Faith and the Good Thing Page 22

  Tippis peeled his fingers from her forearm, rose, and crossed the room to the window. Her eye followed his movements; she heard every word he said. But the words were meaningless. She wanted to die, was thankful that it was a possibility. It made her laugh inside her head: there was freedom after all. Death was a peculiar thing, the boundary event through which all others were defined and delimited. You never believed it was going to happen when you lived; it only happened to others, and you went dutifully to their funerals, suspecting that you might escape their fate and live forever. Not now—she was going to become sand and stone, perhaps a maple or oak, or maybe she’d just be allowed to rest. . . .

  “Are you afraid of dying?” Tippis said, his back to her. “It doesn’t make any sense that suddenly we should be no more. Why should we be if we have to not be!” His shoulders hunched, pushing his head up like a jack-in-the-box. Behind him, laughter came from Faith. Fresh perspiration broke out on Tippis’s face as he looked at her—a red open mouth of serrated teeth, a pink eye in a black head. He inched toward the door, his head tucked in, opened it without a sound, and slipped out.

  With no one to hear, Faith attended to her own thoughts, aware of time mechanically clicking away in the wall clock near the door, not caring, comforted by no illusions of things to be done, no projects which, unless she completed them, might prevent the world from going on. A round sense of the void. But she did not want to die, although going on like this, trapped in a body that would not respond to her will, seemed like a curse. She was aware of it only by the painful itch crawling from her head to her feet, by the hardness of the plastic tubes inserted into her right side. Afraid, she wanted to pray, but suddenly could not recall a single verse. Fine, she thought, just fine.

  The door opened. Her eye smarted with light from the hallway, then focused through a watery film on a man’s figure in the doorway. He straightened the shoulders of his loud sports coat, touched first his bright pink bow tie, then his wig, and sat down with a frump on the bedside. It took a struggle, but she managed to turn her head toward him.

  “I just heard an hour ago,” Maxwell said. He leaned over, looking at her face, then winced. He closed his eyes, stood up, and backed away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The baby, too?”

  Go away! she thought. Her head hurt now; something was flipping her brain over and over like a flapjack. Please—

  Maxwell pressed his respirator to his lips thoughtfully and shifted from one heel to the other. It was almost pathetic; he was a writer, a worker with words for whom comforting words would not now come.

  “Faith,” he said finally, waving his right hand as if to pluck his phrases from the air, “I never knew it was going to turn out like this!” Air whooshed loudly through his throat; he puffed the respirator between his lips. “I tried to reach Jones right after I heard, but he didn’t leave a forwarding address with his parole officer. They’re looking for him now. . . .”

  He had deserted her. So Faith had expected. But why were they looking for Alpha Omega Jones? Surely not for her sake, or the baby’s. Such men as he and Big Todd could not be captured. Not really. You could chain that malleable rough side of them that lay in history, but the rest was wind, a current that sometimes cooled you when you were dry, but broke you, as the wind did tar paper in a cabin window, when you got in its way. Somehow, it was just.

  “If you pull through this, I’ll make it up to you,” Maxwell said. “I’m going to get you the best doctors that money can buy.” He paused, his eyes narrowing on the silhouetted side of her head, his teeth bearing down on his thumb. “If you just show enough Will Power, honey—”

  “Go away!” She got it out this time. It shook Maxwell. He started to speak but swallowed instead, then reached inside his suit coat. He withdrew his billfold and laid twenty dollars at the foot of her bed. “In case you need anything tonight.” He straightened his tie in the mirror above the sink in her room, and left without another word.

  Time dragged on like a polecat mangled by a truck and hauling its dead rear end to the roadside. Each breath became harder for her to draw. Her body seemed already gone, but her mind was clear, as transparent as bubbling spring water with shiny stones visible on the floor of its stream. Side by side at the stream’s bottom were stones for the respective stances she’d endured: Lynch, Tippis, Lavidia, Brown, Maxwell, Barrett, and Big Todd. Their voices tramped through her mind with the force of a hunter’s boot heel—being and not-being, life cannot support itself, sublimation of instinctual drives, get yourself a good thing. . . . She had suffered, and what had she now? Ash on her tongue. The sides of her mouth drew together in a deliciously evil sneer, “Faugh!” Not one of them knew of the Good Thing, or even believed in its possibility—its necessity.

  “Faugh!”

  At that instant her eyes went cloudy, unclear, and ached from within—even the closed one, and when the left one again admitted light from her small room she saw crouched at the foot of her bed an extremely large white cat. Its eyes were like crystal, deep enough to lose your mind in, deep enough to suck her thoughts from one crystalline plane on its surface to another, and finally freeing her as it opened its mouth of razor-sharp teeth: “I can’t do nothin’ until you come, honey. You ready?”

  Faith sucked in her breath and smiled faintly. It was a long way home.

  11

  People never tire of hearing Faith Cross’s tale. An old farmer sitting before the kitchen stove, petting his rooter-dog, may make it an odyssey involving the fate of the world; harlequinfaced grandmothers will grin, giggle, and tell it as a gallyflopper spiced with the morals they want you to hear. It’s said by some of them as far north as Chicago that Arnold Tippis returned to Faith’s hospital room, that he started hollering for help. They say he cringed in her doorway, whey-faced and whimpering for a long, long time, staring at that charcoaled corpse—the mortal remains of sweet Faith Cross.

  That ain’t the truth.

  Truth is, Faith took hold of herself, grabbed the bills Isaac Maxwell left on her bedside, and rose from her bedsheets—minus a lot of skin; she stole down the empty hospital hallway of Michael Reese, and out through the receiving room. Quiet as a ghost. You didn’t need a Navajo guide to follow her trail—it was marked by the line of frightened faces of folks who saw her creeping wraithlike from corner to corner through the streets of Chicago. Clear down Michigan Avenue: horrified folks holding their hearts. The old man in the ticket booth at the train station saw her—he’s in a coma to this very day. Faith rode the rails for hours, asleep with the Swamp Woman’s cat on her lap, and—at Hatten County—climbed off. Without a word, children. Don’t you believe Lem Hastings when he says his hair turned prematurely white from worry. The last murrain that killed his mules didn’t do it. It was fright. Sheer horrification at seeing Faith’s wreckage hauling itself down the back roads past the black hole where her father’s farmhouse stood. Passersby said they saw something as white as snow, swaying, whispering to itself in the farmhouse ruins, moaning, and meandering from room to room. Touching things. Wailing, they say. Then it moved on, across the fallow brown fields to the mephitic bogs. The mud was as high as her hams when she crossed the bottoms. Late autumn winds winnowed rotten leaves around her head. Anguish welled within her; her thoughts were red-tinged, burning her eyes until they watered. It was as if she’d made the transition from the dead living to the living dead (think sharp now), but was back in the world on a temporary visa. By nightfall, Faith could barely break through the tenebrous, twisting barrier of naked trees and thorny bushes bordering the swamp. Everywhere was the septic, intoxicating, sweet smell of seasonal decay. She kept on stepping.

  Clutching vines and fronds fell away from her path at a clearing, and in the distance, surrounded by the roundel glow of moonlight and its reflection off the stagnant waters of the bogs, was the Swamp Woman’s shanty. All else in Hatten County might have changed—calamity might have leveled its houses, families might have been swallowed whole by time—but the shant
y still stood, half submerged in the swamp like a ruin, or the white rib of a mastodon, or a cow skull sunk in the sand. Right. That she was dying Faith had no doubt. And of all the people in the world, probably only the Swamp Woman had a way with death: an understanding. The cracker-barrel philosophers at the feedstore in town often told how Casey Fudd, after the death of his first wife and four children in the great epidemic of ’29, wanted to throw in the towel. So aggrieved was he that he asked the Swamp Woman for a herb to end his life as quick as possible. She refused. “Then,” Casey swore, “I’ll do hit m’self.” He found enough courage to buy himself an old .45, a gallon of kerosene, a long rope, and an economy-size bottle of rat poison. Brother Casey was going to do it up right. Folks say the Swamp Woman wanted Casey to persist, though, and ensorcelled him right on the spot. Not knowing this, Casey tramped down to the river, sat himself upright in a rowboat, and pushed off, floating down the river until he came to some low-hanging trees on the bank. There, he tied the rope around a tree limb, doused himself with the kerosene, swallowed the bottle of poison, raised the pistol to blow out his brains, and kicked the boat out from under himself. What happened? Old Casey pulled the trigger, but the bullet broke the rope, the river doused the fire and, when he got a lungful of water, he gagged up every drop of that rat poison. Old Casey pulled himself up on the riverbank, vowed to make a new man of himself, and ran for Commissioner of Hatten County. And he won, too.

  Weak, ready to give up the ghost, Faith pulled herself hand over hand along the swaying bridge to the shanty. There was still hope if, before she drew her last breath, the Swamp Woman would clear up the mystery of the Good Thing. The glowing lights within the shanty blinded her left eye as she crawled through the Door of the Dead. The werewitch was there, hunched over one of her workbenches amid open Black Books, a gilded copy of De Novum Candarus Salomis, the Kitab-el-Uhud, Clavicle Keys of Solomon, and The Grimoire of Pope Honorius II. Her three forefingers marked her place in one of these as she peered, cackling, through a microscope.

  Faith’s voice cracked. “I’ve come again. . . .”

  The Swamp Woman glowered, spun around on her stool constructed of old gray skeleton bones, and lifted her fingers to the place where her lips should have been.

  “Shhhh!”

  Faith, swaying on her feet, her head bent low, despaired. The werewitch, it seemed, had no time for her. As the Swamp Woman returned sniggering and squinting her green eye through the microscope, Faith turned away, hobbling to the door. She passed the full-length mirror in front of the pallet bed, looked. Shuddered. “Nice looking,” bubbled bitterly from her lips, yet she did not cry. There was almost something aesthetic about her ugliness—her round, hairless head, the cockleburs and mud caked on her tattered white gown. The fire must have destroyed one of her breasts—only that could explain the concave area running from her right shoulder to her hip. Bones forked up through her skin and all over, her body looked as crinkled and black as a soft marshmallow left too long in the fire.

  “You’re looking good, girlie,” the Swamp Woman laughed. She turned away before Faith could respond. Whatever had the werewitch’s attention must have been of epoch-making importance. She kept her eye to the lens, whispering to herself, “. . . Tausend ein Million . . .” and wrote furiously with her free hand. Faith stumbled across the slanting floor, only half aware of the Swamp Woman’s remodeling of her shanty. A new cabinet of alchemical cookbooks and peeling tomes was in the eastern corner beside a shelf of bottled toadstones, molting boar skulls, and growing plants: satyrion, henbane, and sea-blue lungwort. Faith fingered a healthy monkshood for a moment, trying to lose her thoughts in its gristly, hirsute texture. It didn’t work. Emptiness weighed heavily upon her, wrought ruin with her frail attempts at self-regeneration. Only inches from her feet was the Thaumaturgic Mirror. She stepped close, touching the waist-high urn, peering over its rim.

  “And now?” she whispered.

  Electrified water in the urn bubbled briefly and shot before her eyes a single ancient image: the bogs.

  “C’mere!” shrieked the Swamp Woman.

  Slowly Faith hobbled to the side of the werewitch. Who clapped her hands gleefully and tossed back her misshapen head. “I’ve got it, girlie!” She winked mischievously and giggled. “I’ve been workin’ on the solution to this problem for goin’ on a century now!” She leaned forward, peaceful repose sagging her features, and sighed. “I guess I don’t have to be a werewitch no more—when the fish is caught, you toss away the net, right?”

  “You don’t!” Faith said. It was unthinkable. No more Swamp Woman? It was like saying the sun had burned out, and there would be eternal night. “I thought you’d always be around—”

  “Nope!” The werewitch wrinkled her nose. “Don’t ya think I’m more than a werewitch, just like everybody’s much more than whatever they have to be at one given time? It’s like this: everybody looks for the Good Thing in different ways, right?”

  “Yes,” Faith said. “I understand—”

  “Do ya, now?” the werewitch grumbled. “Do ya really understand that a man or woman or werewitch has a thousand ’n one ways to look for what’s good in life? Do ya see that ya have to start with the limitations that ya find y’self in, say, as a preacher, then follow the preacher’s path as far as that’ll take ya—like the Russians say, vynoslivost, ‘living a thing out’; then, ya take a scientist’s path ’n see how far that’ll take ya?” Across the Swamp Woman’s face was a seriousness and intensity Faith had never seen. “Ya take every path: the oracle’s, teacher’s, the artist’s, and even the path of the common fool, and ya learn a li’l bit from each one. That’s life, girlie. Ya keep right on steppin’ and pickin’ up the pieces until ya gets the whole thing—the Good Thing. As for me, werewitchin’ is pretty played out.” Seven gnarled forefingers reflectively stroked her crooked jaw. “I think maybe I’d like to try a young girl’s way—innocence, faith, and all that. Might be a lot of laughs—”

  “But you’ve got the ‘answer’?” Faith gestured at the microscope, the hope of a final solution to her quest sticking, like a chicken bone, in her throat. “You said—” She stopped, noticing that the Swamp Woman seemed puzzled and had cocked her head like a hound. “Child,” she said, “this is one answer (and a damned good one at that). It’s about the only kind of answer that somebody on my path can provide.” She shoved the microscope across the table and said, “Look in there.”

  Placing her eye to the lens, Faith focused and saw an enormous silver globe floating in white space. The head of a pin. And clustered thereon like ants on a sweet apple were thousands of people—more black folks than you can find at Vicksburg on a circus day, all dressed in full-length robes with holes in the back for ebony wings.

  “Two hundred million, seven hundred, and sixty-nine angels,” the Swamp Woman giggled, “that’s the answer—in an average case, that is, just countin’ Virtues, Thrones, Dominions, Powers, Principalities, and Archangels. If you throw in them li’l cherubim, the number will rise to the third power. . . .”

  Disillusioned, Faith removed her eye. The Swamp Woman slapped her knee and howled; she sailed off her seat, crashed headfirst on the floor, and commenced to rolling around, kicking up her heels, laughing, pointing, and signifying on poor Faith, “Oh, look in the mirror! Hee hee! Look, oh, oh—look, look!”

  Faith hurried to the mirror and saw, encircling her one good eye, a sooty ring. She wiped it off. Shouted, “You’re terrible!” Her throat convulsed with humiliation, and she started to cry, letting it all come out—the misery, disenchantment, and, now, a deep and certain longing for death. “You’re an evil, heartless old witch!” she cried.

  That brought the Swamp Woman to her feet; she erupted every now and then with snickers and hid the smile on her face with both her hands. After she had calmed down she placed her right arm around Faith’s shoulders and said, “Girlie, I didn’t mean no harm. Categorically, that trick proceeded from the Good Will. That’s right! It didn’t
involve no means-end relationship whereby I said, ‘If I want to poke fun at girlie, then . . .’ Uhn, huhn. I tricked ya ’cause I had to act in such a way that a maxim based on my action might itself become a universal law.” She patted Faith tenderly on the head, then palmed it playfully. “Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody did that to everybody else?”

  Weariness had its way with Faith. She felt numb and insulated from the world. Her good eye, though it had no lid, began to darken, slowly, like fermenting wine. “I only came to say good-bye before I die. . . .”

  The Swamp Woman jumped back and stomped her foot on the floorboards. “You’re giving up? Child, you’d better stick your brains back into the stove—they ain’t done yet!”

  “The quest is over,” Faith whispered, more to herself than to the werewitch. “I failed. I was a fool—”

  “Over? How can it be over when ya only been on one path—and a silly one at that?” The Swamp Woman’s face blackened with rage. “There ain’t no beginnin’ and there ain’t no end.” She stroked her chin in deep meditation. “There ain’t nothin’ but searchin’ and sufferin’, too! To be human is to suffer, child—to feel, to be sentient, y’see? And, if nothin’ else, ya can do what that sweet gal Imani, Kujichagulia’s wife, did.” A smile spread across the Swamp Woman’s face. “Haven’t ya figured out, after all this time, who Imani is?”

  Faith was alert now. “You!” She was furious and, since furious, quite alive, her spirit reviving with violence. “You lied to me! You didn’t tell me the whole truth! You said the Good Thing was lost.” Faith trembled with anger. It had all been a great lie from the start. “You lied to me!”