Faith and the Good Thing

10

Some folks would say Faith was born without mother-wit, leading a deceitful double life like that. She stopped wearing her wedding band (the skin beneath it had turned pale, and that was some kind of omen), and, ultimately, pawned it along with a handful of her jewelry when Jones’s resources ran thin. He told her he didn’t need much — just a bed, breakfast every now and then, and blank canvases until the time he could turn the creative process on himself. Most of his paintings, means to this end, he gave away, grunting, “Don’t matter much, I got hit out.” She insisted he sell them, that he try to associate himself with a gallery and make a living out of this thing. Each time he refused, and though it angered her, Faith was also glad that he could give his work away, and — especially — could make her feel brand-new. She told him as much on the Indian summer afternoon they ate a late lunch in Lincoln Park.

Also this:

“I’m going to have a baby. ”

Jones started choking, a whooping noise burst from his lips. He pounded his right fist on his chest, gagged, and coughed up a chicken bone. Tears ran from his eyes.

“You sho?”

Faith nodded. Timidly, she handed him a napkin.

“Lord, Lord, Lord!” Jones whistled through his teeth. He looked at the half-eaten sandwich in his hand, frowned as though it held horse or stringy hippogriff, then flung it over his shoulder. He fell backward, spreading his arms on the grass, and groaned. “If that don’t take the rag right off the bush! Me — a father! Hit don’t make no sense. My works, those’re my kids; that makes more sense.” He reared up, his jaw hanging as though unhinged: “How long you known this?” Jones’s eyes half closed, became slits. “You sure hit ain’t Isaac’s baby?”

“It couldn’t be.” Faith shivered at the image of Maxwell sleeping on the sofa in the living room, afraid to approach her, uncertain what reaction would spring forth from their touch. She scooted close to Jones, but he inched back instinctively. She started to reach for him, but her hand fell midway in futility. She blurted, before thinking, “Don’t close me out, Alpha!” Then tried to pull herself together, tugging at the fingers on her left hand. “I saw a doctor yesterday. I’m almost five months along. ”

Grabbing his napkin, Jones wiped furiously at his lips, so roughly she feared he’d smear them away. “Does Isaac know?” he said.

“I haven’t told him yet. I’m afraid. ”

He grabbed her shoulders, held her upright, and thrust his head close to her. Again, she didn’t know him. Jones spoke slowly, deliberately. Making himself known. “I can’t have no kids. I’m an experiment, y’see? Honey, I’m different — I can’t settle down, or raise kids, or nothin’ like that. I’m. an artist.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m outside things, not ’cause I want to be, but because nature did somethin’ strange to me — gave me a screwed-up nervous system so I see things different from most people, and have some slim muscular control that lets me paint.” His breathing had become an ordeal, a painful thing to both their ears. “I’ve got to be free — to move around, to work, or loaf, but mainly to experiment with those goddamn paints, and finally with myself. See? I’ve got to see if a good idea can be made real. That means I’m going to suffer, hit means I’m going to be frustrated, and die inside, and wake up in gutters or in hotels with strange women, or—” In his eyes Faith saw him lose the thought. He wasn’t seeing her, but something else, a vision that attracted yet repelled him. “That’s what I am: a hypothesis. That’s right, a theme. And I can’t let nothin’ tie me down until I see how far the damn theme goes. ” Jones squeezed her harder, almost at the point of tears. “You’re going to tell Isaac hit’s his, aren’t you?”

Watching him, she was amazed: full of wonder. “I don’t want to lie — I don’t want to hurt him, or you, or anybody!”

“Somebody’s gonna get hurt,” Jones cried. His face flushed, tightened and released like a fist. “My life’s the idea of what I can be, honey. I can’t give that up!” Suddenly, calculation came into his eyes. Reason. “You’ve got a little money saved. You can get rid of hit—”

“No! I won’t!”

She was on her feet, retreating backward. Jones said, “I’m trying to be reasonable,” and, with that, Faith started running, abandoning her shoes and purse to race across the park. By the time Jones caught her both her feet were grass-stained and wet. Brown and green. And she was crying.

“I can’t let this thing tie me down,” he said. “I’m not being selfish. Hit’s just that my life’s not my own — hit’s for art — the idea of perfection!”

She would not look at him. He shook her — hard.

“I’m sorry. I never meant for you to think I was free, that I could live like other men.” His voice went flat and empty. “We’ll think of somethin’. ”

Faith pushed him away and stood back, bitter, her voice husky and broken. “You don’t want it!”

“Of course I do. I’m glad,” he choked. “Hit’s. the best thing that ever happened to me. ”

He coaxed her back to their original spot and, without speaking, began folding the checkered tablecloth and dropping their paper cups and cellophane wrappers into a metal trash can at the edge of the quiet park. As they walked spiritlessly to her new car, a sliver of bright steel by the curb, Jones said, “We’ve got to look at this thing from every possible angle, take into account what we know can’t give, like my responsibility to this idea. That’s got to go on, hit’s my life — my purpose!” Inside the car he sighed. “Hit’s all so tricky. ”

“You’re making it tricky!” Faith cried. “What’s more important to you — painting, or me?”

He didn’t answer.

“I—” She could not find her voice; the silence was a boulder lying across her brain.

“Hit’s not that simple,” Jones pleaded. “You don’t understand.” He kissed her with all the tenderness he could muster when she stopped in front of his building, then hurried out the curb door.

Faith called after him, “What am I going to tell Isaac?”

(That we had a good time? That I met and gave myself to a man who had another mistress, a man as strange as a centaur who thought so little of his life and mine and this child’s that he would forsake us for a daydream. God, no.)

“Don’t tell him anything,” Jones said, returning to the car. He smiled down at her and stroked her hand through the window. “I’ll go to his office before he leaves. We’ll get this whole thing straightened out.” Then he disappeared into his doorway.

As always, he put her at ease, but only slightly. She could watch him painting, her jealousy fading before the enchantment of the creative process — the painstaking application of paint, the corrections that brought to life something somehow beautiful and more real than all the things out there. He couldn’t be blamed for his reaction. After three years of living away from the sunlight in a tiny cell he had a right to his freedom. Just the same, it disturbed her. From the moment she knew she was pregnant she realized that a portion of her bondage had come to an end. The thing moved inside her in some warm, deep place like sea depths where insects are spawned, or some immense vale so fertile your spit could make a thousand salvias burst like fireworks from their seeds. She could not hate him. Through him she was no longer apart from the mysteries of the earth, but involved in them. He had given her Big Todd’s truth: only through the stranger, or one stranger than yourself, could you seize your own life’s meaning. But he, like all men, was a stranger to her, to the earth, and was driven by a restlessness, a disease she only now understood. It had stricken Lynch and Brown and Barrett alike, had laid its heavy hand on Big Todd — suffocating them with a sense of fragility and foolishness before the rhythm of the world. She knew that was it — life was music and they could not dance, had no steps, so to speak, and stood there on the gigantic dance floor of existence, sulking and sneering at those who did dance. They could not be content as the humble caretakers of the garden of creation, could not create as she, or God, or a risible old witch woman could; they could not conjure beauty from the nothingness of all our lives. They were the dead living. Yet she had that connection with things, that capacity to dance if the universe said so, to sing if it demanded song. Unable to create, to conjure life from darkness, men railed against the world. Brown worshiped it to gain its favor, Lynch dissected it, Alpha painted it, Tippis — unable to change it — changed himself, Maxwell ignored it. Creation — conjuring, dancing to the world’s grim mi, fa, mi, for all men was a queer thing — it couldn’t be controlled, couldn’t be bought, or captured on canvas, or bent to fit a desperate dream; above all, it couldn’t be ignored. Then how did a woman — be she whore or housewife, shrew or saint, witch or virgin — seize that mystery? Deep within, Faith knew she harbored that secret. In a man’s world she was denied so much. Conquest was forbidden; passion was forbidden; freedom was impossible: what remained? the biological superiority? creation? and how then creation? The child, in an odd way, was the answer — it was all history focused on a single point — a trillion amoebae, plants, and animals martyred by evolution to produce just this one child and no other, holding in microcosm all epochs, or so she believed; it pointed to every beast and tree and transformation of life, of that peculiar dance that had to be before it could be assembled. By her. She did this, created this new subject of the world. If it was a girl, she would know all this before her first words; if a boy — woe.

In her apartment she thought of this, prescinding the strange changes stretching and swelling her flesh and mind for reflection. Maxwell probably suspected. In the mornings he would watch silently from the bathroom doorway as she vomited into the toilet. Yet he said nothing. Five weeks ago she’d brought home four new dresses, all larger than the ones in her closet. He remarked about their size, but took his questioning no further. But if he suspected, why was he silent? Had her confession reamed out his feelings long ago? What she’d done to him, or failed to feel, came dangerously close to bordering on sin. Tippis hadn’t mentioned the terrible rewards of taking another as one’s object — the growing dependence, the loss of one’s self-esteem. They had to be acknowledged; she lived with them every day; she saw the emptiness in Maxwell’s eyes, saw the way his interest shifted from her and his home to the office, to overtime and drinking with his bosses, not because he coveted a raise or a successful column but because he could not bear to be home with her for long. And now? Would her bearing the baby break him completely? Perhaps it would be better to lie after all. But she had done enough, or not done enough, to Maxwell already. He was only a man.

Seven-thirty.

Faith began to worry. He should have arrived hours ago. It was possible that Jones, as disturbed as he was, had burst into The Sentry offices downtown and made a scene, had exposed Maxwell’s marital problems for all to hear and so infuriated Maxwell that they’d fought. Faith chain-smoked. If they’d fought, inside the building or outside in some garbage-strewn alley, or on the street before dozens of onlookers afraid to get involved — and it was likely since Maxwell stayed at sixes and sevens with everyone — then Jones would be arrested. He’d be sent back to prison. She’d be alone again.

Faith forced her worries from her mind and walked to her bedroom window. She looked to the dark lake below, to the waves plashing against stark white rocks along the brown rolling beach. Two lovers strolled on the sand below, their fingers interlaced as they walked barefoot to sit on a large blanched rock. Things could work out all right if Maxwell released her. It would be better for him. She remembered the last time — months ago — when he’d knocked on her bedroom door at midnight, his shorts straining with an erection as hard as Space-Age plastic. She’d risen, leaning on her elbows, pitying him, beckoning him into the bedroom with the hope that—maybe—things would work out. He’d kissed her full in the mouth, slid into bed with his respirator, and tried to rouse her feelings. But as he touched her arm he seemed to remember painful things — their arguments, her confessions, and his tool shrank completely from the occasion. She could smell his sweat as he lay beside her, whining. “You don’t need me, I guess. You need somebody who can do you some good. I—” She’d pressed her lips to his, tasting the bitter fumes of his asthma spray, and he said, “Damn you,” whom he meant, he didn’t say; but he could hardly have meant his respirator. He cuddled up in her arms like a child, fell fast asleep, and not once during the night realized she had cried. He never approached her again. Not once. Faith lit another cigarette, certain that a break would be best for them. He could remarry someone more like himself, and she and Jones could return to Hatten County. They could rebuild her father’s farmhouse, throw up a byre, work the fields, raise the baby. Big Todd’s delicate dream of a bucolic life lived like a myth would not be lost, only deferred, not destroyed, but finally realized in her and the boy who had his favor. She swore to that, and decided to name the baby after Todd.

Before she could turn the sound of Todd Jones over on her tongue, she heard a key in the door. It grated against the metal lock for a long time, like a cat or a demon trying to break in. It startled her; she imagined some long-dead thing covered with seaweed and brine, rising with blood-red foam from the floor of the lake, dragging its scaly form along the sand to the entrance of the building below, then slowly scaling the steps, oozing through the quiet hallway with a leer on its hideous three heads to claw at her door, burst in, and pluck her heart from her breast. The noise stopped. She heard a pounding on the door and wall outside.

“Open the goddamn door for Christ’s sake!”

By the time Faith reached the door she was out of breath; already the baby was stealing her wind. She threw open the latch, and Maxwell fell in, his head pitching forward. She caught him, coughed at the sickly sweet smell of whisky on his breath, and helped him to the davenport in the front room. Maxwell’s head rolled back and forth on the back of the davenport — his mouth hung open, and his eyes were woven with red and blue veins of blood. His limbs seemed boneless. He leaned forward and tried to focus on her as she bit her nails. A chill ran up her spine as she imagined the course of his thoughts across the background of cocoa-colored walls, rug, and delphiniumblue draperies to the foreground where she stood, resting her hand on a straight-back chair, no more important to him than the cold furniture itself. They were obstacles to the tired tread of his feet across the room, even as she obstructed his progress through. She held her breath. Waiting.

“Your boyfriend quit today!” he shouted in a whisky tenor.

She nibbled her fingernail, bit her forefinger, and winced, watching it bleed.

“Did you hear me?” Maxwell said. “Jones came in today at closing time and said he wasn’t gonna work on the goddamn column no more!” He held out the fingers on both his hands and spread them as he pursed his lips. “Pffft! Just like that. He walked out on me. ”

She could hear her own heart hammering, as loud as a voodoo drum in a New Orleans swamp. It hurt her chest. Faith sat down on the chair to her left, holding her head. “What did he say?”

“He said he quit, that’s what he said.” Maxwell’s mouth twisted clear across his face. “He said he was leaving town to take a goddamn job as a goddamn illustrator for a goddamn ad firm in New York City.”

Something slapped her stomach, from the inside. Please stop swearing, she thought. She bent forward, felt her head swim, and tottered to the bathroom where she jackknifed, vomiting into the bowl. Too weak to rise, she heard Maxwell’s voice behind her.

“What do you think of that?” he said. “After all I did for him—”

There was a great claw flexing around her heart, crushing her insides. She dry-heaved, and this time she brought up black clots of blood. Maxwell dropped to her side, catching her around her waist before she fell forward. He carried her in his arms back to the bedroom, drew back the covers, and dropped her on the bed.

“I’m going to call a doctor,” he said. He wagged his finger at her. “Uh huhn—I don’t want to hear it! You’re sick.”

Faith sat up, shivering now. Sweating. He didn’t know. He still, perhaps, loved her. There was still time.

Now.

“Honey,” she said weakly, aware that her voice was hoarse, “come here.” She had not called him that in months, not since his last visit to her bedroom. He froze in the doorway, his face full of doubt. “Come closer,” she whispered, horrified by the hollow echo in her voice. Maxwell sat down on the bed beside her, his hands hanging heavy between his knees, his eyes vacant.

“We’re going to have a baby. ”

The voice of the dead living was behind Maxwell’s reply, a voice that has no mind, no sense, no emotion directing it. The larynx and vocal cords sound like taut strings wired in a small box located in the throat of a ventriloquist’s dummy; the sounds grate from the lips like chalk scraping a blackboard, severed from thought: “A baby. ” His mouth shut with a snap.

All the air in her bedroom rushed to a single corner, far, far away from them. She heard a wheeze, a rattle deep in his throat. “We?”

She wanted to lie down. To wrap herself with the sheets, or in a shroud of dry forest leaves. To sleep.

Thought returned to Maxwell, coloring his words like blood slowly staining cloth. “We’re—we? — are going to. ” He sucked in his breath violently and stood over her, his palms pressed against his chest, his shirt collar, his legs stiff and head pushed forward. “We’re going to have a baby!”

Do something, she thought. Why was it taking so long to sink in? She had to wait, motionless, for his move. It came. Like retribution, destiny, or a curse it came. Before her eyes his expression glided through a rosary of emotions — bemusement, suppressed rage — like a mime gone mad. The muscles around his mouth hardened; they stood out like tiny tumors burgeoning beneath his skin.

His voice grunted, sobbing from syllable to syllable. “You must think I’m a fool!” He tottered away from her bed, suddenly sober and choking for air. He searched his pockets for his respirator but only came up with lint. Maxwell swayed for a moment, snatched off his wig, and threw it to the floor. He whirled toward her. “We are going to have a baby?” he screamed. “Baby, we aren’t going to have anything! I can’t even—” Maxwell closed his eyes and fought for breath; he turned from her on his heels and drove the flat of his fist against the wall. Once. Plaster rained from the ceiling to the floor. He looked at the gray shards from the ceiling scattered at his feet, and his face went slack. He looked at her, and she could hear him thinking, Look what I did. He seemed to be in control again. Said, “Bitch!” barely under his breath to define her, to frame her for the assault building in his mind. She could see his lips trembling under the exercise of his Will Power, his desire to not say a single word until he had thought it through. Then his face changed. He drew his lips back over his teeth, he narrowed his eyes at her, the wings of his nose went open, and his right hand rose, pointing a forefinger at her head like a pistol.

“Let me tell you something! I tried to play it straight from the first day I met you — I didn’t ask any questions when it looked like you didn’t want to give me an answer, but I told you everything about me. Didn’t I?” He was shaking, remembering things he had said to her about his childhood, remembering his confidence. “Shit!” he swore to snap himself back. “I trusted you; I didn’t think you’d lie to me, and even if I did catch you in a lie I thought you were doing it for my own good — our good — to keep us together. Even that insanity about the Good Thing, and the time you spent hustling in that goddamn hotel — it was all okay.” Maxwell wiped away water from his eyes; he clenched his fists for control. “If you loved me I figured it was okay if you lied. And afterward I was glad that you told me. even though I didn’t know how to act anymore. I didn’t know how to get next to you — to make you feel something for me. I thought buying you the car might do it. Or maybe if I could turn you on in bed—” He stopped, looking away, ashamed. “Maybe I was stupid — I’ve got less feeling than you, isn’t that the way you put it one time, less feeling and faith. I ain’t in tune with the universe! Well, I had some kinda faith, all right, because I believed in you, Faith! I lay there on that goddamn davenport in the living room night after night, believing that you’d make the next move, the right move — that you’d come in there and show me what I needed to do to keep us together.” Maxwell bent forward, wringing his hands. “Do you understand? — you meant so much to me that I kept quiet when I saw you messing with that — that — that—boy! Yeah, I knew, but you meant. that much. to me—”

Maxwell rushed to her bedside, his left arm trapping her, his right squeezing a clump of her hair as he, then she, cried.

“. and you still want to play me for a fool, a chump, a pathetic little clown.” He brought his right palm against her face. Once. Twice — a third time. Hard. “You can go live with your barefoot boy for all care. It’s his, isn’t it?” He waited. Faith could not answer. He slapped her. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes!” She felt relieved. It was all out now; it was all over.

Maxwell pointed at her, lost his thought, frowned, and stood momentarily confused. Then he recaptured it. “Get out of here!” His hands dropped to his side. “I don’t want to see you here in the morning—”

Blood running from her nose slipped through Faith’s fingers, flowed to her dress and onto the bed. There was no stopping it, and she breathed huskily through her mouth. Maxwell crossed to her closet and ripped clothes from their wire hangers. He held her ermine cloak high in the air and muttered, “God!” then flung it to the center of the floor. He perfectly enunciated, “Go on!” carefully, slowly, like a voice on an English-language recording. All was stillness in the room. They were manikins behind a store’s smooth glass window, he standing with his right foot forward, his left knee locked, and his hand in his pocket, she covering her face. Their lips were parted as though to say more, but neither moved, nor did breath break the perfection of their outlines and those of the bed, chairs, and dresser covered with cosmetics.

Click.

“You just lost your good thing,” Maxwell sobbed, and he hurried out the open door.

Faith gave herself completely to her misery. Her face was wet and felt twice its normal size. She lifted her hands to her eyes and saw blood. As she stumbled to the bathroom she could hear him in the kitchen, tearing open the top of a beer can and talking to himself. More than ever she felt dirty, coated with the weight of her actions; but beneath that encrustation was a strange vacuum, an emptiness into which her thoughts plummeted. She gathered up her clothes and shoved them into a traveling bag. On the way out she passed the kitchen, where Maxwell, his head bent low over a beer can, sat at the table, smoking his asthma cigarettes and coughing, his mind shut up tight. He looked up at her, his eyes blurred and searching her face. Who is this?

And I? she thought. Faith wiped at her face with a tissue, and said, “I’m sorry—”

Maxwell’s throat tore with a horrible sound. He threw back his head and stood up. She could bear it no longer.

“Good-bye.”

Chicago seemed darker than she could ever recall having seen it. The sky was deep purple and clotted with black clouds whirling west over a craggy skyline. On the El, Faith checked her purse and found close to three hundred dollars there. Instinct sent her to the South Side, to Sixty-third Street, where she returned to Hotel Sinclair. At the desk she rang the bell on the counter, and Mrs. Beasley appeared from a back room, her hair in yellow curlers.

“Child,” she said, “you look like you were in a stick fight, and everybody had a stick but you!”

There was some truth in that. “It was more like a football game,” she said. She set her bag on the floor and opened the register on the desk. Room 4-D was empty.

“I haven’t been able to rent that room since you left,” Mrs. Beasley said. “Folks complained all the time about ghost cats as big as Guernsey cows walking ’cross the floor all night.”

“That’s all right,” Faith said. She knew she could sleep in a rat-infested sewer and not miss a wink tonight. “Can I have it back?”

“Sure, if you ain’t afraid one of them spirits will take over that child.”

Faith looked down at herself and smoothed her dress over the curvature of her stomach. “You can tell?”

Mrs. Beasley laughed. “You kidding? It looks like you’ve got a battleship and half the Russian army in there.”

Faith could not laugh, not now; or in the days, the months that followed when Mrs. Beasley, who supported Faith in exchange for help around the hotel, tried to cheer her. Until the eighth month she was miserable, barely eating enough to keep herself, let alone the baby, alive. Being alone was unbearable. Could she, if another man came along, start again? For Faith the answer was obvious: there was nothing to live for but the baby who would rise phoenix like from her wreckage. Often, Mrs. Beasley caught her held by the spell of her round belly in the bathroom mirror on the hotel’s fourth floor. Faith, naked to her waist, would look at the old woman’s reflection without turning and say, “I’m ugly. ”

Mrs. Beasley slapped her behind and upbraided her. “There ain’t nothing as beautiful as a woman about to give birth!”

That was comforting, but hard to believe. She saw herself with the detachment a stranger might have — the stretch marks extending from her sides to her navel, her swollen breasts too delicate to touch. “Will I look like I did before when it’s all over?”

“Come away from that mirror,” Mrs. Beasley said. “There’ll be marks on your belly, ’course, and for a while you’ll feel like a whole mountain passed through you. But that ain’t nothin’. I raised seven kids and I was okay. It happens to everybody that way—”

Faith waited, marking her days. And as the time grew near she grew afraid, most afraid. Her breasts swelled even more, felt even more sensitive beneath her fingertips — from her neck down she felt clogged and clotted with life. It alarmed her. The thing was possessing her entirely, inhabiting her body like the vengeful spirits of the dead. It would come bursting from her as a chicken does from its egg, destroying its shell, stealing the last of her life to feed its own. Fine. Whether she died for it or somehow survived, whether it tore her apart or gave her new strength, or if — later, when it was grown — it came to turn on her, to deny her as Richard Barrett’s children had done to him, then that, too, was all right. Just fine. She would love it — yes — even if it choked her dead in childbirth.

On the first day of snowfall in November, she lay across the moist mattress in 4-D, doubled over with labor pains quick enough to kill, she thought, a cow. They followed one another only minutes apart: it was coming — kicking itself free from her like a full-grown god bursting from the sea. She could see its brown face blurred under water, rising up with barnacles and slime to break the surface of her skin.

She screamed, her tongue caught in her throat. “Momma!”

“I’m right here,” Mrs. Beasley said softly. “You lay back and fight it, y’hear. I’m right here. I’ve done this before. I had a pregnant woman without no husband down in room five-C once and—”

The room whirled around her head, bright like the eye of the sun at its center, dull at its dark edges. She was certain she could hear the child murmuring inside her, but she could barely make out its words. It was, she thought, calling her name. Mrs. Beasley brought pans of hot water beside her bed, spread towels beneath her, and talked in a cooing voice, the content of which was lost to Faith forever.

“Press your muscles down,” she said.

There was no pain like this pain. Hadn’t Lavidia said that again and again? There was no suffering like the suffering of creation. She could feel the strange pressure caused within her by the child’s thoughts, its pulse; she could hear its tiny heart throbbing as loud as a gong. Life floated between feces and urine: what was it about?

“Bite on this.” Mrs. Beasley shoved the wooden handle of a rusty kitchen knife between Faith’s teeth, which sank in, clear to the metal beneath. She heard all sorts of breathing in an eerie concert — her own, quick and labored; the child’s, soft and like that of a sleeping dog; Mrs. Beasley’s, deep and as heavy as the wind.

The woman was exuding sweat, talking to herself in some crazy, sanctified, secret language of storefront churches until she shouted, “I see its head!”

Deep, silent screams rolled off Faith’s tongue: a bolt of white lightning cut jagged paths before her eyes. Then there was darkness.

“The lights went out!” Mrs. Beasley shouted.

She was caught somewhere between life and death, this girl, the baby not yet born, but breathing in the air of the darkened room.

“Don’t move,” she heard the woman say. “I’ll get us a candle from downstairs.”

She could not move. She imagined herself dead, or at the bottom of the sea. The child was not completely free from her, and the image flashed across her mind of a huge momma cockroach dragging her egg behind her on the floor. The smell of blood and birth was everywhere. Faith was barely conscious when Mrs. Beasley bounded back into the room with a thick homemade candle stuck in the neck of a wine flask. She placed it on the floor, then tugged at the baby’s head; the rest slipped out into her hands.

“It’s a girl,” she sighed. There came then a slapping sound, and a burst of breath. “You hear that?” Mrs. Beasley laughed.

Faith smiled. She closed her eyes, and Mrs. Beasley finished her work. That done, she placed the baby in a dry towel, then into Faith’s left arm. She held the candle close.

“I can hardly believe it”—Faith.

“Every birth,” laughed Mrs. Beasley, “is a miracle, ain’t it the truth?”

The child was as wrinkled as a head of lettuce, bluish in the flickering candlelight. Bald, its eyes were pinched together, and it fidgeted and wailed. Warmth rushed over Faith. It had her curious eyes — two brown dots set slightly asymmetrically on both sides of a small nose. There were a few indentations from Mrs. Beasley’s hand on its head. Faith watched it cry, hugged it closer, and sniffled.

Mrs. Beasley rubbed her hands together like a craftsman after a chore, and stepped backward toward the door. “You hang on to her while I check the fuse box in the basement. I can hear the roomers bitchin’ through the walls right now!” She left, closing the door with a slam that knocked the candle over.

Her eyes still shut, Faith pressed the child’s soft cheek against her own, dreaming briefly of the life they might lead together. Then she felt a film of heat pressing against her eyelids, and opened her eyes slowly. The corner of the room where the candle lay was brilliant and crawling with iridescent tendrils of flame that licked along the dry wallpaper, the bare floor. A thick cloud of smoke rolled like a wave over Faith and choked the baby. She tried to rise, only to fall back, weak, watching the fire snake across the floor like a serpent to the bundle of dry rags and towels Mrs. Beasley had left behind; they burst—fooom! — sparkling like precious jewels. Flames of green, blue, and crimson fire surrounded the bed, each glowing like gems in the sand, in the dark, in the loneliness at the bottom of the sea.

Some unknown strength came to Faith. She scrambled to her feet, wrapped the baby in her blanket, and stood swaying in the hot film of heat. Where was the door? Her eyes were blind with water; the child was limp in her right arm. She stretched out her hand and stumbled, hoping to touch the door by chance. Her palm fell on the hot glass of the window. Her palm blistered; the glass was spreading red with flames, darkening at its corners with smoke. It shattered, showering hot shrapnels of glass across her face.

She shouted.

In the hallway someone cried, “Fire! Fire!”

“Is there anybody in there?” Another voice.

“Some woman,” a third voice cried.

For an instant Faith stood wide-legged, wild-eyed, clutching the blanket. The bed to her left was as red as a drop of new blood. Fire blackened the blanket in her arms. She reeled forward, sucking in breath and holding a wail as old, as ancient as the swamps before it could hit her lips. She went mad for an instant, screaming and clawing at the door. A wall of flame seven feet high rippled across its surface, glowing, sputtering, and spewing like a senile old man, changing its outlines before her eyes and assuming a shape — tall, slender, eternal: Big Todd. She called to the trembling figure, reached for it through the heaving black smoke, and felt, without pain, her fingers dissolving along his fiery face. Flames crawled along her outstretched arm, slithered up her shoulder and face and into her dark hair, igniting it like the dry head of a match.

“Want to be a maple tree?” Todd said.

“UHH HUNH!”

She dropped into the darkness closing around her like a stone down a well.

Sleep.

• • •

This, and for a long time:

She saw herself boiling in West Hell for her trespasses and troubled faith, whirling from burning cavern to cavern and finally falling headlong into a sea of fire. Reverend Brown had warned her, “You’ll be annihilated,” and the spirit man had prophesied her fall—“Flames from the pit will lick your bowels, your heart will explode!”

It was happening.

Demons, not philosopher-kings, swung from the stalactites, giggled and jeered as her flesh popped like grease in the fires; “You are nothing!” Her head was a crackling match, her blood shot out in a stream through her nose. Minotaurs and harpies danced around her and the other sinners who were immersed in filth and flowing seas of blood; serpents devoured men whole — the most fortunate there merely burst into flame. She opened her mouth, and from it shot a jet of steam: Hisssss.

“I don’t think she’ll need that oxygen any longer,” a voice said.

“But,” another voice replied, “she’ll die before daybreak with that collapsed left lung. ”

“And after tomorrow?” a third voice said sadly.

Silence.

Faith opened her eye — her left one, because the right felt pasted shut. She was on her back, lying on something soft and yielding. She tried to arch her back and raise her right arm, but they stuck to the white bed clothing, their surface wrinkled and black as tar. She pulled her arm up again; it rose, but the skin remained.

“Try to be still,” the third voice said.

The room looked warped through her single eye, blurred and distorted. As her eye began to focus, she made out a man’s features — a thin nose, two eyes floating behind thick wire-rim glasses.

“It’s me — Arnold. ”

“Arnnn—?” Faith caught her breath — flashing into the reflection of Tippis’s glasses was a demon; a burned hairless head half destroyed but, through some act of ultimate evil, allowed to persist, its left eye a discolored globe, its right eye closed forever. The nose was gone; in its place were two empty holes. It had no ears, only gaps along the side of its head. And the mouth — a gaping, lipless maw in which swam a bright red tongue. To her horror, the movements of that mouth exactly followed her own. She tried, but could not cry out, or move her gaze from that face so hideous it would have to sneak up on a glass of water. Horrible, children, horrible! A single dark tear fell from the demon’s enormous eye.

Tippis was dressed in white, his sleeves short and ending at the elbow. He lifted Faith’s shoulders a few inches, adjusted her pillow, and took a seat by her bedside. One of the doctors opened the door to what Faith realized was a hospital room, and nodded at Tippis.

“You’ll call if she needs anything?”

“Yes,” Tippis said sadly. The doctors left. Tippis hunched forward in his seat, his head bowed, his hands held together between his knees. He looked at her from the corner of his left eye. “You’re in Michael Reese,” he said. “I’m a male nurse now—”

Once again the flames leaped across her vision. She saw the wallpaper in the hotel crimpling, the ceiling raining hot plaster. “Put it out. please. the baa. bee—”

Tippis looked away from her and took off his glasses. He pinched the bridge of his nose until it grew a dark color, then placed his hand on her arm, shuddering when strips of her skin stuck like soft warm plastic to his own. “Do you want to hear the worst right away?” he said.

Faith did not answer. Her eye seemed transfixed on the sparkling acoustically sealed tiles of the ceiling. She thought of how Lavidia had looked in her casket, how she’d tasted when she kissed her, like an old wax candle. Would anyone, she wondered, kiss Faith Cross? Would the casket even be open?

Tippis exhaled and cleared his throat loudly. It sounded like an engine turning over. “They couldn’t even find the baby,” he said. “Mrs. Beasley’s hotel is a complete ruin. The damn thing went up like a tinderbox. She’s behind on her insurance. Won’t collect a cent. ” He stopped, startled by a low primeval moaning from Faith’s mouth, some primitive sound of sheer animal sorrow. Tippis leaned back, exhaled, and gripped the arms of his chair. He pressed the heels of his shoes on the floor for strength. “The doctors said your right leg is just about burned to the bone. The report — I read it — it says you suffered first-degree burns on three-fourths of your body — you’ll probably have to learn to walk with special therapeutic shoes and—” Sobbing ripped through Tippis’s throat. His hands flew to his face. “They don’t think you’ll live. ” When he drew his hands away his face was wet. He put his glasses on, but in minutes they were steamed. He jerked suddenly to pull himself together. The glasses slipped crooked on his bulbous nose. He didn’t seem to notice. “Faith, they’re wrong! I’ll help you climb back again!” He shook her hand, demanding a response. None came.

Tippis peeled his fingers from her forearm, rose, and crossed the room to the window. Her eye followed his movements; she heard every word he said. But the words were meaningless. She wanted to die, was thankful that it was a possibility. It made her laugh inside her head: there was freedom after all. Death was a peculiar thing, the boundary event through which all others were defined and delimited. You never believed it was going to happen when you lived; it only happened to others, and you went dutifully to their funerals, suspecting that you might escape their fate and live forever. Not now — she was going to become sand and stone, perhaps a maple or oak, or maybe she’d just be allowed to rest.

“Are you afraid of dying?” Tippis said, his back to her. “It doesn’t make any sense that suddenly we should be no more. Why should we be if we have to not be!” His shoulders hunched, pushing his head up like a jack-in-the-box. Behind him, laughter came from Faith. Fresh perspiration broke out on Tippis’s face as he looked at her — a red open mouth of serrated teeth, a pink eye in a black head. He inched toward the door, his head tucked in, opened it without a sound, and slipped out.

With no one to hear, Faith attended to her own thoughts, aware of time mechanically clicking away in the wall clock near the door, not caring, comforted by no illusions of things to be done, no projects which, unless she completed them, might prevent the world from going on. A round sense of the void. But she did not want to die, although going on like this, trapped in a body that would not respond to her will, seemed like a curse. She was aware of it only by the painful itch crawling from her head to her feet, by the hardness of the plastic tubes inserted into her right side. Afraid, she wanted to pray, but suddenly could not recall a single verse. Fine, she thought, just fine.

The door opened. Her eye smarted with light from the hallway, then focused through a watery film on a man’s figure in the doorway. He straightened the shoulders of his loud sports coat, touched first his bright pink bow tie, then his wig, and sat down with a frump on the bedside. It took a struggle, but she managed to turn her head toward him.

“I just heard an hour ago,” Maxwell said. He leaned over, looking at her face, then winced. He closed his eyes, stood up, and backed away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The baby, too?”

Go away! she thought. Her head hurt now; something was flipping her brain over and over like a flapjack. Please—

Maxwell pressed his respirator to his lips thoughtfully and shifted from one heel to the other. It was almost pathetic; he was a writer, a worker with words for whom comforting words would not now come.

“Faith,” he said finally, waving his right hand as if to pluck his phrases from the air, “I never knew it was going to turn out like this!” Air whooshed loudly through his throat; he puffed the respirator between his lips. “I tried to reach Jones right after I heard, but he didn’t leave a forwarding address with his parole officer. They’re looking for him now. ”

He had deserted her. So Faith had expected. But why were they looking for Alpha Omega Jones? Surely not for her sake, or the baby’s. Such men as he and Big Todd could not be captured. Not really. You could chain that malleable rough side of them that lay in history, but the rest was wind, a current that sometimes cooled you when you were dry, but broke you, as the wind did tar paper in a cabin window, when you got in its way. Somehow, it was just.

“If you pull through this, I’ll make it up to you,” Maxwell said. “I’m going to get you the best doctors that money can buy.” He paused, his eyes narrowing on the silhouetted side of her head, his teeth bearing down on his thumb. “If you just show enough Will Power, honey—”

“Go away!” She got it out this time. It shook Maxwell. He started to speak but swallowed instead, then reached inside his suit coat. He withdrew his billfold and laid twenty dollars at the foot of her bed. “In case you need anything tonight.” He straightened his tie in the mirror above the sink in her room, and left without another word.

Time dragged on like a polecat mangled by a truck and hauling its dead rear end to the roadside. Each breath became harder for her to draw. Her body seemed already gone, but her mind was clear, as transparent as bubbling spring water with shiny stones visible on the floor of its stream. Side by side at the stream’s bottom were stones for the respective stances she’d endured: Lynch, Tippis, Lavidia, Brown, Maxwell, Barrett, and Big Todd. Their voices tramped through her mind with the force of a hunter’s boot heel — being and not-being, life cannot support itself, sublimation of instinctual drives, get yourself a good thing. She had suffered, and what had she now? Ash on her tongue. The sides of her mouth drew together in a deliciously evil sneer, “Faugh!” Not one of them knew of the Good Thing, or even believed in its possibility — its necessity.

“Faugh!”

At that instant her eyes went cloudy, unclear, and ached from within — even the closed one, and when the left one again admitted light from her small room she saw crouched at the foot of her bed an extremely large white cat. Its eyes were like crystal, deep enough to lose your mind in, deep enough to suck her thoughts from one crystalline plane on its surface to another, and finally freeing her as it opened its mouth of razor-sharp teeth: “I can’t do nothin’ until you come, honey. You ready?”

Faith sucked in her breath and smiled faintly. It was a long way home.