Faith and the Good Thing Read online

  The owner of the fields charged out of his shack and stopped beside them. He kicked Junior with the heel of his boot, rolling him over to see if he was dead. He scowled, wiped his brow with a red handkerchief, and thought for a minute. He turned to Jones. “Bury him right here.”

  “I can’t do no mo’ work,” Jones said. “I got psychic powers.” He bugged his eyes at the bossman and placed the tips of his fingers to his dark brow. “Ever now and then these spells come over me—I get visions, I get weak and see through things, and can’t do a lick of work.”

  The bossman produced his whip, raised it, then looked curiously at Jones. He dropped the whip and pried open Jones’s mouth to look inside. “You got blue gums,” he muttered to himself. “Hit is possible. Blue-gum nigguhs can do ’bout anything when it comes to magic.” Then his tiny blue eyes flashed. “You gotta prove hit to me. Tonight. And if you don’t, I’ll string you up to feed the crows.”

  That night, in the worker’s shed, everyone prayed for Jones. They knew he was lying. It occurred to Jones that he was going to die. There’d be more vultures around him than women; they’d pick him dry. The bossman, certain all his workers were locked in the shed, went out and shot a coon, brought it back, and stuffed it into an old burlap sack. He entered the shed, the workers drawing back into the shadows; he dropped the bag at Jones’s feet and grinned.

  “If you can tell me what’s in that bag, you and me gonna make a lot of money.” He rubbed his palms together. “Go ’head, we gonna be rich—”

  Jones circled around the bag slowly, then reached out to touch it.

  “Hands off, Mr. E.S.P.,” the bossman shouted. “You just tell me what’s inside.” He produced his whip and let it swing loose at his side. “You’d better not be lyin’, Jones! If you’re lyin’, I’ll see you swing!”

  You would have thought Jones had been walking in the rain, so wet was his clothing. He stared at the bag this way and that, looked at it sideways, and every whichaway, until his eyes hurt. He couldn’t figure it out. Cotton? Shoes? Corn? Finally, he gave up and hung his head.

  “Hit looks,” he said, “like you got this heah coon. . . .”

  “What?” the bossman cried. His eyes strained at Jones. “Tha’s hit, tha’s hit!”

  Jones looked inside the bag. He felt light as a feather, and turned to point his finger at the boss. “Yep, and I can tell the future, too. I can tell that in ten seconds your heart’s gonna give out like a cheap watch. Believe hit! Hit’s gonna draw into itself real tight like a spring, and BURST!” Jones glanced at the clock on the wall of the shed and counted, “One, two . . .” and by the time he got to ten the bossman was stone-cold dead.

  Faith was silent for a second. She ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth, then stared at the unfinished portrait on his easel. “But what about the Good Thing? You didn’t tell me what it was—”

  Jones laughed. It sounded like barking. “You were good.” He looked down at the tablecloth and their empty plates. “That story was good. The dinner was good. . . .”

  Somehow it made sense. Faith went again to the Swamp Woman’s portrait. She could almost hear it sniggering. The good things were the things of the moment, the things that had been felt and tasted and touched in the past, and might be tasted still. Kujichagulia should have stayed in the village of mountain vales. He should have loved and worked and lived to feel the Good Thing in its small reflections. He might have lived longer that way. . . .

  Jones stood up and threw out his arms. Stretched. She watched his easy progress to the portrait of the Swamp Woman. He took his palette from the floor, studied it, and, as he said something to her she would never recall, began squeezing paint from twisted half-empty tubes of alizarin crimson and thalo green. What she felt about Alpha,

  It was difficult to say, but she’d sensed something different about him as they made love, his weight smothering her comfortably like the curtain of evening on a weary farmer after a hard day in the fields. Unlike Maxwell and the Alpha of her youth, he had not asked if it was good: he’d changed. She could smell that change in his odor, no longer that of barley and cotton and Hatten County, but of turpentine and paint. Jones walking through the dry weeds on the land behind his father’s farm was not what she saw: but Jones, his broad shoulders framed by the square canvas and his movements strangely ritualistic, merged, so to speak, with the canvas itself; Jones to her seemed no longer a boy. But not a man either. An eternal child, perhaps. Yes. It came through now as clear as the lines in a wet leaf: when he created, he tried to create himself anew. She counted off long minutes while he spent preparing his tools—rusty palette knives, old brushes with cracked stems, waste rags, and a wide range of pigments, cleaning them with all the care a paraplegic might take to clean his added appendages. Thirty minutes. Then he began: the unfinished corners of the Swamp Woman’s face were conjured beneath his brush, as were shadows and illusions of light, depth, and space in images as clear as those she’d seen on the blank pages of Barrett’s Doomsday Book. Every inch of the lush, rolling background, every curve of the hills and angle of the farmhouse, every line of the fields crisscrossed with primitive industry was incredibly precise. But unreal. Jones had no truck with describing the scene. He was, she realized, calling these things, changing, twisting, and transforming them into—what? Order. The scene puzzled her because there could be no doubt that Jones, though he had no reason to be happy in his present situation, was, when he painted, freer, happier, and more whole than anyone she’d seen since she arrived in Chicago.

  She was slightly touched, slightly saddened by the truth of it all. There was Jones and his canvas, his object, but through his object, not in spite of it, he seemed to find release: the Good Thing. She envied him, then felt terrible, for since she could not create, how then could she realize her goal?

  Almost in spite, she said, “That doesn’t look like her at all. . . .”

  Jones looked over his shoulder, his grin more peevish than warm. “I gave up realism a long time ago—there’s enough of that in movies.” Seeing her jealousy, he smiled. “I started paintin’ in prison. Durin’ the day hit was the only time I was in control of my life. In the mornin’s they led me to the machine shop; in the afternoons I sweated through exercises in the yard, but at night—when I was just a little tired and, therefore, alert—before they’d turn out the lights, I could paint.” Jones’s eyes gleamed. “Hit was the only time in my whole life that I had something to say about what went into, or was taken out of, my world. . . .”

  Completing a black boil on the Swamp Woman’s nose, he dried his brush, then stood back to admire his work. “Hit made bein’ in jail bearable,” he said. “And when your husband convinced them to set me free, hit made bein’ back in the world bearable, too. Hit ain’t easy to explain—I tried to study up on hit to make hit clearer to me, but hit’s still fuzzy.” For a moment, he stroked his jaw and pulled at the wings of his nose; then he gestured at the canvas. “I ain’t even certain what this thing is! A fellah in the joint told me hit was all a trick, that your eyes are fooled by the points and planes and lines. One guy told me hit was supposed to show life as hit is, another said hit wasn’t no good unless hit made him forget alla his problems.” Jones frowned, bending toward the canvas, pointing at it. “A teacher in the joint said what I painted wasn’t as important as how I did hit. A Muslim said my work was worthless unless hit was instrumental to his cause, and another guy—a damned fool!—said all that mattered was my puttin’ alla my feelings in hit, like kids do, and forgettin’ form.” Jones slammed his left fist into his right hand; he glared at the painting, then at Faith. “All I know is that doin’ hit makes me feel good, the way goin’ to Sunday meeting with Reverend Brown never could. In fact, if I paint on Sunday I don’t even feel like I need to go to church!”

  Now she knew she didn’t know him. Yet what he said was familiar. She remembered the feeling of sanctity she’d felt when sitting under a tree, catching its hard sap in her hands on the Sun
days she’d not gone to church but had felt—though she was miles from Reverend Brown’s moaning bench—wedded with the warmth of the earth and the wind. Art, perhaps, was not confined to a canvas. Not at all . . .

  “See, I don’t call myself an artist,” Jones said, slapping his chest. “That’s a special word. A real artist doesn’t play with colors like I do. He doesn’t have to. It’s as crazy as a coon dog with the tics, but it’s true: a real artist is his own canvas. Me—I still need that empty surface. I ain’t ready yet. But someday, when I’ve got hit all together, there won’t be a dime’s worth of difference between what I’m creatin’ and myself—you won’t be able to separate me from my work by space, or by a difference in materials, because—and I know it sounds crazy—my life’ll be the finished work. . . .”

  Jones rubbed his nose, unconsciously smearing paint along his lips and, equally unaware, licking at it. Faith smiled to herself. He’d probably done that often—taken paint unconsciously on his tongue during the intoxication of creation, swallowed it, and sent it streaming through his system. He was that close to this thing.

  “About the only real artist I ever knew was the Swamp Woman,” Jones said. “She didn’t need no paints, or stone, or sheet music, and I swear I believe she could change herself into any damn thing she pleased. No paints, just ideas. That’s what you work on the world with, right? But the trick’s in not comparin’ the ideas to the world to see if they’re right. She compared them to other ideas.” Jones, cleaning his brushes, sighed. “The world’ll never challenge your ideas—only other ideas can do that. . . .”

  Without knowing why, Faith was alarmed. Something in her rebelled against this. She gave it voice. “If you don’t compare what you know, or think you know about the world to it, then how can you ever know if what you think is true?”

  Jones blinked stupidly, trying to unravel her question. “I don’t—”

  “You have to have something to compare things by, don’t you? The Good Thing—isn’t that the standard?”

  He laughed. It did not sound wholly sane.

  “There ain’t no standard.”

  Faith said no more of this. Like so many ideas she’d been exposed to, she tucked this one away deep in her memory, refusing to dwell on it now and reserving it for those hours when she was alone, aching with wonder, and could inspect it like the contents of a lost purse one finds on the street.

  Jones changed the subject. “What’re you going to tell your husband?”

  “Isaac?”

  “You’ve got more than one?”

  Faith wrung her fingers. “What can I do?” The question seemed to pain him as much as it did her. He lit another cigarette, then pulled on his coat. Without speaking for a long time, he walked Faith back to the subway, then stood, his hands in his pockets, beside her on the empty platform.

  “Alpha,” she said, “what do I do?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Be thankful that we had a good time—you can’t ask for more than that.” And he kissed her on both eyes as her El train roared up behind them.

  Children, sweet Faith rode that subway train for hours, back and forth, from the West Side to the North Shore. Finally, to avoid going to the apartment, she walked around the block several times, paced the street, and looked up the sixteen stories to the lighted front windows where she knew Maxwell sat at his desk, working. Waiting. At the corner, she stopped in a bar, had three Bloody Marys for courage, then headed, coiled up inside, for home. The words were framed and well edited in her mind. “Isaac, this is all wrong! We’ve been lying to each other for too long. I’ve lost something, and I’ve got to get it back. I haven’t been fair with you, but I want to settle all that now. You can have everything: the money, the furniture, everything, but just let me go free.” As she stepped from the elevator to her floor Faith thought of Jones and added more to her confession. “Every life should be a kind of painting. We don’t have that together. We keep slashing the canvas with lies and—”

  “Honey, come in here!” She heard him the instant she’d thrown open the door. She entered the front room, her head erect, and found him hunched over his desk, papers scattered over its surface beside empty coffee cups and an ashtray overflowing with ashes and half-smoked cigarettes. His collar was open and stained black along its length with perspiration; both his eyes were red and pinched against the light in the room. Faith sensed her confession slipping from her. It wasn’t going to be easy. Maxwell, despite his faults, despite the deadly chemistry destroying them, could—if she denied herself everything she valued—be loved. She admitted it: I love something about him. But not Maxwell himself. It was some general, vague thing about him that she knew she could love—the same thing she could love in a tree or a rock. Simply, that it was. But even that, no doubt, would be destroyed in the divorce courts. They might like, even slightly love each other when they went in, but the lawyers, to make a case, would have her and Maxwell at each other’s throats. They would part in hatred. It wasn’t right. . . .

  “They loved my first column on Jones,” Maxwell said. Though tired, he was ebullient.

  “They did?”

  “Ragsdale said Jones brought a kind of ‘understanding’ to the prison issue. Don’t look at me! I just wrote down what your home boy said. The editors especially liked the stuff he said about being free in prison—spirit transcending confinement, and all that—like Boethius, Lowell said, whoever that is.” Maxwell beamed. “They’re going to run it next week, and feature it in all The Sentry’s sister papers.”

  Faith tried to remember the opening lines of her confession. “Isaac—”

  “Sssshl” he said, his left forefinger to his lips. He got up and went to the front closet, flung open its door, and let Faith look in. Side by side on the rack hung an ebony Persian lamb coat with mink trimmings and an ermine evening cloak.

  She caught her breath. Maxwell grabbed her hand and led her through the front door, down the quiet hallway, and to the freight elevator. Inside, as they descended, she regained her composure. “Where are we going?”

  Maxwell chuckled, then handed her a set of silver car keys. Faith’s hand shook as she looked at them. “These aren’t ours.”

  “They’re yours,” he said. Downstairs in the parking lot beneath the apartment, he directed her to a sportscar so new there was hardly dirt on its tires. She knew little of these matters but sensed it was a foreign car, one of a limited line, and expensive. She felt her excitement building. And fought it. A car was merely metal, its chassis designed to cover as pleasingly as possible the ugly instruments, oil, and tubing inside. But the chassis was beautiful—long and sleek and silver like a newly polished bullet. The doors were cleverly concealed to give its surface the effect of uninterrupted steel, or an imporous surface like the robe of Christ, of power hidden beneath the hood.

  “I got it all on credit, but the money’s finally coming in,” Maxwell said, “and I figure that it was mainly you, and what you did for me with Lowell, that turned the trick. He was raving about Jones’s column all morning long, and I know it’s not that good!”

  She was in a dream—a maple tree still slumbering through a nightmare that would evaporate at dawn.

  “Don’t you like it?” Maxwell asked. He sounded hurt; he waited nervously, his hands on his hams.

  “Its’ beautiful. . . .” Faith said.

  “I knew you’d like it,” he said. “It cost an easy ten grand, but that’s just the beginning! I’ve been checking on houses out in the suburbs. There’s a ranch house in Evanston, right near the lake. You’ll love it.”

  “We can’t afford that,” Faith blurted. “You don’t have the money—”

  Maxwell laughed and led her back upstairs, the car keys burning in her hand. “As long as you carry the ball there’s nothing we can’t do together. In a year, maybe two, we’ll have every damn thing we want.”

  He went to the refrigerator, mixed them drinks, and returned to the front room to click on the record player. Somethin
g old and blue by Billie Holiday came on. Maxwell plopped down beside her on the couch, crossing his legs, feeling good, and nibbling at her ear lobe. Faith sat erect, as stiff as Lavidia in her casket, ice dripping from her drink to the thick carpet on the floor.

  “Watch that,” Maxwell said irritably. Then he grew warm again, whispering in her ear, “I knew we were going to make it—things just had to start happening.” His lips curled with deep, trembling laughter. “You’re a great ball-carrier, baby. . . .”

  Faith smiled. Her five was sluggish, her six heavy on her tongue, and she never got to seven at all.

  10

  Some folks would say Faith was born without mother-wit, leading a deceitful double life like that. She stopped wearing her wedding band (the skin beneath it had turned pale, and that was some kind of omen), and, ultimately, pawned it along with a handful of her jewelry when Jones’s resources ran thin. He told her he didn’t need much—just a bed, breakfast every now and then, and blank canvases until the time he could turn the creative process on himself. Most of his paintings, means to this end, he gave away, grunting, “Don’t matter much, I got hit out.” She insisted he sell them, that he try to associate himself with a gallery and make a living out of this thing. Each time he refused, and though it angered her, Faith was also glad that he could give his work away, and—especially—could make her feel brand-new. She told him as much on the Indian summer afternoon they ate a late lunch in Lincoln Park.

  Also this:

  “I’m going to have a baby. . . .”

  Jones started choking, a whooping noise burst from his lips. He pounded his right fist on his chest, gagged, and coughed up a chicken bone. Tears ran from his eyes.