Faith and the Good Thing Page 15

  Faith shouted again, “Isaac!”

  The spell of this new side of himself—Maxwell the Berserker—held him fast. Physically lighter, his head clear and humming with a sudden sense of the efficacy of his Will, he did not hear her. Not even Faith might enter into and break the mood of that moment. She dragged him by his arm back down the stairs, the front of her dress and hosiery and underclothes soaking and clinging to her like skin. Once on the street, she stopped to support herself against a waste can, amazed that the air outside was quiet and still, that people passed them by without a single look, ignorant that her world had fallen into shambles.

  She hurried Maxwell to the parking lot, and there he found his voice: “Did you see that sonuvabitch’s face? Did you see what I did to it?”

  “I saw,” Faith said wearily.

  She stopped to catch her breath beside his Buick, then slid behind the wheel, not trusting Maxwell, who shook and seemed too dazed to control the car. She was thankful he had taught her how to drive by letting her cruise around The Sentry parking lot occasionally. But she didn’t have a license. And she wasn’t about to give that a second thought. Faith took the keys in his outstretched hand, and minutes later they were tooling south down the Eisenhower Expressway.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t the faintest idea who he was, really. Isaac . . .” She looked at him shyly. Did he suspect? No, or at least it did not seem that way. His eyes were still narrowed, and he held his head in his hands, still swinging deep inside, still reliving that brief but perfect moment in the theater aisle.

  Fog had descended on the city like a curse, a gray-green gloom that stuck to the sides of the car. Fog filled up the spaces between trees and bushes on the boulevard; fog bloated the alleys and lay in great formless clouds that blotted out the sky and street; fog hung above the road like an alien intelligence. Down the street a car emerged with glaring headlights from the gloom, blinding Faith, who gripped the wheel tighter and slowed down until she and Maxwell coasted into a small pocket of clarity much like the clear spaces in a dream.

  “Are you all right?”—Faith.

  Maxwell was staring at his bloody right knuckles. “Did you see what I did to his eye?”

  Faith said, “Yes,” and turned her attention to her own problem. Not only were her stockings wet, but her shoes were now slowly filling up, too. She started to cry.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Maxwell said as he came to himself again. “The evening’s ruined. If there’s anything I can do to make this up to you—”

  After parking in front of his apartment, Faith slid across the seat and rested her head on Maxwell’s overly padded shoulder. She slid her hand into his open sports coat, and let it rest, rising, falling. Falling on his chest.

  “I’m so glad you were there, Isaac.” That didn’t sound soft enough. She adjusted her tone. “That man, whoever he was—he frightened me.”

  “That sonuvabitch!”

  Maxwell lifted her chin with his right forefinger. He stared blankly for a long while into her eyes, and Faith was thankful that nothing in them could be seen, inferred, or guessed about her feelings. He opened the driver’s door and helped her out, then guided her along the sidewalk and into his apartment building. Once inside, he left the living-room lights out and, directed only by the small bulb over his kitchen bar, fixed them drinks, calling to her in a quavering voice, “He acted like he knew you! Can you imagine? The lines these characters come up with. The nerve! I wish I’d had a gun—”

  Her wet clothes were unbearable. In the darkness of the front room, she slipped off her shoes, stockings, and the rest. They were a ruin. She dropped them behind the sofa and sat down. Maxwell returned to the front room and stopped a few feet in front of her, a glass in each hand, his shoulders trembling as he looked her over. His breathing was louder than the whir of the air conditioner, the humming of the electric clock in the kitchen. Slowly he sat down, handed her a drink, and began pumping his respirator between his lips. “It’s a g-good thing I was around. . . .”

  Now.

  “Isaac, I really do need you. That’s clear now.”

  “What?” Click, click—whir . . .

  “I simply can’t . . . make it by myself.” As she said it, her right fist closed, as if squeezing some object, then opened, as if she were releasing dust. “I need someone who can control a situation—like you do.”

  “You do? Faith!” He grabbed at his throat, and she thought he was about to faint. “No,” he said in a strangled voice, “it’s not that. I never dreamed . . . You do care, don’t you?”

  Click.

  “It’s true,” Faith said. She looked away, out the picture window behind them to the shadowy suggestion of trees beyond, to a squirrel peering at them from one of the lower limbs. She remembered having a squirrel once, and that it was so friendly she could feed it peanuts, bread crumbs, and candy right out of her hand. In the mornings it would follow her into the farmhouse kitchen, then eat with her at the table like an honored guest. By and by it came to think everyone was as kind as Faith, and wandered up to Eula May Jenkins one morning to beg for food. Eula May shot him dead—she was skinning him, pulling the pelt off his bones when Faith walked into Eula May’s kitchen to borrow flour for Lavidia. Thereafter, Faith never befriended squirrels again, nor had she given her affections easily, for fear that her loved ones would be snatched away from her by circumstances or, worse, by death. Somehow her affair with Maxwell was different: he could be replaced easily, as an object you loved could not; he could be Isaac Maxwell, Tom Maxwell, Dick Maxwell, or Harry Maxwell—and she wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn.

  She could see Barrett’s features in the window, frowning. Poor old foolosopher, she thought. Then she turned to Maxwell and said, “I’ve never cared about anybody but you.” When he said nothing, she turned to him, her stomach knotting as severely as when she had the curse. Suspended like shimmering icicles on Maxwell’s cheeks were tears. He was sniffling and rubbing his nose. Faith looked away; it was going to be harder than she’d thought.

  He said, at length, “I can aw-aw-always be with you!”

  Her head swam, and she really felt sick now. Thought, What am I doing to him? Then, What am I doing to me? To avoid looking directly at him she placed her arms around his neck, clasping her hands together between his shoulder blades, and buried her face in his chest.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “I do need you, Isaac.”

  “Faith, I’m nuh-nuh-NOTHING! I’m nuh-nuh-NOBODY, but I-I swear I’ll work for y-you. I luh-luh-love you!” And he heaved a long sigh.

  Good, she thought, very good. And she closed her eyes and clenched her fists. Her ear to his chest, she could hear his heart, a loud, throbbing, roiling thing in his breast: Tha-bump, whir-rrr . . . and the words were on her lips, had been there since the day she’d met him, and now, as he fought for breath and squeezed her tight enough to cause her pain, she could say automatically, quickly and without a thought:

  “Be my good thing. . . .”

  “Y-Yes!” shot from Maxwell’s lips. His arms went slack with exhaustion. “Wuh-Wuh-Will you marry me?”

  She opened her eyes, casting her gaze upward through the darkness to the round figure of a faded rosette in the center of the ceiling, then to the picture window where Barrett’s disembodied hazel eyes closed in something like defeat. A shiver of triumph swept over her. The contest of wills. She shut her eyes again, relaxed.

  “Yes.”

  8

  Faith Cross was among the dead living. We hear all the time of the living dead, those restless, glassy-eyed ghouls whispered of in a trembling voice by our white-haired elders—dead, because their bodies move only at the bidding of witchmen working black magic along the bayou, or in the swamps where, in the stench of black soil teeming with floral decay, their zombies wait, tight-lipped and reeking with age, calling for release—living, because their souls, freed like jinn from ancient fire-forged urns, drift between our troubled realm and the netherwor
ld. They wander through our world as elusive as smoke, peering through our windows while we sleep, gibbering. Snickering. They have no names now, so we call them ITs. Yet the elders don’t tell the entire tale. Seldom is it pleasant. There are, as well, the dead living—their bodies grow, move, but their souls, alas! are as still as stone.

  Now, Faith Cross was such a one.

  Objects have no name. They are ITs, and this is what Faith saw reflected in her bedroom mirror on the day of her first wedding anniversary. IT was portly, IT stared with puffy eyes at her from the smooth glass, IT’s body was well fed, but was losing IT’s health; IT was lugubrious with a gleam along IT’s round limbs, as swollen as a corpse in its seventh day. To tell the truth, Maxwell would have to hug her on the installment plan. Faith, dissatisfied and filled with disgust, turned from the mirror to glare at Maxwell, who had inspired her self-inspection with a smug remark about her widening derrière.

  There were chintz draperies and valances framing the old iron bed Maxwell had restored, bracket tables on both sides of the bed, and old-fashioned pillow shams. At the cluttered bedroom dresser, Maxwell tightened a triple knot in his tie, then folded the dimple in with his thumbnail. “Like I said, you’d just better get your fat ass in the kitchen and fix dinner. If I come back here with company and there’s nothing on the table—”

  Behind him, Faith frowned at his reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Said, “You’ll what?”

  Maxwell sighed and threw up his hands, turning to face her. She could see he was tired, and without his wig he looked old, old. The job, the exigencies of editing, laying out picture pages, and the almost one-year postponement of his prison column were wearing him a bit thin. You could see it in his chin. It seemed to grow smaller day by day.

  “I don’t want to argue,” Maxwell said tepidly. He pulled his wig off the dresser, trying to remain calm, and dusted it off. He tugged it on—backward, and Faith bent down, doubled up with laughter. He began to color, and she came to herself, angry again.

  “You never want to argue!” she shouted. “Well, I do!” Then she stormed after him as he hurried away from her out into the hallway, his palms pressed over his ears, into the living room. Maxwell’s pickled-pine eighteenth-century desk was in one corner, a pair of blond beechwood Sheraton open armchairs were situated on either side of a davenport near a Biedermeier satinwood table and two Italian fruitwood chairs. Pewter and Sandwich glass accessories were on the surfaces of things and, just above the sofa against the southern wall, was a print of de Chirico’s Horses at Sea.

  There, trying to ignore her, Maxwell lifted flecks of lint off his sports coat, talking in a detached way, as though to the wood-paneled walls. “I told you what to do, woman.”

  “You expect me to jump whenever you say so, don’t you?!” She stood in front of him, trying to fix her eyes on his. “Don’t you?”

  “I just expect you to carry the ball sometimes,” Maxwell said sharply. “Is that asking too much?”

  Nervously Faith chewed her lip. Thought: My life is not a football game. She wanted to tell him she was afraid to face company, not because of the trouble involved in fixing dinner and setting the table, or because it involved “carrying the ball” for the business guests he brought home, but because it would take her forever to make IT presentable. The fruit of her body had gone bad. Each day she looked in the mirror she saw deeper lines around IT’s mouth and darker circles under IT’s eyes. IT was beginning to lose IT’s hair rapidly from overuse of a sizzling black straightening comb; IT changed clothes three times a day but still looked terrible; IT had spare tires around IT’s waist that no amount of morning isometrics with that muscular man on daytime television could reduce. IT, she feared, was a hopeless case.

  “You just get your fat ass in gear,” Maxwell said with finality. He’d taken his favorite pose, his right leg slightly forward and bent at the knee, the left knee locked, and his left hand shoved in his pocket. A model’s pose. Long ago he’d asked Faith, “How should I stand?” and presented several postures from Gentleman’s Quarterly for her as she braided her hair—his arms straight at his sides, or crossed, his feet together or parted. “Which one looks best, honey?” To get rid of him she chose the one he posed now. “Did you hear me?” Maxwell said. He looked, or so he thought, like Harry Belafonte.

  In the center of the living-room floor Faith began screaming. Maxwell’s palms flew to his ears.

  “That’s not going to work this time,” he shouted above her scream. He gave her his three-quarter view, said by some to be his best angle. “I won’t hear it!”

  She screamed louder.

  “Faith, I’m warning you! When I bring this ex-con back, you’d better—”

  A sound like splintering wood came from Faith’s head. She collapsed.

  There was a green meadow ringing with earth rhythms, stretching as far as her eyes could see; it was bounded on the north by the aurora borealis, on the east by the rising sun, on the south by the procession of the equinoxes, and on the west—by the Day of Judgment. It was a beautiful place. Birds darted through the air as fast as bullets. Knee-deep and dew-covered was the grass across this stretch of land, and here and there were trees. Faith felt the moisture of the ground beneath her and stood up. The grass rippled with a warm unseen wind that sent the tops of maple trees swaying, like dancers, in the breeze. The area was inhabited with all the creatures Big Todd once told her about: ax-handle hounds who lived on wood shavings in lumber camps; the bearlike Gumberoos, usually found in burnt-out forests and who, it was said, were impervious to bullets. To tell the truth, Faith found herself in the mythical land of Diddy-Wah-Diddy. It’s fairly hard to get to—the road leading to Diddy-Wah-Diddy has so many curves that a mule hauling a wagonload of fodder can eat off the rear of the wagon while he’s walking along; it’s so crooked gnats have snapped their necks going around the curves. Faith discovered behind her a tall elm with hundreds of branches bearing thick green leaves. Those leaves rustled, showering her with dew.

  And then the tree spoke: “My baby’s blue. I can tell—”

  Faith stepped back and shivered. “Daddy?”

  “Uh, huh.”

  Faith caught her breath. “But how—?”

  The tree rustled again. “It’s simple, honey. I said, ‘Uh, huh,’ because that’s one of the words the Devil gave us. I like it. Lucifer was down in Hell one day, taking inventory of his damned souls. He discovered that the number was runnin’ pretty low in the fourth and fifth circles. So he flew up to Heaven and stole a few angels. He stuffed them into his mouth and nose and ears and under his arms. But when he was flyin’ back to earth somebody on the ground said, ‘You takin’ alla them angels to Hell, Devil?’ Lucifer opened his mouth and said, ‘Right,’ and all those angels fell right out and beat a straight line back to Heaven. So the Devil went back for more. That same fella said, ‘You takin’ a new batch to Hell, Devil?’ Old Lucifer jes kept his mouth shut this time. He mumbled, ‘Uh, huh.’ ”

  “Not that,” Faith said. “How can you be . . . a tree?”

  The elm said, “Don’t let that worry you none. We all become trees, phlox, and hydrangeas as soon as we die. That’s only if you lived a righteous life, though. Ask your mother,” the tree said. “She’s right here.” One of its branches gestured toward a weeping willow to its right.

  Faith said, “Momma?”

  “Don’t ask me no questions,” the willow whined, “I’ve got ’bout seven million gallons of carbon dioxide to move before I—”

  “You are Momma!” Faith squealed.

  The elm sighed through its branches. “She don’t never wind down.” Then, with one of its broader leaves, it stroked Faith’s cheek. Said, “Would you like to be a tree? Really, you’re supposed to die first, but I think I can get it arranged for you.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. Can I be a maple tree?”

  “It’s done,” said the elm.

  At first, Faith felt nothing unusual. She saw the lush mea
dow as before. But when she tried to move, she found herself rooted to the spot. She had innumerable limbs and could feel, where her toes should have been, the slow wiggling in the ground of worms and brown ants, as busy as businessmen. She felt so natural she concluded she’d always been a maple tree, that she had slumbered, as maples do, during the long white winter when her branches were encased in ice and the meadow was sprinkled with a film of snow that looked like talcum powder, and only dreamed she was a woman. Now she was awake. Spring birds were returning from their long sojourn south to reinhabit her uppermost limbs. Goofus birds flew backward, as was their habit, and settled in her leaves, as did Phillyvamos and the single-winged, storklike Gillyfamoo birds. Wiggywams (Melancorpus dissolvens)—beaverlike beasts who often dissolve in their own tears—settled to sleep against her trunk. They were joined by Tripodermae (Collapsocorpus geomobilus) who retreated their telescopic legs and lay back on their long kangaroo tails to rest in her shade. Some birds sang, and she understood their language, as well as the obscure tongue of the other trees and slumbering beasts at the edge of the meadow. The dream was over; she was going to be all right.

  Then she woke up.

  Faith looked down and realized she was stretched across her bed. Maxwell must have carried her into the bedroom. She called to him. No answer. She could have been angry again, but she fought that urge, wondering with absolute uncertainty if she was indeed Faith Cross who dreamed she was a maple tree, or a maple tree yet dreaming she was Faith. Somehow, not knowing made her peaceful again. She reviewed the last year with Maxwell, and decided it was neither real nor a dream, but a nightmare somewhere between life and death. She remembered the wedding ceremony at Mount Calvary Baptist Church on the South Side, and the grinning guests from Maxwell’s office. Even Mrs. Octavia Beasley had come, dressed in white with an enormous pink peony pinned to her dress, crying as though Faith were her only child. Barrett, she remembered, had been absent, conspicuously so. He never plagued her again. It was just as well. He would have disapproved of the many tables of catered food in the church basement, her gown of ivory silk organza and imported lace. Maxwell, believing her story of being orphaned early in life, had agreed to pay all the wedding expenses. He had even seemed happy their first few weeks together, felt on top of things, and decided to rent an apartment for them by the lakefront. In the sky. He’d spent money freely, anticipating his hundred-dollar raise. Vividly she remembered the horror in his eyes the evening he came home a month after their wedding to announce that the prison column had been postponed until the newspaper’s circulation picked up. All the Chicago papers were failing, he said, and The Sentry was failing fastest.