked in, opened it without a sound, and slipped out.

With no one to hear, Faith attended to her own thoughts, aware of time mechanically clicking away in the wall clock near the door, not caring, comforted by no illusions of things to be done, no projects which, unless she completed them, might prevent the world from going on. A round sense of the void. But she did not want to die, although going on like this, trapped in a body that would not respond to her will, seemed like a curse. She was aware of it only by the painful itch crawling from her head to her feet, by the hardness of the plastic tubes inserted into her right side. Afraid, she wanted to pray, but suddenly could not recall a single verse. Fine, she thought, just fine.

The door opened. Her eye smarted with light from the hallway, then focused through a watery film on a man’s figure in the doorway. He straightened the shoulders of his loud sports coat, touched first his bright pink bow tie, then his wig, and sat down with a frump on the bedside. It took a struggle, but she managed to turn her head toward him.

“I just heard an hour ago,” Maxwell said. He leaned over, looking at her face, then winced. He closed his eyes, stood up, and backed away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The baby, too?”

Go away! she thought. Her head hurt now; something was flipping her brain over and over like a flapjack. Please —

Maxwell pressed his respirator to his lips thoughtfully and shifted from one heel to the other. It was almost pathetic; he was a writer, a worker with words for whom comforting words would not now come.

“Faith,” he said finally, waving his right hand as if to pluck his phrases from the air, “I never knew it was going to turn out like this !” Air whooshed loudly through his throat; he puffed the respirator between his lips. “I tried to reach Jones right after I heard, but he didn’t leave a forwarding address with his parole officer. They’re looking for him now. ”

He had deserted her. So Faith had expected. But why were they looking for Alpha Omega Jones? Surely not for her sake, or the baby’s. Such men as he and Big Todd could not be captured. Not really. You could chain that malleable rough side of them that lay in history, but the rest was wind, a current that sometimes cooled you when you were dry, but broke you, as the wind did tar paper in a cabin window, when you got in its way. Somehow, it was just.

“If you pull through this, I’ll make it up to you,” Maxwell said. “I’m going to get you the best doctors that money can buy.” He paused, his eyes narrowing on the silhouetted side of her head, his teeth bearing down on his thumb. “If you just show enough Will Power, honey—”

“Go away!” She got it out this time. It shook Maxwell. He started to speak but swallowed instead, then reached inside his suit coat. He withdrew his billfold and laid twenty dollars at the foot of her bed. “In case you need anything tonight.” He straightened his tie in the mirror above the sink in her room, and left without another word.

Time dragged on like a polecat mangled by a truck and hauling its dead rear end to the roadside. Each breath became harder for her to draw. Her body seemed already gone, but her mind was clear, as transparent as bubbling spring water with shiny stones visible on the floor of its stream. Side by side at the stream’s bottom were stones for the respective stances she’d endured: Lynch, Tippis, Lavidia, Brown, Maxwell, Barrett, and Big Todd. Their voices tramped through her mind with the force of a hunter’s boot heel — being and not-being, life cannot support itself, sublimation of instinctual drives, get yourself a good thing. She had suffered, and what had she now? Ash on her tongue. The sides of her mouth drew together in a deliciously evil sneer, “Faugh!” Not one of them knew of the Good Thing, or even believed in its possibility — its necessity.

“Faugh!”

At that instant her eyes went cloudy, unclear, and ached from within — even the closed one, and when the left one again admitted light from her small room she saw crouched at the foot of her bed an extremely large white cat. Its eyes were like crystal, deep enough to lose your mind in, deep enough to suck her thoughts from one crystalline plane on its surface to another, and finally freeing her as it opened its mouth of razor-sharp teeth: “I can’t do nothin’ until you come, honey. You ready?”

Faith sucked in her breath and smiled faintly. It was a long way home.

People never tire of hearing Faith Cross’s tale. An old farmer sitting before the kitchen stove, petting his rooter-dog, may make it an odyssey involving the fate of the world; harlequinfaced grandmothers will grin, giggle, and tell it as a gallyflopper spiced with the morals they want you to hear. It’s said by some of them as far north as Chicago that Arnold Tippis returned to Faith’s hospital room, that he started hollering for help. They say he cringed in her doorway, whey-faced and whimpering for a long, long time, staring at that charcoaled corpse — the mortal remains of sweet Faith Cross.

That ain’t the truth.

Truth is, Faith took hold of herself, grabbed the bills Isaac Maxwell left on her bedside, and rose from her bedsheets — minus a lot of skin; she stole down the empty hospital hallway of Michael Reese, and out through the receiving room. Quiet as a ghost. You didn’t need a Navajo guide to follow her trail — it was marked by the line of frightened faces of folks who saw her creeping wraithlike from corner to corner through the streets of Chicago. Clear down Michigan Avenue: horrified folks holding their hearts. The old man in the ticket booth at the train station saw her — he’s in a coma to this very day. Faith rode the rails for hours, asleep with the Swamp Woman’s cat on her lap, and — at Hatten County — climbed off. Without a word, children. Don’t you believe Lem Hastings when he says his hair turned prematurely white from worry. The last murrain that killed his mules didn’t do it. It was fright. Sheer horrification at seeing Faith’s wreckage hauling itself down the back roads past the black hole where her father’s farmhouse stood. Passersby said they saw some thing as white as snow, swaying, whispering to itself in the farmhouse ruins, moaning, and meandering from room to room. Touching things. Wailing, they say. Then it moved on, across the fallow brown fields to the mephitic bogs. The mud was as high as her hams when she crossed the bottoms. Late autumn winds winnowed rotten leaves around her head. Anguish welled within her; her thoughts were red-tinged, burning her eyes until they watered. It was as if she’d made the transition from the dead living to the living dead (think sharp now), but was back in the world on a temporary visa. By nightfall, Faith could barely break through the tenebrous, twisting barrier of naked trees and thorny bushes bordering the swamp. Everywhere was the septic, intoxicating, sweet smell of seasonal decay. She kept on stepping.