Faith and the Good Thing Read online

  An old woman in a black bonnet and black shawl began to dance. To Faith she danced the way a snake writhed or maybe like something dead but newly risen—like something that had no business dancing at all. She snapped back her head and stepped a mad cakewalk through the aisles, screaming. Magnus smiled. “All that is given to man, to life and to this illusion is stolen from God. Who shall you serve? If Him, your salvation is assured. If the world . . .” Magnus chortled so deep, so strange that it sounded like the earth moving and stiffened all who heard, “. . . woe unto you who would dare to love this world.”

  None would dare.

  So the congregation thumped their feet in loud tattoos along the ground, clapped their hands, and called out. Air in the tent grew dense with dust, cries and smells released from the gathering. Distance between their bodies dissolved until all the raised voices in the tent echoed inside Faith’s head. Inching slowly through the tent, Reverend Brown sought prey—the proud. He laid his fingertips on Eula May Jenkins’s temples, lifting the big woman like a puppet. She quaked, shouted, screamed, and fell at Faith’s feet.

  Lavidia gestured to Eula May’s empty seat. “You sit here by Alpha.” Alpha’s shirt was torn away, his chest was the color of fire. There, Faith did not want to sit. She backed away, aware of a sickness springing at the pit of her stomach, a stinging in her arms and legs. Seeing Faith and Lavidia, Reverend Brown spun on his heels and, from across the room, pointed his finger like a revolver at Lavidia. She froze, trembling once as if cold or being crushed by a great, invisible palm; then she left her seat, tearing at her throat. She collapsed, flailing the air. Faith went to her, tried to pin her arms and legs to the ground.

  It was useless.

  Faith’s dark reflection sparkled in Lavidia’s wide eyes; but her mother could not see. Lavidia’s wig, golden in the lights strung overhead throughout the tent, burst from its pins. Veins corded in her neck. Beside Faith, knifing through the riot of the hymns and loud tambourines, she heard Reverend Brown whispering:

  “Are you ready, child?”

  Dark and triumphant, Brown’s face was a mask of moving, proud expressions. He touched her arm and something inside Faith broke free. She tried to inhale, but the air was swirling, thick and weighted with invisible things. On her tongue strange words formed, and more vividly than before she saw her father’s swinging feet as retribution for his terrible pride and passions.

  “Call!” Brown demanded.

  Pain rippled like electricity through her limbs, so intense she wanted to leap, to avoid it, from her skin. “Call,” Brown whispered. “Say ‘Thank You,’ child.” It meant nothing to her. She would have said anything to extinguish the pain inside her. There on the ground, the earth at her ear humming with voices in the air, she saw it clearly—all the possible number of things in space, all forms that had ever existed in time reflected back into time like a man’s image trapped in a room of mirrors—she, herself, Faith Cross, fading back and forth on the continuum of time until she could no longer be certain of the images of herself that shone in her father’s eyes; those of Lavidia, the preacher, the undertaker, and Alpha were more real than she, if in that crazy complex of images she existed at all. Faith screamed it—“Thank Yooou!”—sang it—“Thank You!”—and finally believed in its healing grace—“Thank You!”

  But it didn’t last. The silent kitchen said so. And so did the yard beyond.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Reverend Brown, wondering if he knew how short-lived had been her salvation. An afterglow that warmed her and dissolved her intimations of a ghastly world without meaning or sense, save salvation and survival, had carried her through the remainder of her childhood. Time, though, did damage to it. For it often took the form of a hunger unsatisfied by further prayer meetings. Always these feelings possessed her, as a demon or jinni might, haunting her experiences to find a vision of complete freedom. It took in breaths beneath her own, moved with her limbs. Demanded its rights.

  Sometimes she tried to ignore it, to grow up like other children. Ignoring it, though, was somehow akin to trying to forget one’s own heartbeat; louder it grew with denial. Like a lover or lecher, the awareness came to her at night when she tried to sleep, stealing through her bedroom window like the scent of night-blooming flowers or the whispering rustle of wind in the trees. When it came, the world as it usually appeared . . . disappeared. Time was suspended, and tomorrow took its true form as illusion. Only the present was immediate and everywhere, disclosed to her as the miraculous—woven veins in a browning autumn leaf, in the minor miracle of an insect nature had fashioned like a twig—with legs!

  Clearest were these feelings on the afternoons she spent spooning with Alpha Omega Jones, her first and, she often thought, last love. It was more than a run-of-the-mill high-school affair; she was certain! Together they would lie in the tall grass, holding each other until their in and out breaths coincided, breathing as a single body; her shorter breaths would slowly slip beneath his own. And the grass and trees, it seemed, would bring their pulsations in line with them until the universe was a single heartbeat. Reality was a dream, or sometimes a nightmare, but no more than this: a rhythm. She felt herself at such times carried through the world as though she had wings, but not toward Glory, never toward Glory. Only back to earth, deep within its strange fabric. No personalities existed in such a pure world of feeling, just flashes of human outlines in the quilt of creation where plants had their place, and animals—all coexisting peacefully, lyrically, like notes in a lay.

  “Well?” Reverend Brown said, removing his hands from her shoulders. “You and your mother both had it for a while. You can have it again.”

  Faith looked away. “I felt something back then, but I don’t think that’s what Momma meant.” She looked at him timidly, almost afraid to say more. “I think Momma meant something like it . . . only more.”

  “More?” Brown grumbled, and again, “More?” as though the word were bitter. He stepped close to her, intimidating her with his size as his hands flexed at his sides. “What more is there? Honey, the world is just the way you saw it on the floor of that tent—there ain’t no more—there couldn’t be! People who look for more will be annihilated.”

  “She meant something,” Faith insisted.

  The reverend cleared his throat and towered over Faith, drumming his fingers on the tablecloth. “Sometimes family deaths can be disruptive. They take away someone who’s been the center of your world for a long time, and you see how difficult it is to live without someone or something to hold on to. Death ought to start a person thinking—”

  “. . . About what the good thing really is?”

  Brown’s fist crashed on the table; Lavidia’s pipes spilled from their rack. He glared at them, then at Faith. “Don’t interrupt me! I’m trying to tell you something!” The reverend’s lips curled back over silver-capped teeth, his brow wrinkled. Faith immediately wanted to take back what she had said. Brown had taken it personally. Bitterness laced his voice:

  “I ain’t gonna preach sin to you. There’s more involved than that! Your momma, God rest her soul, was tryin’ to tell you on her deathbed that you’ve got to have somethin’ to hold on to now that she’s gone. . . . somethin’ that’ll pull the world together.” Brown, Faith sensed, was no longer talking to her, but to himself, slamming his left fist repeatedly into his right palm and pausing for reflection. “This world we live in—it’s like a shadowy cave fulla crazy sounds if you’ve got nothin’ to light it up. There’s no sun but the Saviour, y’see? There’s no right or wrong, and nothin’s clear-cut—there’s nothin’ but a lot of empty things that keep bumpin’ into each other in the dark. . . .”

  Faith thought of her father, of his stunning fictions and well-meant lies. “I’ve heard different.”

  “From who?” Brown sneered. “From the Swamp Woman? I’ve heard tell of the stories she tells kids stupid enough to believe them. You listen to me. Forget people like that.” Brown winced and grabbed at his ri
ght side. “Even talkin’ about her hurts me—happens every time I mention the old witch. People like her will have you believin’ in haints and hoodoo and the walkin’ dead if you let them.” Brown seized a napkin from the table and wiped the wrinkles from his forehead.

  “Pray with me,” he said.

  The bleating horn of Jackson’s hearse drew Faith’s attention. She went to the front porch, Brown at her heels, muttering almost under his breath, “I’ll be back tomorrow and the day after and I’ll keep comin’ back until you start showin’ some sense.”

  From the doorway she leaned against the railing of the stairs and watched as the reverend sprinted through the rain to the hearse and slid onto the front of the seat beside the undertaker. It seemed impossible the dark machine in the mud held her mother. Lavidia’s deep, almost manly laughter would no longer awake her in the morning; silent was the voice that had called her from the fields. Though it was pointless, she forgave her mother for her selfishness; her will, spitefulness, and grudges; even for taking Alpha from her in the cruelest possible way. Forgiving, though, was not forgetting. Always she would remember resting her head on Alpha’s chest as they sat on the front porch of the farmhouse, painting in broad, vague outlines the possibility of a life together, only to look up and see Lavidia’s gray face scowling in the window nearby. Always she would hear her mother say, “You’ll never have nobody that’ll love you like your mother did! You’ll cry for me when I’m gone.”

  Lavidia lived in fear of Faith’s leaving her to a house full of memories that would become distorted and terrifying with the passage of time. Therefore, she clung to her, screened every boy that drove up to the farmhouse to visit Faith, and browbeat each with questions: “Faith’s been saved—she’s married to God,” Lavidia would say; then wryly, with squinted eye and twisted mouth: “Are you God?” Alpha found such competition unbearable. He never returned. Faith had waited for him each evening on the front porch until Lavidia informed her, “He won’t be back no more. I was payin’ him to court you ’cause you looked so lonesome all the time. Wouldn’t no other fellah look at a girl as plain and backwards as you. I couldn’t afford it no more. I guess he’s gone for good.”

  It must have been a lie. Yet to this day Faith was uncertain. Others—the rowdy boys from the mill, the shy ones without a future, and the bold ones destined to die soon in fights or drink—came to the farmhouse after Alpha’s disappearance, but Lavidia never confronted them. Faith herself turned them away, excusing herself to do school- or housework, or simply hiding from them in her bedroom. Did one ever really know another’s affections? You could guess at them and live as best as you could in the shadow of uncertainty. That was Big Todd’s way. He never asked, never doubted that haints and demons inhabited everything. He told her great love and hatred moved men to happiness and shame: it was that simple.

  She looked at Reverend Brown beside the mortician and saw that his smugness, his strength came from knowing or thinking he knew with his heart the workings of other men, that they lusted, or felt lost and would be rewarded or damned proportionally for those longings. But was that true? Was all that really there? Concerning his feelings, Alpha’s face told her nothing. His dark eyes were quiet, and his lips bent up at their corners whenever he saw her; but there was nothing about this, or his smooth hands, or his face and smoother words, that really told her what he was thinking. Love was a myth born in imagination, pieced together from the inferred softness of a stare, deduced, probably from false premises or undistributed middle terms, from his smile: it could have been deceit. Lavidia never ceased to make that clear when Faith found herself moping about the house. “Just how did you know he loved you?” she would challenge. No reply was possible. You could never know. And Alpha and the world of things, of kitchen furniture and hearses, came to her as cold, inaccessible things out there.

  You couldn’t fool yourself; you knew you wanted the smile to be love, and knowing that you knew completely ruined the feeling. How had Big Todd done it—lived in a world so full of magic that he could call pots and pans by proper names he’d given them? Seen from the floor of Brown’s tent the world had been a wasteland; the one in Big Todd’s tales, a dream. Could you choose?

  Within herself Faith found no answer.

  And now the hearse was at the road, hauling her mother to the halfway house between Hatten County and Hell. She jumped down the stairs and ran slipping through the mud. Jackson stopped the car, rolled down his window, and called:

  “You go and stay with Mrs. Jenkins tonight.”

  They left her at the road. From the north the wind brought rain to pelt Faith. She suddenly feared reentering the farmhouse. It rested on white stones her father had carried by mule from the forest. Lavidia’s rocking chair creaked back and forth slowly in the wind. Tree toads were carping, harbingers of a storm, and the rain exploded like the report of rifles far away. Faith remained still, staring at the front porch, trying to imagine Lavidia sitting in her rocker, smoking and squeezing from the pores of her waxy nose white things she called worms. The cabin defied her memories, determined to remain . . . out there. Then came thunder, and in a way that frightened her—as though the noise would tear the thin membrane of the sky, rending it to the horizon like a run in cheap hosiery, and angels, God’s throne, and heavenly host would tumble like leaves across the fields. Faith began running south until she fell. She looked back, still frightened by the cabin that appeared to descend into the soft ground. Alone, she cried, but kept walking, aimlessly and for hours. Her flight took her to the edge of the swamp. Then it was that Faith decided to seek audience with the were witch at her shanty in the bogs.

  2

  Residents of Faith’s county told rumors that the Swamp Woman was the Last Gnostic and hated visitors, that she had once been a diviner of dragon bones and dodo gizzards in Nubia before the coming of the Portuguese, French, and English. They said when her tribe was pillaged and its members shaved, manacled, and driven into the ships lining the west coast of Africa, she had chosen death over captivity and made herself one of the living dead to torment her people’s captors forever from the dank swamps, cackling to herself, working hoodoo, and conversing with spirits. Those who believed in her said she was a midwife for the things hiding like tumors beneath a man’s personality; others said she guarded forgotten mysteries and formulas lost to man. But everyone in southern Georgia attributed miracles to her—like the time before the Civil War when old Massa Furguson paid her eight hundred dollars in horses and slaves to make him young again. The Swamp Woman, if the story is true, was reported to be mischievous. She slaughtered cows and sacrificed virgin slaves that entire night, and by morning the witchery was done. The old Massa awoke and pulled back the covers of his bed. He was young again. And black. His wife screamed, awakening the entire plantation. Old Massa looked in his bedroom mirror and saw that he was in the body of one of his slaves, a healthy but stupid one named Jug. When he turned around, Jug was standing in the doorway, grinning in the Massa’s old body. Jug sipped at a bottle of the Massa’s best port, sucked at his long Cuban cheroot, and gave a strong, protective arm to the Massa’s wife as defense against the raving nigger fingering his face before the mirror. That’s exactly how they say it happened. Jug sold the Massa the very next day for two new muskets and a mustang, freed all his slaves, and threw a party in the Massa’s Big House every weekend for thirty years until he died.

  Terrible was the Swamp Woman said to be in matters of vengeance. On the Thursday evening just before the evacuation of Atlanta to escape Sherman, the Algonquin boys from the Hollow drank themselves courageous with moonshine; they started out to capture the Swamp Woman with shotguns and hounds. P.T. Barnum would have paid quite a sum for featuring the hoary old hag, but—it is said—she exposed herself in all her otherworldly nakedness to the boys at the foot of the bogs. She drove them mad, children. The older folks all spoke of how the Algonquin boys came running back to town barking on all fours, their hair white as ash, while the d
ogs were leading them on ropes with toothpicks jutting from their muzzles.

  But the tales of the Swamp Woman did not bother Faith. She had, in eighteen years, heard of stranger things. Although tired, she traveled all that evening, and by midnight, was slowly walking, guided by yellow moonlight cutting through the trees overhead, through the swamp. Beneath her feet, the moonlight forced shadows away from crawling vines, often causing them to look like serpents. Through these Faith stepped easily, remembering her father’s eyes, for some strange reason, and his story of the snakes: long ago he had sat her at his feet before the hearth as he warmed his legs, telling her in an awe-softened voice how, when just a boy, he had wandered away from home and become lost in the woods. A snake by his foot had frightened him, but looking closer he discovered it wasn’t a snake at all—just a vine. Life, he told her, would be like that—he told her that someday she would awaken from a life of everyday slumbers and realize all she considered familiar were just shadows. But if she began to look, to search with her mind fresh and her heart yearning for truth as a man weaned on sand thirsts, then she, like everyone in time, would find her way out of the woods. Beyond the shadows. Faith’s search was at an end. In the clearing just ahead was the werewitch’s dwelling.