Faith and the Good Thing Read online

  Trying to control her voice was hard, but she managed when someone on the other end answered in a gruff voice, “Yes?”

  “I’m at Soldier’s Field,” she said. “A man just died on the park bench—”

  “Dead!” the voice roared.

  “Yes,” Faith said, her hand moving to replace the phone on its hook. “But he’s not such a fool as he seems. . . .”

  7

  The grave released Richard Barrett.

  Children, the crypt couldn’t contain his spirit any more than death could end his concern for Sweet Faith Cross. Dutifully, he returned as a wraith, companion, and troubled conscience that would not let her rest. Without fail each Friday and always at midnight he came to her hotel, the stench of Hell’s outer circle heavy in his train. Such resurrections happen nearly every day. Esau Holmes, covered with mold and maggots, scrambled out of the cemetery back in ’26 to attend his daughter’s wedding, and everybody’s heard of how old Annie Bell Finch reared up in her casket when her husband Fred arrived at her wake with that fast young gal from Georgia. Listen, if you die before achieving some long-cherished goal, or before seeing some sight long nurtured in your dreams; if you die before seeing the sun rise red as Satan’s eye over the sea, or before hearing the cry of swallows break the stillness of dawn, or before feeling dew from some enameled expanse of country between your toes, then nature in you, too, will not be stilled at death.

  Barrett came back.

  The first Friday it happened, Faith had just finished with her final customer, and sat at her table for a spell, mulling over her life’s meaning as she twisted her hair into tight braids, smeared on facial packs the color of thick bottom land clay, and rubbed the ash off her ankles and legs with mineral oil. Her fingers wound her hair mechanically around into tiny curls while she thought, first of Barrett, then of his Doomsday Book, which sat beneath a Gideon Bible on her desk. Then she clicked off the ceiling light, her head burning with the tight braids, and went to bed. By and by she smelled the scent of brimstone, of old clothes scented with moisture and earth. Then: the feathery tickle of ashes in the air. She sneezed, panic bubbling in her chest. Off in the room’s northeast corner she saw a snow-white cat sidle slowly from one wall to the next. It said, “I can’t do anything a’tall until Richard comes,” and passed through her locked door like a spirit.

  A much larger cat, the size of a suckling calf, appeared at the same wall, walked the same way, and said, “I can’t do anything a’tall until Richard comes.”

  Beads of sweat burst upon Faith’s brow. Faraway she heard, or thought she heard, the rustling of graveclothes and the scraping of bare feet along the floor above the hammering of her heart. Faith lay still as a board.

  In the same corner a third cat, this one the size of a pony, appeared; it swayed slowly across the room, looking at her through large, luminous, laughing eyes.

  “I can’t do anything a’tall until Richard comes.” But before disappearing, it said, “But I think he’s here now.”

  She felt it. Her stomach clenched like a fist around his name. On the other side of her bed, Faith became aware of a form creeping in beside her—she heard the bedsprings groan, felt them settle under a great weight.

  “Oh, God—” Her voice shook. She prayed, then glanced to the pillow beside her. It held the indentation of a head. But no head was there, none at all. Floating free in the air were Barrett’s features, just inches above the pillow: turbid, hazel eyes, a toothless smile and crooked nose. She was across the room—uncertain how she’d moved so fast—her braids unraveling in the sweat from her scalp, and her limbs shaking like a leaf. How had it happened? Spirits could not return unless their hosts had committed suicide, or were conjured at their gravesites by wereworkers who, in the new of the , and in the hours of the and , said to one of the inhabiter signs of the , , or , the following:

  I conjure thee [deceased’s name] by the bloud that ranne from our Lord Jesus Christ crucified, and by the cleaving of heaven, and by the renting of the temple’s veil, and by the darkness of the sunne in the time of his death, and by the rising up of the dead in the time of his resurrection, and by the virgine Marie mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the mysterious name of God: Tetragrammaton. I conjure thee and charge thee my will be fulfilled, upon paine of everlasting condemnation: Fiat, fiat, fiat: Amen.

  (All of which must be uttered in utmost piety, none of which sweet Faith remembered.) But somehow she recollected the way to exorcise haints:

  “What,” she cried, “in the name of the Lord, do you want with me?”

  The ghastly grin widened but did not disappear.

  “Please. . .!”

  That mouth, that disembodied, grisly grimace in the dark—spoke. “I . . .still think . . . therefore . . . I am. . . .”

  Faith clicked on the light. He was gone. But four days passed before she stopped shaking or took food. She avoided the hotel on Fridays, wandering instead through the crowded city streets until Saturday morning. But Barrett was always close by—a will-o’-the-wisp glimpsed furtively or felt intuitively in the alarm at the base of her neck before he disappeared. She changed addresses, hoping to escape him. Faith gave Mrs. Beasley twenty-four hours’ notice on Wednesday, and was out of the hotel with six hours to spare. With the money Barrett had given her she moved into the low-rent Eden Green apartments on One Hundred Thirtieth Street.

  Children, there’s nothing worse than being haunted by a philosopher’s spirit—waking up in the middle of the night with your heart heaving heavy strokes to hear, next to your ear, something muttering, “You may well be free of Barrett, but not Barretteity,” or worse, “Riddle me this, if you’re so smart: Will an arrow ever strike its intended target if, before it can cross that distance, one-half of that distance must be crossed first, and one-half of that, and one-half of that, and one-half of that—”

  Faith feared for her sanity. For months this went on, even after she’d settled in Eden Green, cut back her streetwalking to supply only what she needed to balance her budget, and enrolled in secretarial school. Even this day Barrett shadowed her as she sat across a breakfast table from a clean-shaven, fresh-smelling young man named Isaac Maxwell, her eyes searching the room for the wise man’s haint.

  “Everybody wants power,” Maxwell said in a brassy voice trained, he told her, in a six-week course in public speaking. In his left hand he held the op-ed page of a morning paper, his paper, The Sentry, above his plate of cooling ham, eggs, and hash browns. “But few people understand what real power is,” he said, softer now, waving his fork and watching her closely. “It’s directly connected with ethics, with what’s good, y’know. And what’s good is what makes a man feel more powerful.” He was chuckling, his eyes crafty and his shoulders hunched. Some folks might say that Isaac Maxwell looked a bit queer, as though, at birth, he’d been unable to make up his mind about what he wanted to be. There was a little goat in his long head, the look of a cow in his moist eyes and, in his slight figure, you could see the outline of, perhaps, an upright wolf. His chin was weak and peppered with shaving scars, slightly blue at the edges. He lingered over his breakfast, scratching sleep from his eyes, the wings of his nose widening whenever he spoke. The color of his skin, it seemed to Faith, was yellow and had the same chroma as the yolk of his eggs—like urine from enflamed kidneys. Though he was only twenty-four he was balding, which explained his wig and why he tugged at its corners whenever it slipped back on his head, loose like a yarmulke. When this happened Faith looked away. This time she lowered her eyes to concentrate on his editorial, “The Contest of Wills.”

  “All that garbage about black and white and gay power misses the mark,” Maxwell said. He paused, his attention remaining on his reflection just behind Faith in the broad glass of the restaurant window. There he saw his bright orange suitcoat and blue butterfly bowtie, and carefully lifted flecks of lint off his shoulders. “Faith,” he said, still looking over her shoulder, “everybody’s out for Number One—Nu-u-u-mero U
no, and anybody who tells you different is a goddamn liar. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Society’s composed of individuals, and every one of ’em’s got an individual will. Society thrives on the clash of those wills.” Faith listened from the back of her head, her chin on the heel of her right hand and a cigarette between her fingers. Maxwell’s eyes flashed for an instant. “Please,” he said sharply, “my asthma . . .” She doused the cigarette, hid it in her purse, apologized, and tried to concentrate on his editorial. Which wasn’t easy. The elastic in her underwear cut into her abdomen. She was eating better these days at Maxwell’s expense and it was showing. She shifted forward in her seat, tugged at the fold of her slip, and attended to him. He said, “Power”—still studying his profile in the glass—“is what it’s all about.” He wagged his fork at her. “But everybody won’t get it.” She looked up as if to say, no? “Some people are naturally weak and, to tell it like it is, deserve to be flunkies, others—like myself—are strong,” he tapped his chest with the stem of his fork, “way down deep, I mean. The weak ones go out to demonstrate, march, boycott, strike and picket—they try to change the world, you understand? The point is to use it.” He shook his head, his free hand pressed to his forehead to hold down his wig. “Those people will never know what real power is. You know what it is? You know what’s really good?”

  Faith bent forward a bit farther, pushing her tight slip lower down her back; that helped, but the movement gave Maxwell the impression she was straining to hear what he said.

  “It’s cash,” he announced, “cash money.” Then he slapped the checkered tablecloth with his palm. “Why, you can be as ugly as a witch, you can be evil and selfish and wicked, but cash money can make you beautiful, right?” He saw her face freeze up and softened his voice. “If you haven’t got talent, you can buy folks who do—whatever you want, whatever your Will points to is yours. That’s what I said in there,” and he tapped the back of the newspaper in her hand.

  Faith said, “I see,” but she didn’t. She had changed in many ways, but not so much that she was comfortable with his ideas. In fact, she wouldn’t have recognized herself if she’d seen herself months ago in the glowing waters of the Swamp Woman’s Thaumaturgic Mirror. She would have seen, not a girl married to God in her childhood, or the terrified ethical adventurer who tarried an evening in the Hatten County bogs, but a woman with long artificial eyelashes, light rose lipstick, and crescent-shaped earrings; she would have seen pink nail polish on her long fingers, a turtled sleeveless bodice, navy shirt and jacket, and brown pumps. You wouldn’t know her. Maybe it was her makeup, her mascara, flesh-toned powders, perfumes that recalled the essence of exotic flowers, and waist-long falls that fooled you. You might have seen her legs, or noticed the brevity of her tailor-made dresses and coats, as Maxwell had a month ago when he saw her in this restaurant on Washington Street and invited himself over to her table. At that time he was new on his job as an assistant editor for The Sentry, and new to Chicago, hailing as he did from Columbus, Ohio. He found his new job of editing, rewriting, and sitting through morning news conferences quite a cross to bear. He needed someone to complain to. And like magic there appeared Faith. Once a week he’d find her at the same restaurant, at the same table by the window, looking woebegone as she sipped orange juice and studied her secretarial manual. But seeing her once weekly was not enough. She’d listen to anything you said (he was amazed), she very rarely contradicted you (he found the sense of power unbearable), and she even agreed with you, but not before you’d finished what you were saying. It was too much. He took her to dinner thereafter on Sundays and now, since she didn’t have a job, paid her rent at Eden Green. Strange to say, whenever he left her it was hard to remember anything about their conversations but the sound of his own brassy voice.

  Faith finished the editorial, handed Maxwell his newspaper, and stuck a Viceroy in her cigarette holder. This time he didn’t complain, only said, “Smoking testifies to the weakness of your will,” and lit it for her. She would have agreed with him immediately but saw, floating over the heads of the other diners at the rear of the room, a whiff of blue smoke. Tensing, she turned to Maxwell, who had seen her reaction.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Go on. I think you’re right about all those things.”

  Maxwell broke into a broad grin. “You do?” And he blushed up to his ears. When he spoke again there was confidence in his voice. “Take the death of that professor a while back. The man just lay down on a park bench and gave up the ghost—no Will, no taste for conflict. You remember, don’t you?”

  Faith cringed—recovered, and smiled. “No.”

  Maxwell broke the delicate film over his sunny-side-up eggs with his fork before filling his mouth. He chewed largely with his eyes narrowed and mouth open. Her focus drew in from the room that framed his pear-shaped head to his face and concentrated on his cheeks, which fascinated her. Pack rats had cheeks like these, as big as overstuffed luggage when full. Maxwell shoveled in eggs and neatly cut squares of ham, slices of toast, and hash browns mechanically like an engine taking in fuel; then he began to bite and chew with a certain rhythm, the distended sides of his face decreasing in size like balloons releasing air. At the end of each mouthful he wiped his lips (yellow egg yolk still caked in his mustache and that area of the anatomy just beneath the nose, which Lavidia always called a man’s “snot-cup”) and gulped so loudly it hurt Faith’s esophagus. She wondered how he managed to taste anything he ate since he ate so fast. . . . But her focus slipped back out again, fixing on the background behind Maxwell and the blue wisp of smoke across the room. It drifted toward them, ghostly, like mist over the fields each morning in Georgia, or gas, and she thought: Damn! Could only she see it? It figured.

  “He deserved to die,” Maxwell said between mouthfuls. “I wrote the story on the old man, dug up the information on him and all that. He had everything going for him at one time, you know?—good job as a professor, published some books, but he just left all that behind. For two years nobody saw hide nor hair of that man.” He snorted. “That kind of foolishness makes me mad—I mean, somebody who’s on top of things and just throws it all away! Maybe,” Maxwell chuckled, “he lost his mind.”

  Faith laughed politely. All pretense. She’d learned some time ago that if she laughed heartily with her eyes shut tight and her mouth open in a toothy grin for precisely seven seconds, not an instant more or less, she could easily slip away from the attempts at humor forced upon her usually humorless state of mind. It took a lot of training to perfect that smile, it took hours of standing in front of a mirror, timing herself, then testing the reaction on all the customers that she knew at the hotel. And it paid off. People warmed to Faith’s laughter immediately. For a second she thought about Alpha Omega Jones. Had his smile been deceit? It was tricky but she thought it through: there was what you saw—appearance, and there was what was truly real—the Good Thing; but you couldn’t have the latter. So you learned to control appearances, to construct elaborate, well-timed pretenses and lies to get what you needed to survive. Faith clicked off the seconds to the beat of her pulse and looked up at Maxwell.

  “I figure I can make fifty thousand a year if my Will Power’s strong enough,” Maxwell said. “I mean, the publisher of The Sentry doesn’t have anything I don’t have, except that he’s white. I watch him a lot, y’know? He comes in that front door every morning and slams it behind him. Wakes everybody up, y’know? When he slams that door the noise says ‘Here I am!’ and everybody snaps up straight at their desks. That’s how you get respect—by slamming doors like Ragsdale does, or by letting everybody know who’s in control around there.” Maxwell reached for Faith’s cigarettes and took one. He took one puff and watched himself exhale in the window’s reflection. Then he abandoned the smoldering cigarette in the ashtray to Faith’s right. “Someday I’m gonna run that newspaper. You watch. Just as soon as I get myself together.” For the span of several seconds h
e looked at the manicured nails on his right hand and played with two silver rings on his left. “When that happens, Faith, I’m going to be rich.” He winked, foxy. “But I’ll still be my same sweet self!”

  Faith smiled. Seven seconds later she excused herself. The mist had maneuvered itself above Maxwell’s head like a storm cloud. Her slip was again pinching her waist, and she hurried across the room to the women’s lounge and, once inside, began struggling with her underclothes. Satisfied, she moved to the mirror and fastidiously reapplied her lipstick. She stared at herself in the glass, wondering if Maxwell would propose tonight after they attended the concert at the Auditorium Theater. She had worked hard toward that end, had pulled every trick from her memory, even ones she only faintly believed in and had had to forage pet shops to complete. Like carrying tufts of his wig in her pocketbook, and the Frog Charm (somewhat complicated, but effective: Kill a frog or toad, dry him out completely in the sun—or bury him in an ant’s bed until his flesh is gone. Among his bones will be one that resembles a fishhook, and another that looks like a fish scale. To win your intended lover, hook the fish bone into his/her clothing; to expel him/her, throw the fish-scale bone in that person’s direction). She was never sure, though, if it was the charms, her charm of listening, or Maxwell’s own fatuity that brought him under her control. He was incredibly slow, but could be cajoled into anything she willed through an elaborate process of innuendo and suggestion that left her fatigued and frustrated, but always victorious. Indeed, he seemed dull to her, as simple as a three-headed treasure-guarding troll, but, she told herself, intrinsically good (unlike trolls—they’ll drink a Christian man’s blood), and harmless in a cowlike way. She bent forward, powdering her cheeks, certain that Dr. Lynch had been so right: everything was stimulus and response. Machinery. She remembered the occasion when Maxwell, set in motion by her elaborate act of submissiveness, made his first advances toward her. He’d been nervous that night, wheezing with asthma, staining his tie with brown steak sauce and spilling black coffee onto his crotch. He’d lowered his eyes self-consciously and slipped his trembling hands under the table.