Faith and the Good Thing

by Charles Johnson

  “Well, that’s precisely why I wrote it—supply and demand; but there’s only one copy,” Barrett said, scratching his upper lip thoughtfully, “so be careful.” His pupils struggled behind cream-colored cataracts to focus on Faith. “What is your name, child?”

  “Faith.”

  Barrett smiled; his cheeks were round and puffy. “Und Wunderbarist der Glaubens liebstes Kind, eh?”

  “Huhn?”

  “Never mind.” From a pocket inside his coat Barrett withdrew a half-finished fifth of Scotch and two very used and wrinkled paper cups. He filled both, and thrust one at Faith. As she drank, he soaked, in his Scotch, his sanguine thumb.

  “Why are you doing all this for me?” Faith asked. “If you think I’m going to forgive you, you’re wrong!” Her anger and outrage were building again. “I wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for you!”

  Barrett wet his cracked lips, fingered a wide fold under his chin, and said in a thin voice, “You’ll have to explain. My memory—it fades, you see. . . .”

  For once Faith felt like confessing, like opening herself completely and unraveling her entire odyssey on the bed beside Barrett. She was almost out of stories, and it seemed that truth and beauty and the Good Thing were only there—in fabulous fictions and austral tales told in a mystery-freighted voice. Is that why people told stories? Was it because beauty and order could exist only in the fairy tale, in a painting, or sometimes in well-told lies? She remembered Big Todd telling lies so often it became unclear what was and was not true. She thought of the one about Lucille, Hatten County’s only streetwalker. Old, inured to being always for others, she had, according to Todd, been untouched by her condition. Example: one evening Lucille opened the door to her room above the town saloon and found, wrapped in a beige tablecloth, an abandoned baby girl. “Right,” Lucille said, and without another thought she took the child in, clothed and fed her, and reared her for an entire year. The child’s mother finally appeared, guilty and bereaved, and demanded her daughter. “Right,” Lucille said; and in the same tone she said “Right” when drought ruined the county’s cane and cotton crops, “Right” when the weather was good, “Right” to everything; for somehow, Todd said, Lucille knew the secret. She was the secret, and the secret, he said, had everything to do with ease—with the way water effortlessly wore away boulders, temples, and thrones. Like the way Big Todd boasted he could beat any man in Georgia, in the world, with what he called his perfect defense. Faith and everyone else thought he was lying. But when Ed Riley, the blacksmith, put Todd to the test, he made good his claim. Riley climbed to the top of the courthouse—the tallest building in town, three stories high—and told Todd to block, if he dared, the anvil he dragged to the roof with him. Big Todd stood bare-chested on the ground below, fingering his mustache. The crowd took bets that his head would be crushed as flat as a dime. Lavidia, sitting in their wagon with a blue umbrella to shield her from the sun, squawked, “Go ’head, kill y’self, ya damned fool! Go ’head, make me a widow,” and then began to cry. The odds were one hundred to one against Todd’s walking away from there alive. And only Faith had come to believe he could block that anvil. Riley, his black muscles bulging, dropped the anvil from the roof. Faith saw it hang momentarily, a black bolt in the beryline sky, then plummet like a dead bird. Todd stood still. Its shadow fell across him. The crowd cried, “Eeeeee!” and Lavidia hid her eyes.

  Big Todd stepped aside.

  It had everything to do with ease. Faith started. Barrett, with his forefinger, was wiping a tear from her cheek.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “People fail when they start looking for the Good Thing,” she said.

  Barrett nodded and clucked his tongue. “Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.”

  Faith paid him no mind. Once started, it bubbled from her, became a deluge. “There isn’t any Good Thing! There never was! It’s all an evil lie to keep us happy! There’s nothing!” She shook her head and felt very old. “Nothing!”

  Barrett, before she could finish, was on his feet, his hands behind his back and pacing to and fro with heavy footfalls from wall to wall. His progress reminded her of the way he-bears move, swaying with their arms swinging at their sides, their feet shuffling. Uncertainly, to and fro. By the open door he stopped, looked out to see if they were being overheard, then whispered, “‘Herein you have, my daughter, raised the grand problem of man’s existence, which is’—Comte to the contrary—whether everything that is actual must, like the sound of the tree that falls in an uninhabited forest, be perceived or thought to be!”

  Faith’s mouth hung open so wide a bird could have flown down her throat. Barrett noticed this. “Let me put it another way. What is the relation between thought and being? Does what you think direct what is, or is it that what is controls what you think?” He tugged at his lower lip, looking at his sore thumb all the while, and wheezed. “If you chose the first way, you become a magician—like Nostradamus; if the second way—a metal ball on an inclined plane. An automaton!”

  Tippis’s face flashed before Faith’s eyes. She blinked to dismiss it, raised her cup, and grimaced. It was empty. She grabbed her coat, a cheap article of wet-look leather she’d purchased in a thrift shop, and said, “I’m thirsty. Let’s go out.”

  “The book,” Barrett mumbled. “Where is it?”

  Faith stuck it beneath her arm and started out into the hallway, Barrett at her heels. His voice echoed in the lobby and out into the street.

  “Let me tell you a story,” he said. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets, his head was pulled in, and he peeked over his turned-up collar, his eyes darting from her face to the shattered cement of the sidewalk. “When I was a boy, long before your time, in Pennsylvania, there was no doubt in my mind that there had to be a greater good than any man could conceive. Why? Because that greatest good would have to be because part of being good is being actual, right?”

  “I guess,” Faith said, but she wasn’t sure.

  “And I nurtured that tenuous belief all my life, child. Everything paled beside it. I could be enjoying myself immensely—I could be drunk—literally—with joy, or in the middle of sex, but suddenly I’d become conscious of myself. I’d sober up immediately, or lose my erection, and something in my head would say, ‘Is this really the greatest good?’ And once you’ve asked that, you’ve ruined it. You’ve destroyed that particular joy with questioning.” Barrett stopped to look at his thumb; he frowned and shoved it back into his pocket. “Years later, after I’d experimented with everything under the sun, settled down, married, and began teaching at Princeton, the questions still persisted: is this it? And always it was—No. My colleagues pooh-poohed the entire idea. They were good fellows, I suppose, but like my parents, schoolmates—even my wife and children—they were unable to understand my desire, my need for this thing. One even asked me, ‘Dick, suppose I imagine the most beautiful, the most perfect woman in the world—does that mean she has to be?’ ” Barrett snorted and rubbed his nose. “Petitio principii! They didn’t understand. . . .”

  Faith discovered she was growing fond of him. The man beside her and the one who stole her money seemed entirely different. In fact, he seemed different from most people, like the Swamp Woman, like Big Todd. “What did you do?” she said.

  Barrett blinked and rubbed his eyes as he and Faith stood under a streetlight. His hesitations bothered her for an instant—they were either from failing memory, or the respite needed to think up some good lie. “I investigated the problem,” he said. “I wrote books and articles about it until that approach ran dry. That is, until the quality of my research became suspect. Which was a sham! They simply wanted to get rid of me.” He glared at Faith as though she had been responsible. “Any imbecile knows that all scholarship begins, like science, in passion, in the lust for certainty, virtue, what have you. Anyway, I tried a last-ditch effort; I tried to build a following among my students. It didn’t work—I was fired.” His eyes lit up with an
ger, then watered. “Can you imagine what happened? A logical positivist took my place!” Faith could see that the affront hurt him still. He gazed far away, beyond her, in grief. “My wife left me, of course, when my salary was gone—ah, but I pressed on, Faith. Yes, and I press on still. . . .”

  “Yes?” Faith said excitedly. “And—”

  “And,” Barrett said sadly, turning to her, “here I am today—old, sick (these aren’t spare tires bulging my midriff, child: they’re tumors), yet not quite as foolish, I remind you, as I look.”

  Faith, disappointed, started across the empty street toward the entrance of a tavern. “So the story isn’t over?”

  “Is it ever over?” Barrett sighed. “People are somewhat like novels (don’t make too much of that simile)—we operate on beginnings, middles, and ends; subjective aims deposited in ongoing history to be prehended by other subjective aims. When you reach the end of one road, say, as a professor, you begin another.” Barrett smiled to himself as they entered the dark tavern. “I fancy myself to be a didactic poem now, and you, Faith?”

  “Pornography,” she said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Barrett’s mouth, as they waited on their drinks, sagged in silence, as if pins in his jaws had been removed. After two sips of his drink he was again animated. “We’re co-workers, child—I knew that from the moment I saw you tonight. You and I are after, I sense, the same thing. Yet my age gives me the upper hand. I’ve been through more and, perhaps, can spare you a few unnecessary and unfortunate pitfalls.”

  Faith tried to concentrate on what he said, but found herself nodding from lack of sleep. Her mind couldn’t seem to get hold of what he meant.

  “We all need a guiding principle—we must have one, or our world falls apart. But the catch is that when we start seeking that principle it must first, in every instance, be wholly removed from us and exist in some absolute, unsullied, perfect form. Yes, I know the principle originates in us—yes!—but it’s better to say it’s realized through us. But to be what we desire, that principle must seem completely other, greater than we are—something tangible, a thing of some sort like wood from the Cross at Calvary, or the grail, or a shred of the Saviour’s robe.” Barrett sipped at his drink, dipped his thumb therein, and sighed. “I’m trying to say something important—”

  “You left off with the Saviour’s robe,” Faith said, surprised at her own attentiveness.

  “Ah—yes!” Barrett wagged his head, getting back into the swing of it all. “But that has problems. If it’s a thing we’re after, and if that thing is absolute goodness and perfection, then we’ll never have it. It’ll escape us at every turn—that is, until we bring it a little closer to us. . . .”

  Something went tight in Faith’s stomach. She cautiously said, “How?”

  Barrett gestured, dribbling alcohol down his pointed chin. “Historically, men could turn to good works to find the realization of that principle; in your case that might be difficult, but I suspect that even as constricted by circumstances as you are, you can do a little good in this world.”

  Faith tuned Barrett out, studying him from the great distance of objectivity, the way one reads a novel about philosophical ideas, with haste and indifference. She decided he was dead wrong. She knew what she needed and could see it in the possible, pleasing image of a younger man, someone who would wait on her as she now waited on others, a man who would save her from the sick, tossed thing she saw each day in the mirror above her sink: Faith Cross. “Let’s go,” she said, weary of words. Her patience was at its end, and her mind made up. One had to survive; only that was certain.

  “This Good Thing of yours,” Barrett muttered as he slouched along beside her, “it is a reality like so many things on the horizon of faith and reason, but it’s certainly not a . . . thing.”

  “Then what is it?” she said dreamily as they strolled downtown. But she knew the answer, could see it: a comfortable home, clothes, a car, and a big-hearted husband to do her bidding.

  “Ha!” Barrett laughed. He spread his arms. “This is precisely what you and I will discover, Faith. It’s the human adventure, this quest for the Good Thing. But you must believe; it’ll never appear otherwise.” Barrett broke off, noticing, not two blocks away, a park bench beside Soldier’s Field. He led Faith to it, coughing horribly, sat her at one end, and stretched out, his hands behind his head.

  “As co-workers,” he said, “we’re questers for that which in all ages was the one thing denied man: absolute certainty.” He leaned back his head, looking upside down at her, smiling, then taking in the dark stretch of blue sky above. “That makes us fools. My wife, Amelia, always called me that, because this thing possessed me so, but I’d always come back with, ‘Yes, dear heart, but a Great Fool.’ ” Barrett sighed deeply, scratching his neck. “There’s a big difference. Amelia never understood that. She was a beautiful woman, such haecceitas you’ve never seen, but she was never tortured by beauty—she never looked at a rose and, by dint of reason, went beyond it to yearn for roseness. You see, the entire world was allegory for me—ah, I was a strange child! It always pointed beyond, or perhaps below, itself to something more good, more real and glorious than what I could see. Uncovering this meaning—that to me was philosophy. Not only philosophy, Faith, but life’s work itself—exegesis of the rose, of the world.” Barrett coughed; he nearly strangled, then looked at the thin light of dawn, smiling mysteriously. “My son is an electrical engineer in Vermont. Bright boy, Jimmy. My daughter, Lillian, is a fashion model in New York City. Can you imagine a father’s woe at having children who rebelled against my vision, who thought I was senile and, in cahoots with Amelia, tried to have me committed to a home? Faugh! I ran away. That was eight years ago, on my sixtieth birthday, and I’ve been growing younger ever since. . . .”

  Faith, alert now and rapt, rested on the hard bench beside Barrett, surfeited with the stillness of a morning so blue that sky and water on the lake were merged without the slightest suture. The skyscrapers were the color of deep-sea pearls, as were the clouds, an armada passing overhead. She longed to look upon them forever, to fix them in her mind, to hold on to something, because she lacked so much. Lacked the rose, let alone roseness. She looked at Barrett as he clutched his Doomsday Book to his chest, and saw him as a projection of what she would be if she continued to search: moral wreckage. But he was sweet. To search with him—would it be so bad?

  “Co-workers,” she whispered to herself. Faith laid her hand on Barrett’s head, felt movement on his scaly scalp, and lifted—with her fingertips—a flea from his hair. He was unkempt, oblivious to the external world that seemed to wreak such woe on her and Tippis. He was unsightly, had breath like that of a dying dragon, and probably needed to be in a cancer ward. Yet what he said deeply impressed her.

  “Will you look with me?” she asked. She heard Barrett’s stomach rumble. It sounded like a sewer.

  He coughed in a terrible way and said, “Und zwar von Herzen . . .”

  “Does that mean yes?”

  Barrett seemed sleepy; he closed his eyes and smiled from ear to ear. Faith understood—Jimmy and Lillian Barrett had hurt him sorely; she would replace them. Faith removed her coat and spread it across his shoulders. Then she slipped the book from beneath his hands and opened it with the key. She was not surprised. In the thin, irenic rays of morning, as she listened to Barrett’s throat rattling under the chirping of pigeons in the trees above, Faith saw that each of the hundred pages of the black-bound, dog-eared Doomsday Book was, from top to bottom, blank, as empty as she imagined the world to be, and by virtue of this a sort of screen onto which her thoughts spread out like an oil slick on the surface of the sea. She smiled to herself and stared at the pages as though they actually held words, images. They did, but only as long as she conjured them there. On the first page she saw her father crossing the dung-brown fields behind his farmhouse, fields splattered with rivulets and pools by late summer rain—weather vanes, silos, hound dogs lying on their
sides in the shade of a tree, tiny hay bins and barns filled with ensilage were in the distance against a sky that looked like water—broad, blue, its clouds rolling like great, feathery waves. Then, because she willed it, she saw Lavidia splitting thick logs from the woodpile by the toolshed, singing some old, warm hymn and making up new verses while blackbirds flew as tiny specks in formation above her head with a sound like clothes flapping on a line, then came to rest on the ground nearby, searching the woodpile and yard for scraps of bread and meat. She saw Alpha Omega Jones waving to her from a wind-ruffled cane field, walking in a drying wind through its golden, swaying stalks to sweet-gum trees where she, still a child dressed in blue, waited. As long as she looked and flipped the stiff pages of the book, she could see the farmhouse with clouds of gray smoke curling from its chimney in the dead of wintertime, then the lilting sewing bees and barnyard suppers in the spring, goats nibbling turnips, the picnics in Indian summer by the quiet ponds near the woods—the particular magic and music of a world to which she might never return, but loved all the more because it was unattainable.

  Faith closed the book. She touched Barrett’s arm, for he had given her this. And this: a thought she almost believed—that beauty, truth, and goodness could be born in shipwrecked lives, that flowers might yet bloom on a dead man’s grave. Once livid, his arm was cool. Cooler than the blue morning itself. She knew this sleep well, had seen it take Big Todd, then Lavidia from her as it had now taken Barrett, releasing him as if the green hand of death were stayed only until that moment when a life devastated by suffering had produced its Doomsday Book and given it to another, until it had scaled Mount Kilimanjaro or fallen exhausted, clutching the elusive Good Thing.

  Faith quickly lifted her coat from him and walked to a telephone booth at the corner. She counted the money Barrett had given her. Two hundred dollars. Then she searched her pockets for a dime, and called the police.