Faith and the Good Thing

by Charles Johnson

  The Swamp Woman’s shanty was odd, children, squatting above the fetid swamp on wooden poles with a crazy hole for its door. The hole was circular and carved in the side of the shanty where the traditional Door of the Dead belonged, through which a deceased member of a family was carried so that his spirit could never find the proper entrance and thus haunt his own clan. The rear of the shanty was submerged in the swamp, half hidden under water rising as high as the windowsill. Faith held her breath and swatted at bogflies circling her head. Something about the shanty held her still. Its windows seemed to be lit from within by fire. Shadows crept behind tarpaulin stretched across the triangular-shaped windows. Faith inhaled for courage and started across a rickety bridge of damp boards leading to the entrance. Sounds drifted from within—the whir of machinery, an eerie discordant music. She thought of running, of shouting, of balling her fists to calm herself. One could only guess at the bizarre things awaiting her within the shanty. She might not leave it alive. Faith had almost convinced herself to leave when she first perceived a presence behind her: the smell of something old and dry. Heavy breathing, not her own, filled her ears. Without thinking, she turned to face the origin of the labored breath; this she immediately regretted. Crouching at her heels was a hairless old woman whose face held features like those glimpsed in novel arrangements of vegetation, freak potatoes in the shape of cow skulls. It was horrible. Horrible! One tiny eye, the left one, was partially closed and had no pupil—clear it was and the color of egg yolk. The other, a disk, had a green cataract floating free in its center. Such a creature could never have been born—only spawned; never grown—only fermented in some ghastly cesspool. Like the swamp.

  Faith jumped back a foot and lost her balance, falling along the moist boards of the bridge. Above her, draped over a burlap gown and resembling dual drops of water suspended in space, hung long, purplish breasts tipped with teats as sharp as nails. Faith glanced away, down, only to have her eyes light upon two misshapen feet gripping the edge of the bridge like fingers. She shivered, stricken by a heavy, sulfurous smell that grew stronger as the potato face drew near. Its lipless mouth moved without sound; the werewitch’s words rang deep within Faith’s mind as the old woman shouted in silence, “You’re here to steal my secret, ain’t ya?”

  Faith cringed. “God, no!”

  The mouth twisted into a sneer, brandishing teeth as keen as the files of a saw. “Then what’ya want? A potion? Yer boyfriend can’t get it up no mo’ and ya wants a potion, right? Ya know what it takes to make a potion these days, girlie? Eye of newt and auric eggs don’t come as easy as they use to!”

  “No,” Faith whispered, “nothing like that.”

  The emerald eye, dull and dilated, winked. “Revenge? Ya want to see me turn somebody ya don’t like into a squirrel? Hee hee! That always was my favorite; but his astral body’s gotta be in trine with the right planets before it’ll work.”

  “No . . .”

  “Then ya wants money? Sho! Ya wanna be rich and live forever!”

  Faith fainted, the brief escape being pleasant, not quite like dreamwork, but similar to yet greater than reality, for her father was in it, and anything associated with Big Todd Cross had to be for real. She witnessed, as in times past, the occasion when Todd was threatened by the Weaver Clan, who terrorized Hatten County for six years. Or at least until the day they tried to take over Todd’s farm. To a man, the Weavers were mean and ugly. They believed that men were base and the world was a jungle; therefore, they concluded it should be managed by the meanest, ugliest men around. For this, the Weavers all qualified—animals, for fear of being poisoned, did not bite them. And together the Weavers killed so many men that Oscar Lee Jackson had to expand his mortuary and work on Sundays just to keep the county serviced. It started to look like the Weavers were right about the world. They made a mistake, though; they threatened to take over Todd’s farm and, perhaps, Faith, too—just for sport. Faith’s father descended on their ranch like a storm, toting rifles so big they required two men to load them and a third to supervise. The Weavers saw him coming. They turned pale. So pale in fact their eyes turned pink, their hair colorless, and their flesh as pallid as dough. From that day forward the Weavers left Todd alone. Even they saw they’d been wrong. But that didn’t turn them black again. The doctors said Todd Cross had frightened them so the melanin in their blood evaporated in their sweat. Simpler folks just told the truth: Fate had chosen Big Todd as the means to bring albinos to their little spot in Georgia.

  “Yow!”

  Opening her eyes, Faith realized she was stretched naked on a hard pallet in the shanty, a snow-white cat hissing on her stomach. In her head a thin voice said, “You was dreamin’ about yer daddy—that’s always a bad sign that you’ve lost yer way and need some direction.” Faith, looking across the room, saw the Swamp Woman squatting before a bubbling cauldron, drying her dress. The werewitch nodded toward the cat and said in Faith’s head, “Don’t mind him none. My familiar gets way too familiar sometimes.” Her mouth widened in a silent smile. “Quiet as it’s kept, he’s really the imprisoned spirit of Joseph Arthur Gobineau. . . . I just keep him around to vex every now and then.”

  The cat screamed—a bloodcurdling cry that sounded almost like swearing—jumped from Faith’s stomach, rushed to the werewitch’s left leg, and sank in its claws. The cat, receiving a shock of some kind, spun away to sulk near the circular door.

  Chilled to her bones, dumb with fright, ready (almost) to die, Faith rose slowly, averting her eyes from the Swamp Woman. Like an enormous, half-human frog the werewitch sat herself in a hathayoga position and sipped at embalming fluid from a silver goblet. Around her, rusty wands and V-shaped divining rods littered the floor. Worktables in the room were covered with slide rules, sextants, Ouija boards, jugs filled with jelling dark fluids, and bizarre, useless inventions. The walls were plastered with anatomical and cosmological charts and unfathomable trigrams of the four elements sketched on curling brown papyrus. Bookshelves held dusty volumes bound with large silver rings: The Complete Demonomancer, Domino Divination in 10 Easy Lessons and The Bedside Cartomancer. Against the western wall, sunken into thigh-deep water beneath diagrams of the Adamic, Hyperborean, Atlantean, Aryan, and Lemurian Root Races (with lacunas left for two more to come), a large machine hummed and played music, its gears powered by the frantic racing of a green Gila monster along a treadmill.

  “I’m gonna patent that.” The werewitch giggled in Faith. “Everybody knows a mathematical nexus holds between the frequencies of tones in the musical scale; and any fool knows you can chart the planets in their orbits with similar calculations. Right?”

  “Right,” Faith gulped. “Right.”

  The werewitch giggled again. “Well,” she said, crafty, “not many people know the distance between the centers of the planets causes ’em to make music when they swing around the sun. Hee hee! And I’ve got the only machine in the world that figures out their frequency and tapes that music. Saturn’s a basso profundo, Jupiter’s a bass, Mars is a tenor, the earth’s a contralto, Venus is a soprano, and Mercury—since it’s got the shortest orbit—is a falsetto. Want me to turn up the machine so you can hear ’em?”

  “I don’t think so. . . .”

  Words exploded in Faith’s head. “Ya don’t believe in the Music of Spheres, do ya?”

  “Yes! Yes I do!”

  “No,” the Swamp Woman sighed, “like everybody else ya need some kind of demonstration—as if that proved somethin’ veritical.” The werewitch made a cat’s cradle with her fingers, and leaned toward Faith.

  “What’s yer full name, girlie?”

  “Faith Cross. . . .”

  “Faith’s a good name,” the Swamp Woman said. “Did ya know Saint Augustine said faith meant believin’ in what ya can’t see? No, I guess ya didn’t know that. Never mind. Ya see that chart over yonder?”

  Faith turned to a small chart just above the door. It read:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

/>   A B C D E F G H I

  J K L M N O P Q R

  S T U V W X Y Z

  But she couldn’t understand it. Or the Swamp Woman’s hasty computations.

  “The numbers in your first name add up to twenty-six, the numbers in your last name come to twenty, which is forty-six altogether. Four plus six is ten, and one plus zero is one. That makes you a Number One, girlie.”

  “Is that good?”

  The werewitch sniggered. “What’s in a number? A rose by any other—well, you know all that already. Number Ones are good people, but they have to be pointed on the right path, or they’ll meet with disaster.”

  Considering this for a moment, Faith said, “What’re you?”

  “A thirteen.”

  “And that means—what?”

  Sardonically, the Swamp Woman said, “The numbers all stop at twelve. . . .”

  Faith paused. Then pursed her lips. “Then, you’re the only Number Thirteen?”

  “Don’t I know it!” the Swamp Woman screeched, leaping to her feet. “Girlie, have you got any idea what it’s like bein’ the only substance of its kind in the world? It’s like being God. Ain’t nobody to talk to but y’self. Oh, ya should see my poetry—that’d show ya how lonely and blue I get sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry,” Faith said.

  “It don’t matter.” The Swamp Woman waved off the subject with a sweep of her hand, and returned to flapping Faith’s dress in mists of steam rising from the cauldron. “Ya can’t be happy and smart, too.”

  Still terrified, but at least past nausea now, Faith looked over her shoulder to a six-foot mirror trimmed in arabesques of gold. She realized she was naked, all flushed and protruding from her private places; she began to blush. The tinted blue glass reflected a thin girl whose hair mushroomed like a storm cloud behind her head. A few years ago she had developed, here and there, the appropriate bumps and contours, yet her figure remained soft and childlike. Smooth and the color of caramel. Inside Faith’s head the Swamp Woman laughed, and the laugh was dreadful, a deep grating sound originating in the werewitch’s round belly; by the time it reached Faith as telepathy, it scarcely sounded human.

  “Now I know what ya come for,” she tittered. “Ya wants bigger tits. That’s why ya come, right? You young girls ought to know better’n to pester me for somethin’like that. I’m busy! The Lord knows if I couldn’t steal somebody’s life every now and then when I needed more time, I’d never get alla my work done.”

  Fists clenched at her sides, Faith faced the Swamp Woman, her eyes narrowing to watering slits to blur the werewitch’s sickening smile.

  “I only came to ask you a question—about what the good thing might be. . . .”

  “The Good Thing?” the Swamp Woman cackled, her lips bemused. “You sure you ain’t committin’ the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, girlie?”

  Faith shook her head. “My momma told me to find it. I know there has to be one. If there wasn’t, I know Momma couldn’t have thought of it.”

  “That’s a good argument,” the Swamp Woman said. “It’s off base, but I like it anyway.” The werewitch rested her head against the wall, coming as close as she could to smiling. “You’re too sweet a girl to be worryin’ about the Good Thing. Ya ought to be home afoalin’ babies or somethin’ practical.” Her yellow eye closed completely, the green one stared. “I’ve thought a lot about the Good Thing,” she said, counting off the possibilities on the twelve taloned fingers of her right hand, “and I figure it must be the right functionin’ of an organism as it participates in a form, or the fulfillment of a teleological principle inherent in all matter, or gettin’ in the right relationship with the Lord (or Lords, or y’self, dependin’ upon your persuasion), or followin’ the Hedonistic Calculus in all matters of equally appealing desires, or doin’ unto others as you’d have ’em do unto you, or a leap o’ faith, or abolishin’ private property, or maybe avoidin’ Bad Faith.” The Swamp Woman giggled obscenely as though she’d told a joke. “Take your pick, sweetheart.”

  “But I want the one Good Thing,” Faith said, still standing away from the werewitch. “I want the one thing all those things have in common.”

  Then Faith scrambled across the room—as far from the Swamp Woman as she could go. The old woman’s body shook until its outline was hazy, her green and yellow eyes watered a viscous material that resembled molasses, and she beat her big feet upon and, finally, through the floorboards.

  Faith stood breathless.

  “Spirit World come through again,” the Swamp Woman said when the seizure passed. “It’s kinda like you’ve got a switchboard in your head and alla the switches are ringin’ at once.” With her right hand she smeared the thick fluid from her face, her long nails leaving tracks that soon grew red. “The word’s out that it’ll definitely be Blazetail in the fifth race.”

  “I’m not interested in that,” Faith said.

  “All right, all right!” The Swamp Woman jumped to her feet and rummaged through several wire cages stacked in a corner of the room. From one she withdrew a chicken that fought desperately to free itself from her grip. The Swamp Woman strangled it and snapped off its head.

  Shuddering, Faith looked away.

  “Come over here,” the Swamp Woman said.

  Faith obeyed, but came no closer than four feet as the werewitch squeezed blood from the chicken’s head onto one of her cluttered workbenches. She placed a monocle over her green eye and studied the puddle carefully, twisting her head from left to right, snorting, chuckling, and following with her three left forefingers the contour of the puddle.

  “What’s it say?” Faith asked.

  “It says that whatever is is either a substance or an attribute, mind or matter with the absolute certainty of the external world grounded in the self-evident fact that God could not be an Evil Deceiver and still be all-good.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The Swamp Woman frowned. “I ain’t sure. Let’s look at the liver.” Faith turned her head as the Swamp Woman dug inside the chicken and extracted the liver. She held it close to her yellow eye, like a gem-cutter inspecting a diamond, or an old philosopher studying an atomic proposition, and grimaced:

  “The liver’s in Latin! I can’t read no goddamn Latin!”

  Faith groaned, about to despair, but the Swamp Woman suddenly became animated, screeching, “I’ve got just the thing for you, sweetheart,” and she lurched out the door. Faith rushed to the cauldron and felt her dress. It was dry, almost crisp to her touch, and she pulled it quickly over her head. From outside there came the squealing of a hog in distress. Faith took the opportunity to inspect her surroundings.

  A museum: that was the only way to relate the host of marvelous, mystical contraptions scattered throughout the room. Nailed to one of the walls was a rotten ferryboat oar from the Styx. Wood there was from the cross at Calvary, strewn as kindling beneath a stove. A philosopher’s stone held the door open, and speckled philosopher’s eggs lay in weed-woven baskets on the workbenches. There were imaguncula—clay, wax, and wooden figures of lute-playing satyrs and mermen used for divination. Among them Faith also found the likenesses of many residents of Hatten County, including a figure of Reverend Brown with a needle stuck in his right side. There were magic drums stretched with reindeer hide, rings shaped like the sacred serpent oύρoβóρoζ and, toward the rear of the room, a small table with a free-swinging pendulum beneath it. The table’s surface held metal plates bearing the numbers of the alphabet, and above it was a sign: COMMUNICOGRAPH—DO NOT TOUCH.

  Faith touched it.

  And the metal plates on the surface became illuminated with a sea-green glow, spelling first the word “Listen;” then, “Find yourself that good thing,” and finally, “Momma.”

  Lights on the Communicograph flickered out and its plates went cold. Faith found herself drawn to a waist-high urn of water on one of the tables. She recalled hearing of magic bottles filled with electrified water that would, if a child a
sked it questions, respond with pictures for answers. The almost forgotten word whispered by conjure men rolled off her tongue, “Th . . . Thaumaturgic Mirror.” That was it. All one need do was ask.

  “What,” Faith said, “will become of me?”

  Water in the urn began to churn. Looking over its rim, she saw images forming, floating along the wet surface. There was first her own reflection; then she saw herself seated sleeping among many empty seats with a sign hung from her neck. Next: the bespeckled face of a wide-eyed man whose thin lips moved faster than the wings of frightened thrushes. Again, the water churned, offering this time phantasmagoric scenes of a stone-and-mortar building surrounded by dense smoke, of a wretched little room overlooking an alley where rats and worms sifted through garbage for scraps of food. Faces were yielded by the water—the image of an old man coughing and clutching a mysterious black book, another man—younger, high-yellow, and wearing a wig. She saw the back of a lean man who wore work clothing, and knew she would recognize him if he turned around. The man did not turn. His figure was replaced by a scene that caught Faith’s breath: an infant girl ringed by rising tongues of fire.

  Cloudy, the water offered no more. It returned to its clear consistency as the Swamp Woman tramped back into the room, both her hands filled with steaming hog entrails. These she dumped in the center of the floor. The werewitch wound the intestines around to form a crude pentagram, deposited the kidney, colon, spleen, stomach, and the rest in the middle, and wiped her red hands along the front of her gown. On her haunches, she sneered, “All right—give!”