Faith and the Good Thing

by Charles Johnson

  On Saturdays, a Mr. Jonathan Crowell always punctual, appeared at her room. Faith, on his last appearance, opened the door and stood staring into Crowell’s sea-colored eyes, struggling to combat the wave of control overcoming her. Crowell, square-jawed and chubby with thin sienna hair, would smile—it overwhelmed her, as certain smiles are wont to do. Her will began to fold; Crowell entered and, after flipping back his blue coattails, lowered his weight onto her bed. He, she could tell, was like all the others: certain of their power over her, yet blind to the bonds that such power brought. He withdrew a billfold from his pocket, a dollar from the billfold, and laid it on her wrinkled pillow, thinking, as he pulled off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt, that he was in control.

  “Give me some sugah.” He pursed his pale lips.

  Faith closed her eyes and kissed Crowell, contemptuous of him as he leaned forward, lowering his head to say, “Tell me . . . something nice. . . .” He always asked that; like the rest, he could not get his fill of her tales. Thus, her power in bondage. Though Faith hated selling her favorite stories so cheaply, she came up with one Big Todd told her when she was only three and always fighting with other children, always contesting her will against theirs, then wailing when, due to her frailty, the others won. “If you think there’s ever a winner or a loser,” he said “you’re dead wrong.” No, Faith thought, this tale is too dear to sell. But, looking at Crowell and seeing his self-confidence, it was evident he needed this. She began. . . .

  It was Sunday morning. Everyone was in church, or still in bed in that tiny Kentucky town where Big Todd Cross found himself meditating over a game of solitaire and rum in an empty saloon. He drank, feeling miserable for having wounded a young boy too full of piss and vinegar the night before. But his reputation was always getting him in trouble; besides, the boy had been caught cheating at cards. All around Todd this morning were chairs turned upside down on round wooden tables. A balding old Negro in coveralls drifted around the room with a wet mop and pail, scrubbing at the blood stains near the bar. He stopped, leaned on the bar, and said to Todd, “That was Jim Slaughter’s boy you shot—he’ll be coming after you ’fore long.” He shook his head soberly, said, “Slaughter’s mean; he’ll drive you like a flash o’ lightning through a gooseberry bush.” Before Todd could reply, the door behind him burst open: Slaughter stormed in. Todd tried to remain cool, tensing himself as still as a cigar-store Indian. He watched Slaughter from the corner of his eyes. Children, Jim Slaughter was a huge barrel-chested man, with a beard hanging to his belt. He had a shotgun; he shoved it straight into Todd’s back.

  “Cross,” he shouted, “I’m going to send you straight to West Hell!”

  “Damn,” Todd whispered, “why you want to come in here and make me look bad?” And Todd took another drink.

  Click.

  Todd began to sweat.

  Slaughter, too, poured sweat. Really, he didn’t want to do this, but some vague sense of honor was at stake. “You’re a player, eh? A gambler?” he snarled. “Well, I wanna see you play fo’ your life, I wanna see you win it back from this gun barrel!” He motioned with a nod of his head to the terrified janitor to sit across from Todd. Said, “Willis, you’re gonna play this sonuvabitch and beat him, or I’ll blow your brains out!”

  “Suh?” Willis stammered.

  “And you,” Slaughter growled at Todd. “I’ll kill you if you lose.” He cut the cards with his free hand and returned behind Todd with the gun. “Play!” he shouted.

  The plastic cards kept slipping from Big Todd’s trembling hands. Sweat blinded his eyes. But, by and by, he realized he was winning the game. He looked across the table at Willis. Todd’s heart sank. Poor Willis was pale; he clutched at his heart, and Todd could hear the old man whimpering and sobbing like a child. An emptiness filled Todd, a space so wide he felt himself fall therein and the gulf between himself and the old janitor evaporate like smoke. Todd misplayed his hand.

  “What’re you doing?” Slaughter cried over Todd’s left shoulder. “Ya had that hand—ya had him beat!” Slaughter shuffled the cards again, and dealt another hand.

  Todd sighed. He blew that one, too.

  “Stop that!” Slaughter screamed.

  Todd kept losing. Then he started to laugh, and big clear tears dropped from Willis’s eyes.

  “You’re crazy,” Slaughter said.

  “Yeh.”

  “I got the right—the duty to kill ya now!”

  “Sho.”

  But he didn’t. Dazed, Slaughter lowered his gun to his side and stumbled, scratching his head, from the saloon. Todd and Willis, as soon as Slaughter was gone, broke into the whisky barrels in the basement and drank themselves blind.

  Crowell smiled at Faith and said, “I guess that was okay,” and gave her an extra five dollars. He slept with her until morning, but before drifting off, he flung his arm around her waist, whispering, “It’s a shame the world isn’t really like that, isn’t it?”

  She could not sleep that night and hated him for saying that, for calling into question that which she longed to believe. This disquietude—it followed her day and night like a stray dog, a curse, or damnation. It bothered her so that Faith could not eat the following day, or rest, and, finally, withdrew in desperation from her purse a circular she’d found on a bus the week before:

  Why is there suffering? Is there a possibility of rebirth and hope in this life? Are you tired of living apart from the Truth? Are you tired of asking questions like this? Let us answer them for you. Come to The Church of Continual Light, 64th and Stony Island.

  She went, giving herself completely to the urge to again be, if not free, at least saved. Though married in her childhood to God, she’d been a bad wife, had taken another lover: the Good Thing. But Faith, as she rode the bus south, consoled herself with the cleanliness that penitence possibly could bring. She found the Church of Continual Light wedged between a crumbling old brownstone and a bakery. Outside, she stood in the snow, shivering and listening as the singsong chants within merged in a single dreamy hum; she closed her eyes until the lights from inside lulled her with images and cloudy shapes forced along her eyelids. Reverend Brown had spoken of that shadowy, senseless, Cimmerian world where groping things collided like blind, hungry moles: she was there. Suffocating in it. Lost.

  “Hallelujah!”

  The cry rang inside, again and again, driven by a belief, a security she longed to have. Faith cracked open the door; she timidly peeked in. The storefront church must at one time have been a delicatessen; it smelled of raw salmon and catfish. It was packed. Toward the rear where she stood, snow dripping from her coat, were old, old men in green and gray workclothes and, farther up, fat, chubby women who clapped their hands and stomped their heavy rectangular feet. They stopped, even as the wet-eyed women on the wooden moaning bench went still when a lean-fleshed man in black pounded his podium at the front of the room. In his right hand he held a Bible, in his left—a big fistful of thunder:

  “I gave my heart to know wisdom, to know madness and folly,” he said, “and I’ve seen all the wonders under the sun and—behold—all is vanity. . . .”

  Silently Faith stepped to the last row of chairs. The minister’s voice thrilled her; she felt safe again, at ease and acquainted with the anxious, sweating faces around the room.

  Up front, the minister folded his hands. Intoned, “I know what’s in your hearts, brothers—I know, because I’ve been there, I’ve seen it myself. The whole world’s been there, because every one of us has to cross that deep sea of questionin’ by himself. You think you’re the center of the whole world at first, you think it whorls around you like the planets around the sun—don’t you?”

  “Yes, Lord!” a woman shouted.

  “But one day, you come across someone else who thinks just the very same thing. You’ve got to fight then, to do battle over who’s gonna be supreme, you or that other fellah, ’cause that’s the way we men are—strugglin’ against each other with our wills, o
ur dreams. . . .” The minister’s mouth opened. Faith caught her breath. His mouth was bright red inside, the color of fresh blood. “And you both lose!” he boomed. “You both see neither one of you have anythin’ to do with what pushes the world along. What, then?” he said. “Where do you turn, then, brothers—sisters, what do you seek?”

  Pensively Faith pushed forward in her seat. She bit her fingernails.

  “You look beyond—both you and that other fellah, and see that the world’s moved by somethin’ bigger than either one of you—somethin’ more than you’ll ever be, but somethin’ you must know, must be like if you’re ever to be free—”

  “Yes,” Faith whispered. Her nerves and brain hummed; she gave herself to the enchantment. “Yes—”

  “And,” he said, “you go on lookin’ for it. You look all over the earth! You look to the South, to the East, some of you even came up North to find it, but you never do see it, do you?”

  Faith wanted to stand up, raise her hand, and cast a question. Instead, she waited, certain he was talking to her.

  “So, because God was so remote, so inaccessible, He sent his only Son, as flesh, blood, gristle, and bone, to show us how to get closer to Him—to seize the root of this thing greater than any of us can be.” He slammed his Bible on the podium. Raised his voice. “And even that wasn’t enough! It was still too far away. Can you imagine that gulf between man and his greatest goal? Can you see how horrible it is to be separated by all the universe from the thing we need most? Only one step remained: to look inside ourselves—to put it so close we don’t have to search all over the world no more!” The minister tapped his chest, then smacked it hard. “It’s in here! That’s the only place it is, or could ever be—in your hearts!”

  In here. Faith laid her right hand along her left breast. She held her breath and closed her eyes, searching for this truth but finding only a memory there. A bad one, at that. She remembered the spring evening eight years after her father’s death when Reverend Brown came visiting. No—he came to confess. She’d always wondered to whom troubled men of the cloth carried their cares when the Lord did not or could not answer their call. Brown took his to Lavidia. Why he did she could only conjecture: because Lavidia had known and transcended grief, because she realized in her flesh, in her blood, at the floor of a hot tent that summer night long ago, all Brown could know only in theory. And theory alone. He came. They saw his car roaring up the road before a cloud of crimson dust.

  Brown parked it in the brown shade of an oak in the front yard, and slowly removed his bent straw hat. Said, “Evenin’, Sister Cross.” His voice cracked. Faith knew something was wrong; she could feel it in her throat. Especially when Brown looked irritably at her, winced, then turned to Lavidia. “Can I talk with you alone?”

  Without waiting for her mother’s response, Faith fled into the farmhouse, creeping barefoot across the quiet front room to the window where, behind a drawn curtain, she heard Reverend Brown’s agonized voice.

  “What’s troublin’ you, reverend?”—Lavidia.

  Faith, her hand on the dry curtain, expected them to conceive yet another plan for her wayward soul’s salvation—some nocturnal trip to the river of another county where she would be baptized, or another riotous prayer meeting in a close tent on a sweltering summer eve.

  “Jennie Scott just died,” Brown said.

  “Lord have mercy,” Lavidia cried. Faith heard the scraping of her mother’s nails on her brow. “Reverend, she wasn’t but sixteen! It was that sickness she had, wasn’t it? Loo, looo—”

  “Leukemia,” Brown sighed.

  Through a crack in the curtain Faith could see Brown leaning as lifeless as a scarecrow against the porch railing.

  “I prayed night and day for that gal,” he said. “Damn if I didn’t almost go down to the bogs to call on that crazy woman for her!” With his thumb and forefinger he squeezed his nose, so hard Faith felt the bridge of her own nose ache. “I told her parents—when there didn’t seem to be no hope—that sufferin’ was a teacher, that there was some lesson in it that we just couldn’t see . . . but what? Livvie, that child never hurt nobody!”

  “I know, I know,” Lavidia moaned. “There ain’t no answer, I guess. It sure wasn’t your fault, reverend.”

  “Wasn’t it?” Brown cried. His fingers tightened on the railing; his knuckles were white. Brown turned his back to Lavidia and hung his head out toward the yard. “It must have been me!” Then he turned around, openmouthed. Sweating. “Have you ever doubted the purity of your faith, Livvie—I mean, that’s a good reason for the Lord never answerin’ when you call, don’t you think?”

  “No.” Lavidia’s voice trembled. “I don’t never doubt it—”

  You could hear the floor of the porch cry under Brown’s heels. Faith imagined him breathing with irregularity, like an overworked horse, the sweat steaming at the curly roots of his sparse gray hair. “Haven’t you ever . . . doubted that what you were doing was right?”

  “I do what the Lord wants,” Lavidia said.

  The porch buckled again; the floorboards creaked as Brown moved closer to Lavidia’s rocker. “Some people—like you, ’way back when you got the spirit and heard Him talkin’ to you: you knew then, didn’t you? I mean, He touched you, rolled you around that tent floor with His big black toe. I saw it happen to you, Livvie! And you knew clearer than I’ll ever know what He wants.” The reverend’s voice went sharp, splintering like dry kindling split by an ax. “It never come to me that way. It don’t happen like that to most people. I’ve got faith and religion, but not like I seen it come to some people like you. It didn’t happen to me like that. I . . . decided to follow the Cross, ’cause what it stood for seemed to be everything I wanted to be like.” Brown looked away from her, as though he’d said too much. “I pray for understanding, Livvie. I look for some kind of sign. . . .”

  Lavidia’s breathing was as loud as that of a cow.

  “Nothin’ comes,” Brown groaned. “How do you really know what you’re doin’ and believin’ is right? Don’t mistake me now! I don’t doubt for a minute that He’s out there, but, from day to day, how do you really know?”

  Faith suffered a long, long silence as Lavidia waited, puffing her best briar pipe. “You feel it, I guess,” she said. “You ought to know ’bout that better’n me—”

  “Feelin’s ain’t certain!” Brown slammed something, perhaps his fist, against the wooden railing. It shook the house. “I feel Jennie oughta be alive!”

  It seemed suddenly to Faith that the porch was empty. She heard the mindless prattle of chickens in the barnyard, the wind crackling, like the rustling of crumbling cellophane, in the trees. She peered from behind the curtain and saw Reverend Brown resting silently on his knees beside Lavidia, searching her face for a sign.

  “Feelings belong to the flesh,” he said. “I can feel the wind comin’ up, I can feel it gettin’ cooler, ’cause the sun’s goin’ down.” He pointed a finger at his temple. “But my mind ain’t at ease with that. It wants to be absolutely sure!” Brown pressed the heels of his hands against his wet forehead. “Sometimes I ain’t even certain if Father Divine or Prophet Cherry knew what was right all the time!” He touched Lavidia’s bony wrist. “When it happened to you—what was it like, Livvie?”

  For reasons she could not describe, Faith felt a wave of uneasiness. It was like he’d asked for a description of the way Lavidia and Todd made love.

  “It was kinda soft, like the way you’re touchin’ me now,” Lavidia said. “But it wasn’t like the touch of no livin’ man. It was like He put His hand across my breasts, and they exploded, and shot out into the tent, and carried somethin’ inside me through the air, clear up to some dizzy spot above the world. I was kinda dead, but alive, too, because I couldn’t stop shakin’ on the ground. I saw myself shakin’—it was like I was lookin’ at myself from far, far away, right beside Him, or maybe all alone in some dark place like a cave. And I was watchin’ what was left of me the way
you look at the wigglin’ of a chicken with its head wrung off. It didn’t matter none. That thing on the ground wasn’t me. I knew that, reverend. It was like a box I’d been kept in all these years—”

  Reverend Brown nodded. Water fell from his eyes. “And you knew the soul was immortal; you knew it brought you ’cross that wide sea between man and God. That was the sign he gave you. . . .”

  “I reckon,” Lavidia said. “I try not to think ‘bout it too much. It’s like you said at the last meetin’: the best thing in the world is inside us.”

  “I said that?” Brown looked at her quizzically, then snapped his fingers. “Yes!” he shouted. “I did say that!” He jumped to his feet, stood still for a moment, then spun on his heels. “That is what I said, isn’t it?” A smile split his mouth; he slammed his palms together and laughed. “I wasn’t thinkin’ right! That child, Jennie, is in a better world—she’s saved. She’s thrown off that box she was trapped in, and there ain’t nothin’ separatin’ her from the most real thing of all!” Brown straightened his coat, regaining himself, happy now. He smiled at Lavidia, and touched her arm. “That space between Him and us ain’t so flamin’ wide after all, is it?” He said, “Thank you, Sister Cross,” and took his leave. As for Faith,

  She jumped, stupefied, to her feet. Shouted, “There’s nothing there!” They were looking at her now; she’d shattered the mood of sanctity and peace in the Church of Continual Light. She didn’t care. Her thoughts rose as a veil before her vision, recalling her times spent walking across the city at the blackest pitch of night before the break of dawn, at that time so like a sick man’s momentary slumber. State Street, parallel to the lakefront and glistening with melted snow, was silent. There she would walk, then along the misty, moonlit beaches, thinking, inuring herself to this life in the depths of the cave, but always certain that something about her remained vernal, clean, and beyond it all. It was a transparent time, akin to the great space between a gremlin’s hourly heartbeats, or between a zombie’s outstretched arms. Inner and outer worlds flowed back and forth beneath the integument of her skin like water in a pipe. She remembered sitting on the hard Civic Center benches beneath Picasso’s wraithlike statue, feeling that flow and sensing for the first time that what was outside—in the world, on its streets, and behind its façade of buildings—stole within her at times, and was balanced by her own soul’s emanation, altering that world with compassion, her father’s legacy of mythopoesis and love. But in this church,