Faith and the Good Thing

by Charles Johnson

  “It’s a terribly long story,” Lynch whispered, “billions of years old. You must be patient.”

  She bobbed her head as the doctor glared at her. Only the right side of his face was lit by the lamp. His single visible eye did not blink, but its surface glistened with moisture.

  He said, “Billions of years ago an explosion of tremendous magnitude occurred in space, and our universe was aflame with radiant energy until darkness fell.” Lynch jerked his hands above his head to describe the event, and left them in the air, motionless. He described matter forming, gaseous clouds aflame throughout the cosmos, the impossibility and undesirability of infinite regress, and the Fallacy of the First Cause. “Around these rotating clouds matter condensed to form our earth, which was cold then, so cold that it froze water vapor, nitrogen, carbon oxides, ammonia, and, of course, methane. On our earth, snow fell, and at a speed that could generate enough heat to melt this cosmic snow itself. A crust formed on the earth, and above it—oceans—”

  Faith shouted at Lynch’s back, “That’s wrong! Daddy said the oceans were tears from the eyes of angels!”

  One stare, one sophisticated snarl from Lynch were sufficient to silence her. Testy, he said: “Entia nun sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum,” and scowled like a whale.

  “Faith,” Lavidia said timidly, “please . . .”

  Lynch fumbled through his vest with one hand and, with a deadly drumming, struck his leg with his pipe bowl. His knotty jaw muscles flexed in the darkness, his wide eyes set on Lavidia. He found dry matches in his coat pocket and, without looking at his hands, carefully relit the bowl.

  “It was a long time, aeons ago,” he said, turning to glower at Faith, “that the fissures split along the surface of the earth’s crust, and liquid granite was vomited to the surface. The continents were formed in this way.” Lynch leaned back in his chair, serene again, and fingered the stubble on his chin. Smoke streamed down in twin jets through his nostrils. He cracked his knuckles, leaned forward, and tapped Lavidia’s arm. “The earth was barren. For uncountable centuries the only activity was that of the volcanoes hurtling up their contents until the earth froze and thawed, for several such cycles—until something living struggled into being. What was it, Mrs. Cross? Was it man? Will you submit that it, ha ha, was Adam?” Lynch’s mouth smiled; really smiled. “It was slime! At the ground floor of life are primitive blue-green algae. Like all life, that life is composed of cells that come together, working in a harmony that destroys the strength each cell possessed as an independent entity. Do you see?” Lynch cried. “Life brings death.”

  He was on his feet, clutching the pipe in his right hand and limping across the room. He stared at his feet as though he’d heard a rumble, or a beast rising beneath the floorboards, cocked his head to the right like a curious rooter-dog, and waved his free hand through the air.

  “Life itself is the condition of death—it’s self-evident. L’être amène le néant! That was the strange secret that created religion and poetry, Mrs. Cross—this incredible contradiction. Life, on the level of the cell, can continue indefinitely—the cell regenerates itself ad infinitum. But,” and he pointed his long pipe stem at Lavidia, “the cells come together to build a simple organism, to make algae and fish and . . .” he paused, his eyes like saucers, “. . . and us. But life cannot support itself. From rest, from the nonliving, it springs forth; to it, it must return. And why? Why, in reason’s name, are we born only to die? The way of being of life itself, as supported by nonliving matter, ultimately requires the end of being, the weakening of the syncopated cells . . . the death of the organism.”

  Lynch hurried back to his seat and bent forward, blinking as though about to cry, his lips close to Lavidia’s ear. He told her that the oceans shrank, that in the swamps plants appeared. “Can you witness this?” he asked. “Can you see it? Because, herewith, from dead matter to mollusks, from nothing to a plurality of life forms, man emerged through accident, madam! Life, as we know it, as we worship it, must come to know itself as an aberration—an accident in the universe—as God’s greatest jest. Yes! As a ridiculous longing for itself!”

  Faith closed her eyes. It had not happened that way. There were no accidents, no mistakes in creation. She remembered Big Todd’s story of how black folks got to be that way: black. A gathering of souls in limbo were, after centuries of waiting, finally called to the Godhead for judgment. They all scrambled like evening commuters to get there, pushing and shoving until God, angered as only He can be, boomed, “Get back!” And all had thought He said, “Get black!” And they did exactly that. (Later, in the stillness of a summer eve, he told her the truth: from different colored clay were men made—and Faith believed him then.)

  She saw Lynch exhale a long column of green smoke, exhausted as though he’d staged the historical drama of creation himself (and he had, children). Lynch rearranged Lavidia’s cotton gown around her shoulders and placed his fingers between her breasts.

  “You take in close to twenty thousand breaths a day, at about twenty cubic inches of air per breath,” he said. “The air carries oxygen, which the body warms and filters. It’s moved to the bronchiae, on to the lungs, and finally to millions of cells that are air sacs surrounded by vessels and capillaries.” Lynch located a thick blue vein on Lavidia’s right breast and ran his ragged finger along its length. “Blood absorbs the oxygen through these cells and expels carbon dioxide. Fresh blood moves to the heart which pumps eight hundred gallons of blood each hour. . . .

  “A machine,” he said with slight disgust. “Do you hear the click-clicking of your delicate instruments developed over those billions of years from unliving matter?”

  Faith remembered the empty stare in her mother’s eyes. Lavidia, her pink lower lip drooping and her nostrils flaring like a colt’s in winter, had not spoken immediately.

  She blinked, and seemed to come out of a trance. “Yes. . . .”

  “That’s how you work,” the doctor said, cramming loose tobacco from a cellophane bag into his pipe. He wet both lips with his tongue and cocked his head to the left. “That’s what you are, no more than that complicated plexus of cells through which energy travels like an electrical current. You take in energy from your food, from the rays of the sun; you channel it through your body where it can move muscles, or be siphoned off into brain work. But regardless of what you do, you must move it. If you don’t, your muscles will contract, your loins will ache with tension. Tension and release. Mrs. Cross, nothing—absolutely nothing beyond that can be called real.”

  Unbuttoning his collar, swinging his head from left to right, and his bemused eyes still straining at Lavidia, Lynch said, “The pitiful struggle of Jesus with his flesh—what was that but tension and release? Michelangelo’s Pietà, van Gogh’s Starry Night, Bach’s Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29, or Dante’s Divine Comedy? Nothing but novel ways to unload tension.” Lynch laughed and leaped to his feet. “That’s your meaning of life—bigger and better means to detumescence. Life is a constant frenzied motion; death is when the circuit breaks. . . .”

  Lynch grabbed his coat from Faith’s lap, retrieved his bag from the bedside, and moved toward the door. “That explains everything.”

  Not quite.

  Lavidia had been thoroughly upset by his explanation. “How do you live?” she asked, wringing her hands. “Why do you live?”

  Lynch did not hesitate: “To function. To keep breathing when you know the breaths are numbered, and that the circuit will break to return you to stone.” The doctor shoved his pipe stem back between his teeth and chewed on it. “You’ve caught me. The truth isn’t beautiful, and it doesn’t make me feel good. But I can’t heal myself—the best I can do is keep living, unloading my day’s energy, élan vital, essential juices, the best I can.” He returned to her bedside and scooped Lavidia’s dark hand into his own. “We live to die—only to die. But that’s not really so terrible, is it?”

  Lavidia’s eyes turned from him to the shadow-swept east
ern wall. An interval of silence passed.

  “I’m going to keep you alive,” Lynch whispered close to her ear. “Why? Because you know yourself you can’t imagine any other way of being, can you? Of course not.”

  Faith had been witness to her mother’s struggle with the doctor’s story. Lavidia lay in bed, taciturn, frowning, and looking nauseous long after her virus ended, refusing food, pouting, and sleeping without rest. In the end, she transformed the story to destroy its content. What persisted in her mind was the reference to breathing: “I’m fifty-five today,” she announced on her birthday to Faith, “and that means I’ve almost took four hundred million breaths; it’s God’s will. Everybody’s got a certain number to draw ’fore they die. That’s His way. . . .”

  And so it went until she drew her four hundred millionth. Standing there in the dry weeds before Lavidia’s headstone, Faith had been unable to cry. Why cry? It—the struggle to complete life’s monotonous movement—had ended for her mother. For her, as for Lynch, all that could matter were the absolutely perfect moments when one’s breathing was the heaviest—great quantities of oxygen flooded the brain, gorged the cells. In battle, in ecstasy, in love, each click, click, click of the body’s machinery came through with clarity. Discharge was what was good. Release. Life’s meaning, if it had any meaning at all, was defined by death. Death alone.

  But was that beautiful?

  Parallel to but a world away from her mother’s headstone was that of Big Todd. It read:

  TODD CROSS

  Carpe diem, quam minimum

  credula postero

  Faith, as a child, had often asked her mother the meaning of the words engraved beneath her father’s name, but Lavidia avoided the question entirely: “Your father was a fool.”

  She had touched the headstone. That rubbing of the moist moss and the stone’s cool surface against her fingertips were what the inscription meant. She was certain.

  But also this:

  The intimations ever on the tip of her tongue that never broke free into words; the sudden rush of rippling warmth through her skin whenever she stood on the highest hillslopes of Hatten County and peered across its smooth verdant fields and corrugated farmlands, whenever she stepped barefoot in darkness from her bed and peeped through the farmhouse window frosted white by winter to see timorous barts and ewes searching among moonflower vines in the yard for food. That was what it meant: all of it—the shivering animals and drifts of snow beneath a blue band of sky; all creation would have been sad if she missed its appearance, for the naked, twisting trees and bushes cared for her, responded to her admiration and—it was true—languished when she herself was sad. So sweet were the songs of the field birds in the time of Sweet Grain that she, if she could have located a dragon, would have tasted its blood and flesh, as the conjure doctors advise, to fathom their language. While Hatten County harbored no dragons that anyone knew of, it did have the old werewitch (though some saw her as a necessary evil like auto accidents and yearly locust), and stranger things still. Those words on the headstone were themselves strange; but strangeness was essential to what Big Todd preached.

  Remembering:

  Screeds of speech, shrapnel-like faces spinning again before her eyes like hail in the heart of a storm. She remembered Big Todd filling their kitchen table with fruits and sweetmeats and, for the dinner hour, encouraging discussions. Lavidia, given to silence as she shoveled sliced beets and potatoes into her mouth, rarely found the mealtime appropriate for talking. But Todd, pausing with his cheeks burgeoning like old luggage crammed with underwear, would grin and nod at Faith, his eyes half-lidded as he retold tales he’d heard in town from Crazy Lewis, the cobbler, or Paddlefoot Dean, who sat a daily vigil on the doorsteps of the town’s only drugstore. Once, between his second and third helpings of beef gumbo, he decided to explain why men and women were different. Faith had raised the question after seeing, earlier that day, the unashamed mating of two Hampshire hogs in the mud. It thoroughly confused her, being somehow strange, rare, yet revealing as something kept secret from her for years. And Alpha told her that in town there lived a lonely widower, Needem Dewey, who longed for the affections of the flighty blacksmith’s daughter, the most beautiful girl in town. He sought audience with the Swamp Woman, and received from her the formula for a love potion. Following her directions, Needem lifted dirt from his loved one’s footprints, mixed it with his own clipped toenails and essence of pomegranate. And ate it. Immediately he knew of the Swamp Woman’s trickery. It was a love potion, all right. But for the use of women. And for years thereafter young boys from the mill crowded like bogflies around poor Needem’s door. Yes, love was strange. And Big Todd kept it mysterious.

  Time was, he said, when all animals had no sex. Unsex, he called it, because they all had the same male and female equipment, and could mate perfectly well with themselves like tapeworms do today. That situation didn’t last long. A god, some god, any god (or, maybe, Big Todd himself, who felt godlike when spinning metaphysical yarns) decided, as gods are wont to do, that things would be more interesting (and wasn’t that what life was all about?) if he split all those animals in twain. Which he did. But not only that: he flung them around the world so none of the animals could find their proper halves, not without a lot of searching. It stood to reason that living half-lives like that wasn’t pleasant at all. Everything on the earth—birds, beasts, grubworms, and especially men—were and still are incredibly lonesome, and suffer a lot until their lost halves are found. So, Todd concluded, leaning back in his seat and rubbing his stomach like a flesh-fed Druid, such was sex. That ever-so-often feeling that rolled across your brain like fog; it was nothing more than the call to hunt for your other half. Bad marriages, or ruined love affairs, were nothing but two wrong halves coming together. “Square pegs in round holes,” he said. And he laughed.

  Lavidia howled.

  She lobbed an car of corn across the table—it hit him on his forehead.

  “Why you tellin’ lies to this child?”

  Todd was cool. With his napkin he wiped his face. “Ain’t no harm—”

  “No harm!” Lavidia wailed. “You’re going to pump this child fulla lies, and the world’s goin’ to eat her alive! Faith,” she said, “you’ll learn about sex soon enough. Love is perfect till somebody pulls back the bedcovers on you—”

  “Stop that!” Now Todd was furious. Faith had never seen him so angry, his monkey up, his mouth greasy with gumbo and twisted across his clenched teeth. His fork bent slowly in his fist. She sat between them, her head revolving from left to right as first her father, then Lavidia stood up shouting, like soon-to-battle stags. She was sorry she’d asked about sex, but knew they argued this way often. When she couldn’t sleep, she’d tiptoe to their bedroom at the rear of the farmhouse, only to find her father all naked and hairless like a salamander, pleading with Lavidia, who pretended, and rather poorly, to be asleep or sick. Todd would finish the argument by storming from the house. His usual tactic. He would snatch his jacket from the rack at the front door, wearing it inside out so spirits would leave his person be, and disappear for long walks alone. Faith would steal out the back door, searching for him and, if she was lucky, she would see his outline against the road. For a long time he would say nothing while they walked. This was disturbing, for she was used to him telling her tales as she walked with him, and could egg him on with, “Tell me another mile.” But after arguments with Lavidia he would be withdrawn and moody, unable to conjure even though she chattered nervously and sang his favorite work songs to him, songs he had heard on chain gangs, in cotton fields. Finally, he would smile, laugh as she imagined shamans did, and tell her something outrageous. Or he’d talk about haints, though this was dangerous and would attract them just as sure as liquor on your clothes brings them at your heels.

  (Careful, this is sorcery. If you please, haints—a whole host of them—will be revealed to you, just as sure as hearing a moaning dove will give you a backache, if you look o
ver your left shoulder, or through a needle’s eye, through a mule’s right ear, or into a mirror with another person, though the most certain technique is to break a rain-crow’s egg in a saucer of pond water and wash your face with it twice. If all else fails, wipe off a rusty nail from a minister’s coffin, insert it between your canine teeth, and spirits, like street beggars, will crowd around you. But if you wish to be rid of them forever, say, “What in the name of the Lord do you want with me?” thrice, and the spirit will (a) flee, or (b) carry you to some secluded spot where it’ll bid you dig until you come to a pot of money. Read, if the haint returns, a Bible verse or a prayer backward, but not the Lord’s Prayer, for this, assuredly, will conjure up the Devil and his lieutenants (it is the way of warlocks). Should all these methods fail and spirits still stalk like Jehovah’s Witnesses at your front door, say, “Skit, scat, turn into a bat,” and the apparition (also Jehovah’s Witnesses) will go its tormented way.

  Sometimes, when sad, Todd spoke of himself.

  Todd Cross never knew his birthdate, never really cared. In the attic of his memory he saw a huge woman in rags, so fat she’d need a shoehorn to get into a bathtub, so dark she needed a license to drink white milk. She was enormous—all over, even her arms, which were as big around as the flanks of a racehorse. In these she carried any number of babies often said to be his brothers and sisters. He remembered a house that rattled in the wind like old bones from an unearthed casket, but nothing more. Because he ran away from the woman. Never a day of education, he said proudly, never learned to read (but you knew he was lying because he listened carefully to the words of book-readers, and filed them away deep in his mind). He remembered vomiting in the hot sun while picking Alabama cotton, and the day he decided to leave that job and wander away his youth from one southern town to another, living off what he earned gambling or stealing. He remembered falling in with a traveling circus; that was in his twenties. He had really wanted to get to Mexico; to adventure just a bit more. But the circus job, watering animals and throwing up tents, appeared one spring in Tennessee. Mexico was forgotten each evening when he stood guard at the main tent, watching the fire-eater, monkeys riding bareback on ponies, acrobats and magicians in the center ring, and the trapeze artist swinging through the air as freely as a fish in the sea. He would never forget this: dry hay and horse manure tickling his nose, whitening his nostrils like those of a weary mule—the heavy musk of the animals, and the half-sober but always captivating ringmaster who called these bizarre acts into being with a wave of his hand: freaks, dog-faced boys, and women in star-spangled leotards, who drank like fish late at night but could walk, with bright parasols in their hands, on wires thin enough to cut you in two. They were loud, these circus people, and coarse, but each was horribly uncommon. And though he could do none of their stunts himself, he, too, felt special—as though he could cleave waves and fell giants if he tried hard enough. The first woman he made love to was the Alligator Girl, who had extraordinary legs but had been disfigured by some skin disease in her childhood. She was the Fat Man’s woman and Todd, to avoid his anger, hit the road again, wandering until he arrived bone-weary in Georgia. He met Lavidia, her mother, and her two sisters in a backwoods Baptist church. Why he was in that church he only vaguely recalled—it had something to do with shooting someone six times in a saloon the night before. Money had been involved. Also, the extra aces and kings he carried in his pants cuff. He remembered sitting at the back of the church with a painful, bandaged cut on his right side just beneath his ribs, hearing the minister shout, “Thank God, we ain’t what we were, are what we are, and can be what we will!” He heard Lavidia and her sisters singing like angels in the choir up front, all of them dressed in stiff white dresses, and their hair newly pressed and slicked down with butter. He saw clearly that if he didn’t settle down, and quick, he’d be dead within a few years, belly-up on some barroom floor. Lavidia, more than any other woman he’d seen, looked exactly like his opposite: that was important. The woman you wed had to be everything you weren’t—sober when you were drunk, calculating to check your impulsiveness, sane and with her feet on the ground, regenerating your strength and her own when something got in your blood like a disease and told you to move. Lavidia was all this, so much so that she ran from him when he approached her after service. Todd was persistent. He bought the best suit he could find, trimmed his sideburns, oiled his skin, and had a barber clip the long hairs hanging from his nose before he called on her. He told her he was a liniment salesman from Philadelphia, and would take her North in his limousine (presently in another town for repairs) to butlers and ballets. To wealth. After the wedding ceremony at her mother’s home, Todd took her to a two-dollar-a-night hotel in town, and from there to the sharecropper’s farm where they had lived ever since. Lavidia never, never forgave Todd for that. The truth of his situation killed her mother with a stroke; her two sisters never came to visit. Yet she couldn’t leave him since Faith followed too soon on the heels of their wedding. So she suffered. Todd told Faith that he suffered, too, because he never wanted to go North in the first place, nor did he want to be a salesman, or own butlers, or do anything other than amble around his farmyard each afternoon and feel loose dirt and green grass between his bare brown toes. They would love each other, he thought; they would eat well, and live off the land, their stomachs full. Their hearts full, too.