Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Clutching vines and fronds fell away from her path at a clearing, and in the distance, surrounded by the roundel glow of moonlight and its reflection off the stagnant waters of the bogs, was the Swamp Woman’s shanty. All else in Hatten County might have changed — calamity might have leveled its houses, families might have been swallowed whole by time — but the shanty still stood, half submerged in the swamp like a ruin, or the white rib of a mastodon, or a cow skull sunk in the sand. Right. That she was dying Faith had no doubt. And of all the people in the world, probably only the Swamp Woman had a way with death: an understanding. The cracker-barrel philosophers at the feedstore in town often told how Casey Fudd, after the death of his first wife and four children in the great epidemic of ’29, wanted to throw in the towel. So aggrieved was he that he asked the Swamp Woman for a herb to end his life as quick as possible. She refused. “Then,” Casey swore, “I’ll do hit m’self.” He found enough courage to buy himself an old.45, a gallon of kerosene, a long rope, and an economy-size bottle of rat poison. Brother Casey was going to do it up right. Folks say the Swamp Woman wanted Casey to persist, though, and ensorcelled him right on the spot. Not knowing this, Casey tramped down to the river, sat himself upright in a rowboat, and pushed off, floating down the river until he came to some low-hanging trees on the bank. There, he tied the rope around a tree limb, doused himself with the kerosene, swallowed the bottle of poison, raised the pistol to blow out his brains, and kicked the boat out from under himself. What happened? Old Casey pulled the trigger, but the bullet broke the rope, the river doused the fire and, when he got a lungful of water, he gagged up every drop of that rat poison. Old Casey pulled himself up on the riverbank, vowed to make a new man of himself, and ran for Commissioner of Hatten County. And he won, too.

Weak, ready to give up the ghost, Faith pulled herself hand over hand along the swaying bridge to the shanty. There was still hope if, before she drew her last breath, the Swamp Woman would clear up the mystery of the Good Thing. The glowing lights within the shanty blinded her left eye as she crawled through the Door of the Dead. The werewitch was there, hunched over one of her workbenches amid open Black Books, a gilded copy of De Novum Candarus Salomis, the Kitab-el-Uhud, Clavicle Keys of Solomon, and The Grimoire of Pope Honorius II. Her three forefingers marked her place in one of these as she peered, cackling, through a microscope.

Faith’s voice cracked. “I’ve come again. ”

The Swamp Woman glowered, spun around on her stool constructed of old gray skeleton bones, and lifted her fingers to the place where her lips should have been.

“Shhhh!”

Faith, swaying on her feet, her head bent low, despaired. The werewitch, it seemed, had no time for her. As the Swamp Woman returned sniggering and squinting her green eye through the microscope, Faith turned away, hobbling to the door. She passed the full-length mirror in front of the pallet bed, looked. Shuddered. “Nice looking,” bubbled bitterly from her lips, yet she did not cry. There was almost something aesthetic about her ugliness — her round, hairless head, the cockleburs and mud caked on her tattered white gown. The fire must have destroyed one of her breasts — only that could explain the concave area running from her right shoulder to her hip. Bones forked up through her skin and all over, her body looked as crinkled and black as a soft marshmallow left too long in the fire.

“You’re looking good, girlie,” the Swamp Woman laughed. She turned away before Faith could respond. Whatever had the werewitch’s attention must have been of epoch-making importance. She kept her eye to the lens, whispering to herself, “. Tausend ein Million. ” and wrote furiously with her free hand. Faith stumbled across the slanting floor, only half aware of the Swamp Woman’s remodeling of her shanty. A new cabinet of alchemical cookbooks and peeling tomes was in the eastern corner beside a shelf of bottled toadstones, molting boar skulls, and growing plants: satyrion, henbane, and sea-blue lungwort. Faith fingered a healthy monkshood for a moment, trying to lose her thoughts in its gristly, hirsute texture. It didn’t work. Emptiness weighed heavily upon her, wrought ruin with her frail attempts at self-regeneration. Only inches from her feet was the Thaumaturgic Mirror. She stepped close, touching the waist-high urn, peering over its rim.

“And now ?” she whispered.

Electrified water in the urn bubbled briefly and shot before her eyes a single ancient image: the bogs.

“C’ mere! ” shrieked the Swamp Woman.

Slowly Faith hobbled to the side of the werewitch. Who clapped her hands gleefully and tossed back her misshapen head. “I’ve got it, girlie!” She winked mischievously and giggled. “I’ve been workin’ on the solution to this problem for goin’ on a century now!” She leaned forward, peaceful repose sagging her features, and sighed. “I guess I don’t have to be a werewitch no more — when the fish is caught, you toss away the net, right?”

“You don’t!” Faith said. It was unthinkable. No more Swamp Woman? It was like saying the sun had burned out, and there would be eternal night. “I thought you’d always be around—”

“Nope!” The werewitch wrinkled her nose. “Don’t ya think I’m more than a werewitch, just like every body’s much more than whatever they have to be at one given time? It’s like this: everybody looks for the Good Thing in different ways, right?”

“Yes,” Faith said. “I understand—”

“ Do ya, now?” the werewitch grumbled. “Do ya really understand that a man or woman or werewitch has a thousand ’n one ways to look for what’s good in life? Do ya see that ya have to start with the limitations that ya find y’self in, say, as a preacher, then follow the preacher’s path as far as that’ll take ya — like the Russians say, vynoslivost, ‘living a thing out’; then, ya take a scientist’s path ’n see how far that’ll take ya?” Across the Swamp Woman’s face was a seriousness and intensity Faith had never seen. “Ya take every path: the oracle’s, teacher’s, the artist’s, and even the path of the common fool, and ya learn a li’l bit from each one. That’s life, girlie. Ya keep right on steppin’ and pickin’ up the pieces until ya gets the whole thing — the Good Thing. As for me, werewitchin’ is pretty played out.” Seven gnarled forefingers reflectively stroked her crooked jaw. “I think maybe I’d like to try a young girl’s way — innocence, faith, and all that. Might be a lot of laughs—”

“But you’ve got the ‘answer’?” Faith gestured at the microscope, the hope of a final solution to her quest sticking, like a chicken bone, in her throat. “You said—” She stopped, noticing that the Swamp Woman seemed puzzled and had cocked her head like a hound. “Child,” she said, “this is one answer (and a damned good one at that). It’s about the only kind of answer that somebody on my path can provide.” She shoved the microscope across the table and said, “Look in there.”

Placing her eye to the lens, Faith focused and saw an enormous silver globe floating in white space. The head of a pin. And clustered thereon like ants on a sweet apple were thousands of people — more black folks than you can find at Vicksburg on a circus day, all dressed in full-length robes with holes in the back for ebony wings.

“Two hundred million, seven hundred, and sixty-nine angels,” the Swamp Woman giggled, “ that’s the answer — in an average case, that is, just countin’ Virtues, Thrones, Dominions, Powers, Principalities, and Archangels. If you throw in them li’l cherubim, the number will rise to the third power. ”