Faith and the Good Thing

by Charles Johnson

  Obediently, one end of the intestines wiggled into the air and bent toward the northwest. It wavered like a long finger for a few moments, turned black, and drifted to the floor as ashes.

  “Go to Chicago,” the Swamp Woman said wearily, sweeping the ashes under a table with her foot.

  Faith beamed. “It’s there?”

  “I dunno. Why the hell you town folks think I know everything? I’m not the Sphinx, y’know. You saw what happened the same as I did.” The Swamp Woman scooped up the remaining entrails and dropped them into the cat’s dish, still grumbling. “Sometimes hog guts is unreliable. Coyote or dingo innards is best, but there’s a shortage on.”

  Taking Faith by her arm, chilling her with a touch that was at once moist and mushy despite the Swamp Woman’s strong grip, the werewitch sat her again on the pallet, and positioned herself nearby. Absentmindedly, she chewed on her talons.

  “Honey,” she said, “I seen ya comin’ years ago, and I knew you’d be wantin’ to ask about the Good Thing. I’ve got to be truthful with ya. I was readin’ a horse’s brain for old Widow Smith in town, and I seen yer face just as plain as day in the occipital lobe. . . .”

  “You know if I’ll find it, then?” Faith squealed. “You do, don’t you?”

  The Swamp Woman played with her nose, which must have had the consistency of putty, for she shaped it between her fingers first with flaring nostrils, then as flat. Finally, she chose to leave it as a long beak between her eyes, and said, “I never was too good on futures, levitation, or resurrections, but I sho ’nuff know how the Good Thing was lost.”

  Despite her dread, Faith leaned forward, entranced by the werewitch’s rasping voice.

  “Long, long ago, way before your time, the world was way different than it is now. Now, you can look at it, and sometimes it’ll appear like a stately ancient oak, a century’s product of patience and time, broad and beautiful from its gnarled trunk to its treetops; then, at other times, it’ll look rotten, child, hoary and as hollow as a politician’s head, fulla maggots as big as yer fist.

  “But it wasn’t always that way. Uhh, huhn. Once, men knew their place and were loath to leave it: paradise. Do ya hear me? Paradise. They didn’t live on the airy summits of Olympus, nor did they dwell along the straits of Ultima Thule. They had no nectar, no ambrosia; what they had, child, was the Good Thing—the one thing so good that no greater good can be conceived. Imagine, child, imagine awakening in the mild blue mist of morningtime to stand on the edge of another day filled from daybreak to dusk with the Good Thing; not just your Good Thing, but everybody’s Good Thing as it manifests itself in an infinity of forms. Folks fancied that the gods put those forms of the Good Thing in the world. Now you can say men put them there—through dreaming, through some ancient need for order and certainty, and gave the gods credit, fooling themselves. But that way of putting it isn’t pretty, and all good stories (and true ones too) have to be pretty, even the ugly ones. So I’m telling you that man’s ethical life was quite in order ages ago. That is, until the day the restless one, Kujichagulia, was born.

  “Folks said Kujichagulia should never have been born, because right from the start, only ten minutes out of the womb, he started screaming: ‘Who am I? What can I know? Where am I going? Where have I been?’ and worse, much worse, ‘What am I?’ People were embarrassed by his questions; they had no answers. And soon, after Kujichagulia’s cloudy infant eyes began to focus, he started criticizing the modes of the Good Thing. ‘Shallow,’ he called the thrice-daily worship of the forest gods; ‘Quaint,’ he said of the people’s fireside dances, their ceremony of the harvest and fear of the night. Deliberately he absented himself during the rites of passage for the young men of the village; thus, he remained a child forever, with many, many questions. Not only did his questions disturb the village elders, but within time certain gods began to wax hot with rage. Faraway, over the hilltops and trees, you could see thick thunderclouds swirling like frightened fish around Mount Kilimanjaro, home of the gods; torrents of rain, drought, and locust came, but still Kujichagulia questioned.”

  The Swamp Woman stopped and squinted at Faith. “You follow all this?”

  “I guess,” Faith said.

  “Is it entertaining?”

  “Uhh, huhn.”

  The Swamp Woman grinned. “All right. So Kujichagulia was spoiling everything. The gods—Amon-Ra, Isis, Osiris, and Shango—were checking out Kujichagulia all along, wondering if he would eventually set out after the source of the Good Thing, abandoning its modular reflections to seize the Good Thing itself. Some wagered that he would, but others, enraged by his restlessness, vowed to punish him and his tribe severely if he found it. For it was not only for Kujichagulia, but for everyone. On the night Kujichagulia finally realized the Good Thing could only be in the mountains where the gods were, all nature rose against him. Beneath his feet, as he traveled, the ground turned to mud under a terrible rain and the earth split from tremors that uprooted trees. But Kujichagulia pressed on. For sport, Amon-Ra sent many-limbed behemoths to stop Kujichagulia before he reached the mountains; these Kujichagulia avoided, being swift. From the depths of the sea, Osiris called forth slithering things with shining eyes to devour Kujichagulia. But the village boy scaled a tree and they died of thirst with upturned bellies beneath him on the ground. All these obstacles he overcame. Except one: at the base of the mountains he rested with an old tribe long respected for its magic and conjuring. His trials had weakened Kujichagulia; his tongue swelled in his mouth and he walked on burning, blistered feet. A girl named Imani wove her love magic around him; she took him to her dwelling, fed him, clothed him, and sat with Kujichagulia until he again was well. She loved him, girlie, and Kujichagulia returned her affections, soon forgetting his hunt for the Good Thing. For many years he stayed with Imani and filled her with children. Shango and Amon-Ra began to think they had won their wager, that the village boy had abandoned the Good Thing. But, as the years passed, Kujichagulia again became restless. Thoughts would burn his brain with longing; deep within he felt incomplete. At night he would stare from his hut at the clouded peaks of the mountains. Imani begged him to stay, to love and work and die in the way all did without question, but in the night, seven harvests before his seventieth birthday, Kujichagulia rose from their bed, tightened his loincloth, and began ascending the dark mountain. He climbed hand over hand for many days, bleeding from his feet and palms, thirsting now, hungering to glimpse just once before death the fabled Good Thing.

  “Near the top Kujichagulia knew he was mad, driven so from his suffering. Through the peals of thunder and the strong cry of wind he could hear the gods swearing at him. Far below he saw the village—tiny mud huts scattered among rocks and trees. Yet still he climbed, still he questioned, ‘What can I know?’ And there, in the cemetery stillness of the cool gray mountains, Kujichagulia beheld the Good Thing. Like a light it bathed him, like fire it warmed him. Killed him. For he was old and could not bear the strain. The gods Osiris and Isis raged, girlie. So furious were they that Kujichagulia had seen the forbidden, they put their heads together and decided to torment all men with the curse of restlessness and questioning. They hid the Good Thing, child, and the world darkened like a room deprived of its only light. But even the gods could not destroy it. It is a wish, a possibility that can only be deferred; and so, even today, it remains hidden. . . .

  “Now,” the Swamp Woman said, “just how’s a li’l fox like you gonna find what ain’t been seen since the beginnin’ of our bondage?”

  “I don’t know,” Faith said. “But I will.” Somewhere in her chest she felt the warmth, the terror of dreams on the brink of fulfillment. “And when I do, everybody’s bondage will end.”

  But was it real? Her heart said yes; her mind—no.

  “Are you sure?” Faith asked. “Is that the way it really happened?”

  The Swamp Woman scowled. “What difference does it make? I could have told you that the Good Thing escaped from Pandora
’s box, or that it lies waitin’ for man in the middle of Eden. But none of that tickles me as much as what I just told you.” She wiggled a crooked finger at Faith. “Before you ask if anythin’s true, first ask y’self if it’s good, and if it’s beautiful! Was the story good?”

  Faith nodded. “Yes. . . .”

  “And was it beautiful?”

  “Yes. Yes, it was.”

  “All right!” The werewitch snorted. She moved away from Faith to her strange machine in the corner. The Gila monster, exhausted, had fallen asleep with its legs dangling over the treadmill. The Swamp Woman yelled, “Haaa!” and the startled lizard began racing again. Lights flickered on the machine, and from a phonograph by its side there came music.

  “Hear it?” the Swamp Woman cried. “That’s the earth’s music as it revolves. Ya hear it? It’s smigin’ ‘mi, fa, mi’ ’cause life on the earth without the Good Thing is marked by famine and misery.”

  Closing her eyes, the Swamp Woman started patting her foot to the earth’s mournful music. And while she was distracted, Faith inched backward toward the door, slipped out, and hurried across the bridge.

  3

  Listen.

  Faith Cross, gambling on the legendary Good Thing, buried her mother and quit the South. Walking toward the quiet train station in town, her eyes on the overhead golden glow of the moon, she heard, like a refrain pounding in repeated rhythms through her brain, the inscription on her mother’s tombstone:

  LAVIDIA CROSS

  She Was Given 400,000,000

  Breaths and Took

  Them All

  Time and again, Faith recalled the eerie job of restitution Oscar Lee Jackson had performed on Lavidia’s bloodless body. He obeyed the Laws—removed any reflective surfaces from the parlor (spirits, therein, are easily ensnared), positioned Lavidia on her left side as she slumbered when alive, and—most important—relieved Faith of the sundry purification rites by doing these himself. They can, for the bereaved, be a vexation. In her cherrywood casket at the rear of the funeral parlor, Lavidia had looked like a waxy deflated balloon. Something had abandoned her, though what that was remained unclear: breath, perhaps. Shriveled she had been in her nineteen-year-old wedding gown, the Lord’s unwilling bride. Dehydrated. In her lifetime she’d been a derisive, vindictive woman who criticized everything without distinction, yet looked for nothing better, which is sin—it breaks the Twelfth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Criticize before Questing. She made, in her lifetime, few friends, thus none came to pay respects. Faith sat alone in the empty, echoing funeral home as an unperturbed Reverend Brown delivered his prepared speech on her mother’s virtues. It was an old eulogy. He used it for every death in Hatten County, changing proper names, adverbial modifiers, and pronouns, yet always injecting a deep sorrow and promised glory into his words. Faith, therefore, didn’t mind.

  Her thoughts had been elsewhere. For hours she struggled with the desire to kiss her mother good-bye. She did, finally, holding her breath and lightly brushing her lips along Lavidia’s dry forehead. It tasted like wax. Nestled under Reverend Brown’s arm for support, she followed the grim gravediggers back to the farm. The diggers—silent, muscular, and methodical men in faded overalls—opened the earth beside Todd Cross’s headstone, situated just yards from the farmhouse. They shoveled clumps of loose sod over the casket, buried Lavidia’s most prized possessions with her so she’d not return for them, and left with the minister like mute zombies in Brown’s employ. Faith remained. What had she felt standing there in the sunburnt grass between the two square markers? Round wreaths lay across the front of each. Only five feet separated the headstones, but Faith sensed that if she thrust her hand between them she would be brought again into the turbulence, caught in the conflict between Lavidia’s world and that of her father. She studied that space, watching it fill with remembrances fond, familiar, and sometimes frightening as her shadow swelled with the sun’s passage toward afternoon. Lavidia would have been pleased with the inscription on her marker. The words capsulized her reaction to the truth as told by the man of science: the man called Lynch.

  Time often distorted Faith’s memory, but now it was clear. She remembered: a few months after Todd’s death in the time of Dirty Mouth when children eat the new, golden grain, Lavidia took sick with a virus. Faith called for Dr. Leon Lynch, who practiced medicine in a cluttered one-room office in town next to the mortuary and had, it was said, attended all the great schools. It rained that night, with thunder so violent portions of the roof buckled and dripped water to the floors. They say it was so dark that raindrops knocked on people’s doors, begging for candles just to see how to strike the ground. Faith went frequently to the front window, smeared away swirls of steam on its glass, and watched for his coming. Betimes, the weather built to a thunderstorm. The outlines of water pumps and oaks in the front yard grew obscure. Dr. Lynch first appeared in the front yard as a distant shadow floating through the downpour, a plodding shape oblivious to the elements and electricity in the air. As he crept up the front porch, his shoulders hunched forward, and the brim of his hat ran water before his face. A shapeless hat, a down-turned, glowing Bull Moose pipe jutting from the drawn-up collar of his coat—these were all Faith could see until she unlatched and opened the door. Lynch wavered in the doorway, towering over her, so tall he could, at the same time, have gotten his hair cut in Heaven and his boots shined in Hell. He was tall, children. Before he entered, his tiny, alert eyes studied the dim interior of the front room, his gaze flitting from the cold fireplace, the old pine cupboard and sawbuck table, to the ladder-backed chair and candle stand by the door. Faith retreated to the bedroom, and he followed her, tracking soft mud through the front rooms and kitchen. In Lavidia’s bedroom Lynch again scanned the walls, ceiling, furniture, and shadows nervously before dragging a bow-backed chair against the wall to her bedside. He peeled off his wet coat and spoke hurriedly, the pipe stem bobbing between his clenched teeth:

  “Cold?”

  “Yes,” Lavidia said, shivering under several quilts.

  “Temperature?” He looked at Faith. Who was too frightened to answer, but managed, though she couldn’t find her tongue, to take his wet coat.

  “Open your mouth,” Lynch told Lavidia; then, as an after-thought, “please.” Lavidia obeyed, and from his black bag Lynch removed a wooden tongue-depressor, a thermometer, and items Faith was unfamiliar with (Did he need all that for healing? Conjure doctors only used dove’s blood, asses’ milk, and fresh cabbage dew, and with them could cure everything from sores in a horse’s eye to impotency). She was shocked that he had not asked her to leave the room before he pulled Lavidia’s nightgown up. It was odd, upsetting, to see your mother’s breasts, half-filled flaccid things lying across her like enormous leeches. Lynch ignored Faith’s reaction completely, and she knew immediately that he was one of those people who thought all children were, if not sophisticated but curious animals, at least aberrations of nature.

  Faith, seated behind him on a three-legged footstool, studied him carefully. He was revolting, hatchet-faced, and had a figure so scrawny it seemed to have been stretched on a rack; his long arms and legs were gaunt and angular in a blue serge suit shiny with age. Lynch’s right leg must have been artificial, fashioned from plastic or wood, because whenever his pipe flickered out with a hiss from tar and saliva backed into its stem, he would bang the ashes free of its bowl by striking it against his right knee. The sound was that of wood striking wood. A golden watch chain swung from beneath his open suitcoat, and both his shoes seemed enormous—perhaps size thirteen, with inch-thick soles. The back of Lynch’s neck was ruffled with obscene little folds, his face and hands looked sedimented with a grimy material that had permanently worked its way under his skin, beneath his broken fingernails and into his large pores. His head was pear-shaped and balding, his mouth was full of gum-line cavities when he smiled, and about him was the smell of rubbing alcohol and sulfur.

  Understand, men like Lynch are rare in t
hese parts. In truth, rare anywhere. They have in their hearts a homesickness that burns like an ulcer. Burns them up. Some find, in the end, their own hands turned against them. Like Beaumont Gaines, once said to be the smartest man in Hatten County. That he had to die like any other man got the best of Beaumont. “All men are mortal,” he told himself. “Beaumont Gaines is a man; therefore—” But he refused to believe the major premise—decided, he did, to check it out. The hunters came across him while chasing a hart into the hollow. Armed with slide rules and medical instruments, he was tearing open graves in the hollow, which was where they found him; also, where they burned him.

  Even though Lynch handled Lavidia roughly, she trusted him more than she did the root workers Todd brought to the farmhouse whenever she was sick. She believed in him and asked how she was, how she really was. What followed was a tale as strange as anything to come from the mouth of the Swamp Woman.

  The doctor slowly replaced all his instruments after inspecting each by the light of the single oil lamp burning on Lavidia’s nightstand. For a long time he said nothing. He filled the bowl of his pipe with a green sweet-smelling tobacco, smoothed its surface even with his forefinger, and drew carefully, thoughtfully, with painfully controlled breaths, on the stem. Soon, clouds of smoke rose around his head.

  “If I tell you,” he said, “you’ll have to promise not to interrupt me until I’ve finished.” His voice had grown deeper, more strained and troubled. In tone it was a lecturer’s voice, or that of a man talking to himself at some lonely hour. “I despise interruptions.” His lips parted in a tigerish grin. Biting on his pipe stem forced his lips apart, baring brownish teeth. Uncertain how to respond, Lavidia smiled. The effort faded fast. . . .