Faith and the Good Thing Page 18

  “Damn,” he whistled. “How come you’re so happy this morning? What’d I do?”

  She laughed. It was true; she hadn’t been so happy in months. Her sleepless night had not left a mark on her beyond the pillow wrinkles now fading from the right side of her face. Too, there was lint from the bed linen in her hair. But she was wide awake, her irises the size of saucers. A healthy, ruddy coloring like that caused by sexual excitement spread across her cheeks. She moved about the kitchen so lightly on her feet that Maxwell was overcome. He grabbed her and kissed her neck.

  “Am I still your good thing?” he asked, his voice hoarse before his first cup of coffee.

  “Uh huh.”

  “And maybe,” he offered timidly, “maybe we can still make it, eh?”

  “Yes—maybe,” Faith said, and she broke away from him to turn on the burner beneath a frying pan of bacon. Maxwell ate quickly, not quite awake, and—it was true—he looked somewhat wolfish at the table. His eyes were pink, his skin still blotched from sleep. He dressed and kissed her at the door. When he was gone, Faith took a quick cold shower, dressed, and started for the elevator. She stopped there, then hurried back to the apartment, where she pricked her left forefinger with a sewing needle and used the needle to write Jones’s full name backward in blood on the reverse side of his note. To add to her allurement she rubbed a film of rice powder along her breasts.

  She rode the subway to his address in the lower sixties, reciting Psalms 45 and 46 to herself until she arrived. His neighborhood made her nauseous. Old brownstones with shattered windows, shattered doors, and shattered steps leaned forward as if about to fall into the street; clouds of yellow smoke rolled through the air from a chemical factory on the corner and settled on the cobblestones of the street as fine powder. She saw the heads of rats pushing through small piles of garbage in an alley, an old man still asleep under a blanket of newspapers—The Sentry—on the corner near a liquor store, and abandoned cars all along the curb. Down the street, whirling in a circle like a dervish, was a mad dog chasing its short tail, white foam like meerschaum filling up its mouth. Faith checked the address on her note again, anxious, smudging the paper with moisture from her fingers. Then she saw it clearly: the scene in the Swamp Woman’s Thaumaturgic Mirror—this had been it. She crossed the street to a basement apartment on the corner, descended the steps, and knocked on an unpainted door, then waited, remembering that, in truth, there was no way to know with certainty if love and all she longed to believe about Alpha were real. Gestures told you nothing, nor did notes pressed into your palm by an old lover from home. It struck her that she’d been silly and was about to be made a fool. At the second she started to turn, to forget this affair entirely, the door opened, and Jones stood before her in a pair of baggy gray pants and a wrinkled shirt open to his navel. He smiled. Features on a manikin. She parted her lips to speak, then simply licked them, unable to move as she wanted, unable to toss her arms around his neck. How do you know he loves you? Faith swallowed, a bit loud. She struggled for a moment, deep inside her head, then threw her arms around him. She listened, her ear to his chest, to his heart, and felt everything would be all right. She was certain. That was all.

  Jones looked down at her and chuckled deep in his throat. “We’d better stop, or your father’ll whop my tail like he use to.”

  “Huhn?” Faith allowed him to direct her inside his single-room apartment. “I don’t understand. . . .”

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  Faith declined. She took a seat on the corner of his bed—just a mattress, really, lying flat with half its white stuffings falling to the floor. Jones walked barefoot to a hot plate across the room and started water boiling for instant coffee. A few groceries—unopened cans of butter beans, corn and cabbage, bottles of cheap wine and unopened boxes of instant potatoes—were stacked along the eastern wall behind a hot plate and beside a small refrigerator. His room reminded her of her own at the hotel: bare wooden floorboards with splinters sticking up like sharp needles, a low ceiling with a naked bulb in its center, and dingy walls. But the walls were covered in places with preliminary charcoal sketches. Half-finished canvases lay about and crushed tubes of paint were underfoot, their contents worked into the texture of the floor. The room had a feeling of presence and warmth that glowed behind Jones’s poverty. No—that word was wrong. It revealed not poverty but a sort of voluntary retreat from the world, similar to the atmosphere of a treehouse or a cave where children hide from their parents and talk about girls (or boys) and terrify one another with ghost stories. Beside it, her apartment was spiritual slum. Relaxing, she noticed an in-progress painting in the center of the room; she remembered the face well: the Swamp Woman.

  Jones poured his coffee into a tin cup, which he held in both hands, and sat down beside her on the mattress. Closer to her now, he seemed slimmer, shorter, and not at all like Big Todd. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and she could see a tattoo around his neck with this legend beneath it: Cut on dotted line.

  “Your daddy used to wallop me whenever I got funny with you, remember?” he said.

  Faith searched her memory. She found nothing there. “Daddy was dead when I first met you. . . .”

  “He was dead all right,” Jones laughed, “but his ghost could exfluncticate any man alive. Believe it.” He sipped at his coffee, set it down, and rubbed his arms. “You ’member that time on your porch when I first run my hand down the front of your dress? And I flew outta my chair and ran off down the field, you remember?”

  It was coming back. Slowly she recalled being seated with him on the wide farmhouse porch, late at night after Lavidia had gone to bed. The heaviness of the air returned to her. It was thick with humidity and smelled of rain after a short-lived sprinkle that left gleaming pools of water along the steps of the porch. She remembered the heavy moonlight floating in those puddles beyond the yard, the fluffy drifting balls of fur from pussy-willow trees that moved around their heads like fairies, or daydreams. They had watched the rain, enjoying each other too much, had been driven closer together by the thunder, and then the stillness, the heat and oppression of night. They ran out of talk. Jones wiggled closer to her on the top step of the porch, put his arm around her waist, and waited for her reaction. She could do nothing. She’d wanted him there, that close. Closer. But what of her reputation and pride? The trees were watching her, the summer moon and animals hidden out there in the bushes and trees. They saw her sit without protest as he dropped his hand inside her dress. They were jealous. She could feel it, because she felt she belonged to their world and not that of men, because she’d walked among them, her feet slipping on moonflower vines, her ears hearing and loving every birdsong of morning. They might never forgive her. But she let Jones have his way until he’d been hurled away from her. He pitched forward off the porch and into the mud, where his head crashed and his arms flew out wild. Without a word, he’d taken off, stumbling through the yard, falling flat on his face, and eventually vanishing from sight.

  “That was awful strange,” Faith said. She found she could not look at him, especially into his eyes. It involved too much. “I thought maybe you had a nervous condition, and had an attack or something. That’s why I never asked about it.”

  Jones slapped his knee. “Hit was your old man! Soon as I lay my hand on you, he came along with a haymaker hot enough to set the Mississippi on fire.” He imitated the move with his own fist, hitting his jaw, and fell back on the mattress. “He planted hit dead on my chin. Believe hit! I looked up from the floor, and there he was—all big and black and bristlin’ mad, standin’ between us on the steps. So I started travelin’. I ain’t use to fightin’ haints—no sir! I’ve fought some strange things in my time, but I wanted to be ready for him, to have hit out with him in the open. . . .”

  “It was Daddy?” Faith shook her head and stared at the floor. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Swear fo’ God,” Jones said, and he crossed himself once. “So I went
out to the fields when I left you, and waited for him. Sho ’nuff, he came floatin’ in toward me on the air. Like smoke. I swung at him, but my hand went right through his chest. Then he slapped me upside my haid, and stood over me, shoutin’, ‘You mess with my baby ’gain, and I’ll whop yo’ tail clean into next week! Well, I figured I couldn’t mess with nothin’ like that. But I had to see you again, right?”

  “Yes,” Faith said. She pulled her lower lip, kneading it between her finger and thumb. He was lying—she could smell it (lies smell sweet, children: somewhat like a fresh biscuit), but she said, “That does sound like Daddy—”

  “Yep,” Jones continued after finishing his coffee, “so I ran straight down to the swamps, and looked up that old witcher ’ooman.”

  Faith rose and went to the half-finished oil portrait. The outline of the Swamp Woman’s head dominated the center of the picture; her yellow eye was shut tight, the green one shone as bright as jade. Faith turned to Jones, her head pounding with pressure.

  I didn’t have nothin’ ’gainst your daddy,” Jones said, “but he was standin’ in my way. You know how fathers are—they don’t think nobody’s good enough for their daughters. Anyway, the witcher ’ooman heard me out, and gave me somethin’ to overcome anybody that got in my way. I think I still got hit.”

  “A mojo?” Faith said.

  “Just a minute—” Jones stood up and fumbled for the frayed billfold in his hip pocket; from it he produced a square strip of white cloth bearing red and black letters:

  A I K N

  P R M C

  D H T R

  M M P M

  “She wrote it for me during the full moon,” he said, “and she told me to go straight to the graveyard where your daddy was buried—where his haint would be waitin’ for me to have hit out once and for all. . . .”

  Faith hurried to the mattress where Jones had sat down again, picking at his toenails. “What happened then?”

  “Oh, I got there at ’bout midnight. Hit was so dark I couldn’t make out none of the headstones. I kept hearing noises, too. Laughter. They scared me. I wasn’t but twelve years old then. This big wind came up, then a mighty grist of rain—noises flew up from the ground all around me, like chains were rattlin’ somewhere. Honey, I wanted to run home. Believe hit. But you had my nose wide open. I woulda wrestled with the Devil and walked a hundred miles jes to keep on seein’ you. Sho! But jes when I thought I couldn’t stand hit no longer, when I thought my blood was ’bout ready to turn to water, I heard another sound behind me, turned around shakin’, and saw your daddy behind me—whiter all over than if he’d jumped in a vat of milk, and twice the size he was when he was livin’. ‘You ain’t give up yet?’ he said. The rain started ’gain, and hit got into my eyes. I could hardly see, and my legs and arms were as stiff as wood. I shouted, ‘No!’ and then he came at me, his big fists flyin’ through the air. I shouted what the witcher ’ooman told me to: As the eternal fires of West Hell burn, let my adversary twist and turn! And he stopped jes short of hittin’ me, his eyes popped open, and he started turnin’ around in circles and screamin’—”

  “He did?” Faith cried. “Daddy was hurt?”

  “Naw, he wasn’t hurt—jes caught in that old ’ooman’s magic spell. ‘Do you give up?’ I said, and he cried, ‘Naw!’ But I knew he had, and was jes too damn proud to admit hit.” Jones looked up cautiously and said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Yes, yes, I do,” Faith said. But she thought: Big Todd’s grave was not in a cemetery but behind their farmhouse—Alpha had lied. But he’d lied well. . . .

  “So,” Jones continued, “when he stopped turnin’ he fell down, and started tearin’ tufts of graveyard grass up with his fists. He shook his head, looked up at me real peaceful-like, and said, ‘Ain’t nobody beat me in life or death, and anybody who come as close as you did deserves to have my daughter.’ Then he started laughin’, and ’fore I could say ’nother word he was gone.”

  Faith fought a sinking feeling in her solar plexus and a chill that seemed to be not on her skin but beneath it. She felt like a bird ensorceled by the eyes of a cat, and hung on Jones’s slow, melodious speech. “He really said that?”

  Jones nodded. Said: “Believe hit. I swore that nothin’ was gonna keep Alpha Jones from his honey if I could help hit, not even dead folks. I didn’t count on your momma, though.” He whistled through his square teeth. “Live folks can be a lot scarier than dead folks sometimes. . . .”

  Faith stood up, returning to the painting of the werewitch, allowing her thoughts to move along its surface. Liar! she thought. But it stood to reason that if Todd approved of anyone courting her, it would have to be a storyteller like himself. Someone strong, a giant, a Great Fool among frightened ones, a weaver of words and delicious little lies to woo other people and live by. She started, but remained still. Jones had come up behind her, barefoot and silent, and folded his forearms around her waist.

  “Hang me up for bear meat if I ain’t been empty inside without you, Faith. . . .”

  She hung her head, fighting the warm feeling that sprang between her skin and his. Who else could say something as silly as that—bear meat, indeed!—and make you believe in it? Like Todd, he was just an overgrown boy—long, apelike arms and hard black flesh hiding a mind that could create fabulous lies and believe in them. And, though it was wrong, she believed in them too. “Alpha, I’m married. I’ve been married for a year, and Isaac is good to me. . . .” She stopped, afraid to pursue that last thought any further. “It would be a sin—”

  “Shoot! Life is short, sweetheart—you got to seize the day. Hit’d be a sin not to.” He placed his rough face next to hers. “I wouldn’t bet a huckleberry to a persimmon if you ain’t the only gal that ever meant somethin’ to me. . . .”

  “Alpha, please—” She couldn’t think. “Please—”

  “I know you’ve seen lots of ripstavers since you knew me, but I’ll be shot if I didn’t pray like a horse to cross paths with you again. Without you I’d be as dead as a catfish on a sandbank.”

  Jones tasted the inside of her mouth, and she his: warm, as she’d expected, faintly sweet, as she’d hoped. Then she was weightless in his arms, floating toward the soiled mattress. The thought of making love disturbed her. It had never worked out before. It had to be an exchange, give and take. With Arnold Tippis, Faith had felt the energy released between them stifled in this natural expression; rather, it had all come one way—she had been unreal to him, a thing in which to violently unload that energy, that tension Dr. Lynch spoke of; and Crowell had been hardly better with his hasty mechanical approach to the matter. Maxwell, before they’d ended sex together and he moved to sleep on the sofa, had wanted passively to receive that energy, to be acted upon like soft clay. And with all the others—sheer horror. Yet now as Jones’s shadow fell across her it was somehow different; the energy was released, displaced, and sent shuddering back and forth between them, in the desired exchange. Alpha projected the image of himself in her, as she did within him until they seemed to exist, not as two people, but one. Or, stranger still, as nothing. It was crazy, but she thought of high-school math at the moment their images melted, drifted, and were transformed; she thought of herself, Faith Cross, as one lonely pole in the universe—FC, and Jones as another—AOH with he a + and she a—when their rhythm touched its telos:

  AOH: FC

  Stillness.

  Beside him, her pulse beats slipped slowly beneath his own, her chest fell as his rose, rose as his fell, and Faith refound just a bit of the enchantment of her childhood in being a woman. There was a twilight feeling like that of sleep in her body; and in her mind—the frieze of a frost-sprinkled earth, naked brown tamaracks twisting into a sky of milk-white clouds. Jones, lying on his back, closed his eyes sleepily, flung his left wrist across his brow, and sang,

  “Here’s to hit, the birds do hit,

  The bees do hit, too, and die;

  Dogs do hit and get hung to hit, />
  So why not you and I?”

  By and by he rose, pulled on his trousers, and started preparing dinner. He spread a tablecloth (really a large rag made from sewn-together work shirts) on the bare floor beside the bed, and within a few hours had it covered with plates of collard greens and baked bread. As they ate, Faith told Jones of her search, its inception, its untimely end. For once her tale did not fall on deaf ears. As she unraveled it, he ate faster, as though it made him hungrier, and when she brought everything up to date, he reached across the tablecloth and held both her hands in his own.

  “Things ain’t hardly ever like they seem—not even me,” he said. “But they usually come out for the best.” The muscles in his face grew slack, his eyes calm. He told a story:

  When Alpha Omega Jones was passing through South Carolina on his way North, he ran short on money and stopped to work on a tenant farm. The bossman looked him over, said, “You’re pretty healthy lookin’—how long you wanna work?”

  “Just a week,” Jones said.

  And he signed up for just that long. Seven days later, he went to draw his pay. The bossman was in his shack near the fields where he employed about fifty men in picking cotton. He scanned his books and shook his head. “Ah been feedin’ you for ’bout a week,” he said, “and I figure that you et up alla your salary plus ’bout ten dollars mo’.” He spread his hands, palms up, and grinned. “You’ve got to give me another week’s work.”

  Since it was all there on paper and looked official, Jones did not object. He went back out into the sun, back to his place in the fields, not suspecting anything until an old Negro named Junior collapsed right beside him. Jones propped Junior up. The old man’s throat rattled. He said, “You better run, boy. You’d better run hard, and hide y’self! That man’s kept me here for five years—” And he died. Another worker stood beside Jones, shivering. “Junior’s the seventh one to die this month. You can’t run ’way. The bossman’s got a weak heart, but he comes after you anyway, with a gun and a whip and alla his dogs. He whops you, and if you run ’way, he won’t give you no food.”