Jones gave no sign. He took Faith’s outstretched hand and pumped it until Maxwell frowned with impatience. “My pleasure, Mrs. Maxwell,” Jones said, grinning. Faith searched his face for recognition. Could he recognize her through IT? He winked. She almost fainted.
Maxwell cleared his throat. “Shall we get down to business?” He removed his sports coat and flung it across a rocking chair against the wall. “We can talk over dinner”—turning to Faith, “it’s ready, isn’t it?”
Faith quickly pulled her thoughts together. “It’s on the table. ”
“Ummgh,” Maxwell grunted, pleased but putting on a great show of indifference. Then he led Jones into the dining room. It had a French Provincial feeling — yellow wallpaper with a brown motif, checked curtains, wire mesh in the cupboard doors, and French Provincial pottery, all designed to complement Faith’s complexion. The light there was brighter than elsewhere in the apartment. Or so it seemed to Faith. She had put her best tablecloth, the one rich and green and pleated on its border, on their circular dining-room table. The details of the room stood out for her, and suddenly she felt awkward, as if her arms and legs were lead beams swinging through a room of glass. She moved carefully behind them, silent and staying in her place, recognizing Jones’s back as the image she’d seen in the Thaumaturgic Mirror. He seemed somewhat taller, more muscular than before, with bulging veins that moved under the skin on his forearms and neck like snakes. His clothes were simple — matching blue work shirt and trousers, low-cut leather boots the color of wood bark but a bit the worse for wear, and a brown corduroy jacket which she hung in the front closet. Anyone who dressed so simply, who disregarded his exterior, had to be rich inside, as complex and intricate as an old gold watch.
“As you know, there’s an awful lot riding on this new feature,” Maxwell said. He crossed his thin arms on the table, his head hunched between his shoulders as he played with his spoon. “I’ll need to know as much about your background as I can to write a sidebar for the first column. ”
Jones sat quietly, his big hands folded in his lap. His face was linear and lean-jawed. His hair, dark and moderately trimmed, was thinning on top. Faith watched him, almost able to hear the words forming in his mind before he spoke. “What do you want to know?”
“The Five W’s,” Maxwell said. “Who, What, Where — you know.”
Jones leaned back and cracked his knuckles, then sipped at his coffee cup to wet his lips. “I grew up in Hatten County, Georgia,” he said. “If a man’s from Hatten County, he’ll usually say so right away. If he isn’t,” Jones chuckled, “you shouldn’t embarrass him by asking.”
Maxwell frowned, bending his spoon out of shape, then back again. “Yeah. Right. What brought you to Chicago?”
Sighing, Jones looked at Faith. “Work, mainly.” He drew his lips back over two rows of square teeth. “All the mills and factories back home were layin’ people off. My folks had a stretch of good bottom land handed down through the family since Reconstruction, but hit started goin’ dry in the forties. Pa used to say hit was so bad, if he sold hit to a church, the congregation would have to fertilize the whole place just to raise a prayer. And the creek that run ’cross hit got so parched I once counted ’bout a hundred bullfrogs that never learned how to swim.” Jones laughed and slapped his knee. “Heh, heh, talk ’bout hard times, buddy!”
Faith hid her hands under the table. They were trembling.
“What kind of work did you find?”—Maxwell.
“I couldn’t find a thing. Nothin’! Mind you, I ain’t crazy ’bout work — hit didn’t scare me none. I can lay down beside the biggest chore you ever seen and fall right asleep. Heh heh. But I was hungry — so hungry my stomach musta thought my throat’d been cut. I looked for months.” He glanced at Maxwell, his eyes wide with humor. “Things got so bad at the flophouse where I was stayin’on the West Side that the rats were too weak to run or hide when somebody cut on the lights. And you could bile me for a sea horse if I wouldn’t rather crawl into a nest o’ wildcats, heels foremost, ’fore I did something like go on relief or start beggin’.” Jones started laughing again — it sounded like a hyena imitating a man. Faith smiled, then bit her lip when she saw Maxwell’s incredulous eyes.
“What did they convict you for?” Maxwell demanded irritably.
“Stealin’,” Jones said. “I don’t reckon hit was really stealin’, though. I never took more than what I could use for food, rent, and a new canvas.” As he ate, Jones wagged his fork in the air reflectively, his jaws packed like a beaver’s. “I don’t suppose they would have caught me if hit wasn’t for that. I had hit all figured out — I needed twenty dollars a week to live on, not a penny mo’ nor less. So on Saturdays, if I couldn’t win the money in a game of chance, I’d relieve somebody of exactly that amount. I stopped a guy down on Fullerton Avenue, liberated his wallet, and was in the wind. When I checked the wallet hit had twenty-five dollars in hit. Imagine! So I looked up his address — a Mr. Luther Langford, I believe — and took the five dollars back. ”
“That’s when they caught you?” Faith said.
Jones nodded. “A patrol car pulled up quicker nor a ’gator can chew a pup after I’d dropped that five-dollar bill in the mailbox!”
None of this sat well with Maxwell. He pulled at his left sock, which kept slipping down his leg, and ate carelessly, too quickly and with such huge mouthfuls that meat caught in his throat and made him cough. That upset his breathing. He hurried to the bedroom, found his spare respirator, and returned weakly to the dining room, wiping his eyes. “You aren’t at all sorry for what you did?” he said.
“Sho am,” Jones drawled. “That twenty dollars woulda doubled the ante in the game back at the flophouse if I coulda made hit back in time.”
Maxwell went silent, smoking a strange new product he’d found in a dime store. Asthma Cigarettes. They were filterless, twice the size of regular cigarettes in diameter, and filled with a green tobacco that smelled like hay. He smoked, coughed, but kept going until he’d finished three in a row. Faith opened the window to clear out the room and cleaned off the table as Maxwell and Jones withdrew into the living room. In the kitchen, seated at the table with a fresh martini, she held her breath to catch snatches of dialogue drifting through the hall with Maxwell’s green smoke. Jones’s voice, its tone and timbre, brought back, not with its words but its ring, that lost life in Georgia. It lifted her thoughts back to the time he’d saved her life. She’d be dead, she was certain, if Alpha Omega Jones hadn’t outfoxed Old Man Cragg.
(It was summer, one of those hot, sweltering days when your lips were so dry they cracked from the heat. Jones suggested they steal into Old Man Cragg’s east orchard and carry away a few peaches from his tree. She’d objected violently, because Cragg was second in awesomeness only to Big Todd. Children, he was so mean he gave his kids ten cents each every night if they skipped dinner, stole it from them during the night, and whopped ’em the next morning for losing it. Mean? Why, he was so mean and lowdown he had to reach up to touch bottom; he was so black his wife, Elsie, had to throw a sheet over his head so the sun could rise. No, you didn’t mess with Cragg. Or his peaches. Faith demurred, but Alpha dragged her off to Cragg’s farm. He rubbed chimney soot over their arms and legs and faces so they could sneak around invisibly at night. Then he shinnied up one of Cragg’s trees and started tossing ripe peaches down into a basket while Faith kept watch. By and by, she felt something behind her.
A voice, like thunder, exploded. “You children better be baptized, ’cause I got yo’ contracts fo’ West Hell right heah!”
Alpha fell from the tree. He and Faith looked up and saw possibly the biggest man in the world — huge, and so dark lightning bugs flew around his head thinking it was midnight. He reached out to them with hands as big around as wheels on a hay wagon.
“You better not!” Alpha shouted.
“I better what?” Cragg boomed. “Boy, when I’m through, there’ll be six men on either side of you; there won’t be enough marrow in yo’ bones to fill a thimble!”
Faith hid her face. She wanted to eat one of those peaches if this, indeed, was the end. But her throat was solid. It was hard to breathe.
“I’ll take you on,” Alpha said, “but you’ve got to let me pray first—”
Cragg grunted, and rolled up his worksleeves. “Tha’s a good thought — you pray real good.”
Still on his knees, Alpha raised his sooty hands, closed his eyes, and started rapping. “O God, you know I didn’t mean to kill Stackalee and High John the Conqueror and John Henry, and Toledo Slim and Peg-Leg Willy, but they touched me and got a douse of this here terrible disease. You know that I told John Brown and Rip Bailey that this thing I got is terminal, that hit starts yo’ skin to peelin’ like old paint, and you start swellin’ up with horrible boils and hit drives you mad and turns one half of your brain to pure crystal and the other half to water. You know I told them about hit before they touched me, Lord, jes like I’m tellin’ this man Cragg who’s gonna touch me and get hit and die all black and bloated in his bed like alla my relatives did. Don’t blame me, Lord, if he turns to ashes even ’fore Oscar Lee Jackson can get his death wagon out to Cragg’s house, or if his widow-woman and po’ hungry kids come down with hit, too. ”
Alpha opened his eyes and stood up. He stretched out his sooty arms and started walking toward Cragg. Who trembled, spun on his heels, and ran like hell. Faith gave Alpha a big sooty kiss, dug into the peaches, and ate herself sick.)
She left the kitchen table and hurried to the front room, where she’d heard the squeak of chair legs against the floor. Maxwell had Jones’s coat, and was walking with him to the front door.
“. Next Friday, then?” Maxwell said.
“Sho. We can start any time you like.” Jones saw Faith and stuck out his hand again. “Mrs. Maxwell, that sho nuff was one of the most bodacious and tetotaciously pleasing meals ever to cross my lips.”
“Thank you.” She stepped back dizzily, closing the hand into which Alpha had pressed a folded note. Maxwell said, “I’ll be back soon,” and escorted Jones out the door. Faith, when she was certain they were gone, opened the note: Let me see you tomorrow. He gave the time and place. She hid the note in her brassière and paced the apartment for an hour. Jones was exactly Maxwell’s opposite. Which made him identical to her. That broke Big Todd’s maxim about marriage, but she knew she didn’t care. Not one whit.
At ten, the front door flew open, and Maxwell came in. “It’s not going to work,” he said. He dropped his wig on the diningroom table on his way to the kitchen, then returned with a vodka and tonic. “The man’s all wrong for this column!”
“What?” Faith’s left hand went to her breast where she pressed down the wad of paper in her bra.
Maxwell settled into an armchair and kicked off his shoes. “I said Jones isn’t right for the column. He’s not what I visualized for it. He’s not angry enough — he doesn’t show enough Will Power.” He took a drink, gulped, and glanced up at Faith. “You can tell a man by that. You heard that bullshit he was babbling over dinner, didn’t you? Je-sus!”
Faith sat down on the arm of the chair, looking straight down at Maxwell’s bald head. “He has to be mad?”
“Damn right he’s got to be mad! He’s got to be representative of all the rage a prisoner feels, all the frustration and bitterness.” He pressed his cool glass to his forehead and rolled it from his left temple to his right, closed his eyes, and muttered, “Jones is too at peace with himself and the world. You’d think he’d lived in a fairy tale, or something — not a prison. ”
Faith slid off the arm of the chair to sit on a cricket stool in front of him. She rested her head in her hands, looking up. “What’re you going to do?”
Maxwell groaned. “My hands are tied. I’ve got to select the right mouthpiece for the column. Jones is on probation, and he’s broken it already! They’re supposed to report all their earnings, new possessions, change of addresses, and things like that every month the Lord brings. Jones hasn’t even called his parole officer once since he was released.” Maxwell rubbed his eyes sleepily and stood up, stretching his arms. “I’ll bet that they’ll have him back behind bars in two weeks. I’ll bet he hasn’t enough Will Power to stay free a month!” Unbuttoning his shirt, he wagged his head from side to side. “I’ll have to find myself another parolee.”
Faith was on her feet, pulling at her fingers. “We won’t see him again?”
Maxwell turned down the foldaway section of the living-room couch, dropped his trousers in the middle of the floor, and lay down. “I hope not!”
Faith slept not a wink all night. As she lay alone in her bedroom, her mind worked like machinery, a constantly churning instrument that focused upon Alpha Omega Jones, moving around her memories of him like a lilting jazz improvisation, children — inspecting first this side, then that, reviewing him again and again from every possible perspective until her memories, like music, died away. She jumped out of bed when the warm sunlight of morning fell across her face, and fixed Maxwell’s breakfast before he awoke. Maxwell, after stumbling into the bathroom in his sweaty shorts, came into the kitchen wearing his bathrobe, scratching his head.
“Damn,” he whistled. “How come you’re so happy this morning? What’d I do?”
She laughed. It was true; she hadn’t been so happy in months. Her sleepless night had not left a mark on her beyond the pillow wrinkles now fading from the right side of her face. Too, there was lint from the bed linen in her hair. But she was wide awake, her irises the size of saucers. A healthy, ruddy coloring like that caused by sexual excitement spread across her cheeks. She moved about the kitchen so lightly on her feet that Maxwell was overcome. He grabbed her and kissed her neck.
“Am I still your good thing?” he asked, his voice hoarse before his first cup of coffee.
“Uh huh.”
“And maybe,” he offered timidly, “maybe we can still make it, eh?”
“Yes — maybe,” Faith said, and she broke away from him to turn on the burner beneath a frying pan of bacon. Maxwell ate quickly, not quite awake, and — it was true — he looked somewhat wolfish at the table. His eyes were pink, his skin still blotched from sleep. He dressed and kissed her at the door. When he was gone, Faith took a quick cold shower, dressed, and started for the elevator. She stopped there, then hurried back to the apartment, where she pricked her left forefinger with a sewing needle and used the needle to write Jones’s full name backward in blood on the reverse side of his note. To add to her allurement she rubbed a film of rice powder along her breasts.
She rode the subway to his address in the lower sixties, reciting Psalms 45 and 46 to herself until she arrived. His neighborhood made her nauseous. Old brownstones with shattered windows, shattered doors, and shattered steps leaned forward as if about to fall into the street; clouds of yellow smoke rolled through the air from a chemical factory on the corner and settled on the cobblestones of the street as fine powder. She saw the heads of rats pushing through small piles of garbage in an alley, an old man still asleep under a blanket of newspapers—The Sentry—on the corner near a liquor store, and abandoned cars all along the curb. Down the street, whirling in a circle like a dervish, was a mad dog chasing its short tail, white foam like meerschaum filling up its mouth. Faith checked the address on her note again, anxious, smudging the paper with moisture from her fingers. Then she saw it clearly: the scene in the Swamp Woman’s Thaumaturgic Mirror — this had been it. She crossed the street to a basement apartment on the corner, descended the steps, and knocked on an unpainted door, then waited, remembering that, in truth, there was no way to know with certainty if love and all she longed to believe about Alpha were real. Gestures told you nothing, nor did notes pressed into your palm by an old lover from home. It struck her that she’d been silly and was about to be made a fool. At the second she started to turn, to forget this affair entirely, the door opened, and Jones stood before her in a pair of baggy gray pants and a wrinkled shirt open to his navel. He smiled. Features on a manikin. She parted her lips to speak, then simply licked them, unable to move as she wanted, unable to toss her arms around his neck. How do you know he loves you? Faith swallowed, a bit loud. She struggled for a moment, deep inside her head, then threw her arms around him. She listened, her ear to his chest, to his heart, and felt everything would be all right. She was certain. That was all.
Jones looked down at her and chuckled deep in his throat. “We’d better stop, or your father’ll whop my tail like he use to.”
“Huhn?” Faith allowed him to direct her inside his single-room apartment. “I don’t understand. ”
“Coffee?” he asked.
Faith declined. She took a seat on the corner of his bed — just a mattress, really, lying flat with half its white stuffings falling to the floor. Jones walked barefoot to a hot plate across the room and started water boiling for instant coffee. A few groceries — unopened cans of butter beans, corn and cabbage, bottles of cheap wine and unopened boxes of instant potatoes — were stacked along the eastern wall behind a hot plate and beside a small refrigerator. His room reminded her of her own at the hotel: bare wooden floorboards with splinters sticking up like sharp needles, a low ceiling with a naked bulb in its center, and dingy walls. But the walls were covered in places with preliminary charcoal sketches. Half-finished canvases lay about and crushed tubes of paint were underfoot, their contents worked into the texture of the floor. The room had a feeling of presence and warmth that glowed behind Jones’s poverty. No — that word was wrong. It revealed not poverty but a sort of voluntary retreat from the world, similar to the atmosphere of a treehouse or a cave where children hide from their parents and talk about girls (or boys) and terrify one another with ghost stories. Beside it, her apartment was spiritual slum. Relaxing, she noticed an in-progress painting in the center of the room; she remembered the face well: the Swamp Woman.
Jones poured his coffee into a tin cup, which he held in both hands, and sat down beside her on the mattress. Closer to her now, he seemed slimmer, shorter, and not at all like Big Todd. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and she could see a tattoo around his neck with this legend beneath it: Cut on dotted line.
“Your daddy used to wallop me whenever I got funny with you, remember?” he said.
Faith searched her memory. She found nothing there. “Daddy was dead when I first met you. ”
“He was dead all right,” Jones laughed, “but his ghost could exfluncticate any man alive. Believe it.” He sipped at his coffee, set it down, and rubbed his arms. “You ’member that time on your porch when I first run my hand down the front of your dress? And I flew outta my chair and ran off down the field, you remember?”
It was coming back. Slowly she recalled being seated with him on the wide farmhouse porch, late at night after Lavidia had gone to bed. The heaviness of the air returned to her. It was thick with humidity and smelled of rain after a short-lived sprinkle that left gleaming pools of water along the steps of the porch. She remembered the heavy moonlight floating in those puddles beyond the yard, the fluffy drifting balls of fur from pussy-willow trees that moved around their heads like fairies, or daydreams. They had watched the rain, enjoying each other too much, had been driven closer together by the thunder, and then the stillness, the heat and oppression of night. They ran out of talk. Jones wiggled closer to her on the top step of the porch, put his arm around her waist, and waited for her reaction. She could do nothing. She’d wanted him there, that close. Closer. But what of her reputation and pride? The trees were watching her, the summer moon and animals hidden out there in the bushes and trees. They saw her sit without protest as he dropped his hand inside her dress. They were jealous. She could feel it, because she felt she belonged to their world and not that of men, because she’d walked among them, her feet slipping on moonflower vines, her ears hearing and loving every birdsong of morning. They might never forgive her. But she let Jones have his way until he’d been hurled away from her. He pitched forward off the porch and into the mud, where his head crashed and his arms flew out wild. Without a word, he’d taken off, stumbling through the yard, falling flat on his face, and eventually vanishing from sight.
“That was awful strange,” Faith said. She found she could not look at him, especially into his eyes. It involved too much. “I thought maybe you had a nervous condition, and had an attack or something. That’s why I never asked about it.”
Jones slapped his knee. “Hit was your old man! Soon as I lay my hand on you, he came along with a haymaker hot enough to set the Mississippi on fire.” He imitated the move with his own fist, hitting his jaw, and fell back on the mattress. “He planted hit dead on my chin. Believe hit! I looked up from the floor, and there he was — all big and black and bristlin’ mad, standin’ between us on the steps. So I started travelin’. I ain’t use to fightin’ haints — no sir! I’ve fought some strange things in my time, but I wanted to be ready for him, to have hit out with him in the open. ”
“It was Daddy?” Faith shook her head and stared at the floor. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Swear fo’ God,” Jones said, and he crossed himself once. “So I went out to the fields when I left you, and waited for him. Sho ’nuff, he came floatin’ in toward me on the air. Like smoke. I swung at him, but my hand went right through his chest. Then he slapped me upside my haid, and stood over me, shoutin’, ‘You mess with my baby ’gain, and I’ll whop yo’ tail clean into next week! Well, I figured I couldn’t mess with nothin’ like that. But I had to see you again, right?”
“Yes,” Faith said. She pulled her lower lip, kneading it between her finger and thumb. He was lying — she could smell it (lies smell sweet, children: somewhat like a fresh biscuit), but she said, “That does sound like Daddy—”
“Yep,” Jones continued after finishing his coffee, “so I ran straight down to the swamps, and looked up that old witcher ’ooman.”
Faith rose and went to the half-finished oil portrait. The outline of the Swamp Woman’s head dominated the center of the picture; her yellow eye was shut tight, the green one shone as bright as jade. Faith turned to Jones, her head pounding with pressure.
I didn’t have nothin’ ’gainst your daddy,” Jones said, “but he was standin’ in my way. You know how fathers are — they don’t think nobody’s good enough for their daughters. Anyway, the witcher ’ooman heard me out, and gave me somethin’ to overcome anybody that got in my way. I think I still got hit.”
“A mojo?” Faith said.
“Just a minute—” Jones stood up and fumbled for the frayed billfold in his hip pocket; from it he produced a square strip of white cloth bearing red and black letters:
A I K N
P R M C
D H T R
M M P M
“She wrote it for me during the full moon,” he said, “and she told me to go straight to the graveyard where your daddy was buried — where his haint would be waitin’ for me to have hit out once and for all. ”
Faith hurried to the mattress where Jones had sat down again, picking at his toenails. “What happened then?”
“Oh, I got there at ’bout midnight. Hit was so dark I couldn’t make out none of the headstones. I kept hearing noises, too. Laughter. They scared me. I wasn’t but twelve years old then. This big wind came up, then a mighty grist of rain — noises flew up from the ground all around me, like chains were rattlin’ somewhere. Honey, I wanted to run home. Believe hit. But you had my nose wide open. I woulda wrestled with the Devil and walked a hundred miles jes to keep on seein’ you. Sho! But jes when I thought I couldn’t stand hit no longer, when I thought my blood was ’bout ready to turn to water, I heard another sound behind me, turned around shakin’, and saw your daddy behind me — whiter all over than if he’d jumped in a vat of milk, and twice the size he was when he was livin’. ‘You ain’t give up yet?’ he said. The rain started ’gain, and hit got into my eyes. I could hardly see, and my legs and arms were as stiff as wood. I shouted, ‘No!’ and then he came at me, his big fists flyin’ through the air. I shouted what the witcher ’ooman told me to: As the eternal fires of West Hell burn, let my adversary twist and turn! And he stopped jes short of hittin’ me, his eyes popped open, and he started turnin’ around in circles and screamin’—”
“He did?” Faith cried. “Daddy was hurt?”
“Naw, he wasn’t hurt — jes caught in that old ’ooman’s magic spell. ‘Do you give up?’ I said, and he cried, ‘Naw!’ But I knew he had, and was jes too damn proud to admit hit.” Jones looked up cautiously and said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Yes, yes, I do,” Faith said. But she thought: Big Todd’s grave was not in a cemetery but behind their farmhouse — Alpha had lied. But he’d lied well.
“So,” Jones continued, “when he stopped turnin’ he fell down, and started tearin’ tufts of graveyard grass up with his fists. He shook his head, looked up at me real peaceful-like, and said, ‘Ain’t nobody beat me in life or death, and anybody who come as close as you did deserves to have my daughter.’ Then he started laughin’, and ’fore I could say ’nother word he was gone.”
Faith fought a sinking feeling in her solar plexus and a chill that seemed to be not on her skin but beneath it. She felt like a bird ensorceled by the eyes of a cat, and hung on Jones’s slow, melodious speech. “He really said that?”
Jones nodded. Said: “Believe hit. I swore that nothin’ was gonna keep Alpha Jones from his honey if I could help hit, not even dead folks. I didn’t count on your momma, though.” He whistled through his square teeth. “Live folks can be a lot scarier than dead folks sometimes. ”
Faith stood up, returning to the painting of the werewitch, allowing her thoughts to move along its surface. Liar! she thought. But it stood to reason that if Todd approved of anyone courting her, it would have to be a storyteller like himself. Someone strong, a giant, a Great Fool among frightened ones, a weaver of words and delicious little lies to woo other people and live by. She started, but remained still. Jones had come up behind her, barefoot and silent, and folded his forearms around her waist.
“Hang me up for bear meat if I ain’t been empty inside without you, Faith. ”
She hung her head, fighting the warm feeling that sprang between her skin and his. Who else could say something as silly as that — bear meat, indeed! — and make you believe in it? Like Todd, he was just an overgrown boy — long, apelike arms and hard black flesh hiding a mind that could create fabulous lies and believe in them. And, though it was wrong, she believed in them too. “Alpha, I’m married. I’ve been married for a year, and Isaac is good to me. ” She stopped, afraid to pursue that last thought any further. “It would be a sin—”
“Shoot! Life is short, sweetheart — you got to seize the day. Hit’d be a sin not to.” He placed his rough face next to hers. “I wouldn’t bet a huckleberry to a persimmon if you ain’t the only gal that ever meant somethin’ to me. ”
“Alpha, please—” She couldn’t think. “Please—”
“I know you’ve seen lots of ripstavers since you knew me, but I’ll be shot if I didn’t pray like a horse to cross paths with you again. Without you I’d be as dead as a catfish on a sandbank.”
Jones tasted the inside of her mouth, and she his: warm, as she’d expected, faintly sweet, as she’d hoped. Then she was weightless in his arms, floating toward the soiled mattress. The thought of making love disturbed her. It had never worked out before. It had to be an exchange, give and take. With Arnold Tippis, Faith had felt the energy released between them stifled in this natural expression; rather, it had all come one way — she had been unreal to him, a thing in which to violently unload that energy, that tension Dr. Lynch spoke of; and Crowell had been hardly better with his hasty mechanical approach to the matter. Maxwell, before they’d ended sex together and he moved to sleep on the sofa, had wanted passively to receive that energy, to be acted upon like soft clay. And with all the others — sheer horror. Yet now as Jones’s shadow fell across her it was somehow different; the energy was released, displaced, and sent shuddering back and forth between them, in the desired exchange. Alpha projected the image of himself in her, as she did within him until they seemed to exist, not as two people, but one. Or, stranger still, as nothing. It was crazy, but she thought of high-school math at the moment their images melted, drifted, and were transformed; she thought of herself, Faith Cross, as one lonely pole in the universe — FC, and Jones as another — AOH with he a + and she a — when their rhythm touched its telos:
AOH: FC
Stillness.
Beside him, her pulse beats slipped slowly beneath his own, her chest fell as his rose, rose as his fell, and Faith refound just a bit of the enchantment of her childhood in being a woman. There was a twilight feeling like that of sleep in her body; and in her mind — the frieze of a frost-sprinkled earth, naked brown tamaracks twisting into a sky of milk-white clouds. Jones, lying on his back, closed his eyes sleepily, flung his left wrist across his brow, and sang,
“Here’s to hit, the birds do hit,
The bees do hit, too, and die;
Dogs do hit and get hung to hit,
So why not you and I?”
By and by he rose, pulled on his trousers, and started preparing dinner. He spread a tablecloth (really a large rag made from sewn-together work shirts) on the bare floor beside the bed, and within a few hours had it covered with plates of collard greens and baked bread. As they ate, Faith told Jones of her search, its inception, its untimely end. For once her tale did not fall on deaf ears. As she unraveled it, he ate faster, as though it made him hungrier, and when she brought everything up to date, he reached across the tablecloth and held both her hands in his own.
“Things ain’t hardly ever like they seem — not even me,” he said. “But they usually come out for the best.” The muscles in his face grew slack, his eyes calm. He told a story:
When Alpha Omega Jones was passing through South Carolina on his way North, he ran short on money and stopped to work on a tenant farm. The bossman looked him over, said, “You’re pretty healthy lookin’—how long you wanna work?”
“Just a week,” Jones said.
And he signed up for just that long. Seven days later, he went to draw his pay. The bossman was in his shack near the fields where he employed about fifty men in picking cotton. He scanned his books and shook his head. “Ah been feedin’ you for ’bout a week,” he said, “and I figure that you et up alla your salary plus ’bout ten dollars mo’.” He spread his hands, palms up, and grinned. “You’ve got to give me another week’s work.”
Since it was all there on paper and looked official, Jones did not object. He went back out into the sun, back to his place in the fields, not suspecting anything until an old Negro named Junior collapsed right beside him. Jones propped Junior up. The old man’s throat rattled. He said, “You better run, boy. You’d better run hard, and hide y’self! That man’s kept me here for five years—” And he died. Another worker stood beside Jones, shivering. “Junior’s the seventh one to die this month. You can’t run ’way. The bossman’s got a weak heart, but he comes after you anyway, with a gun and a whip and alla his dogs. He whops you, and if you run ’way, he won’t give you no food.”
The owner of the fields charged out of his shack and stopped beside them. He kicked Junior with the heel of his boot, rolling him over to see if he was dead. He scowled, wiped his brow with a red handkerchief, and thought for a minute. He turned to Jones. “Bury him right here.”
“I can’t do no mo’ work,” Jones said. “I got psychic powers.” He bugged his eyes at the bossman and placed the tips of his fingers to his dark brow. “Ever now and then these spells come over me — I get visions, I get weak and see through things, and can’t do a lick of work.”
The bossman produced his whip, raised it, then looked curiously at Jones. He dropped the whip and pried open Jones’s mouth to look inside. “You got blue gums,” he muttered to himself. “Hit is possible. Blue-gum nigguhs can do ’bout anything when it comes to magic.” Then his tiny blue eyes flashed. “You gotta prove hit to me. Tonight. And if you don’t, I’ll string you up to feed the crows.”
That night, in the worker’s shed, everyone prayed for Jones. They knew he was lying. It occurred to Jones that he was going to die. There’d be more vultures around him than women; they’d pick him dry. The bossman, certain all his workers were locked in the shed, went out and shot a coon, brought it back, and stuffed it into an old burlap sack. He entered the shed, the workers drawing back into the shadows; he dropped the bag at Jones’s feet and grinned.
“If you can tell me what’s in that bag, you and me gonna make a lot of money.” He rubbed his palms together. “Go ’head, we gonna be rich—”
Jones circled around the bag slowly, then reached out to touch it.
“Hands off, Mr. E.S.P.,” the bossman shouted. “You just tell me what’s inside.” He produced his whip and let it swing loose at his side. “You’d better not be lyin’, Jones! If you’re lyin’, I’ll see you swing!”
You would have thought Jones had been walking in the rain, so wet was his clothing. He stared at the bag this way and that, looked at it sideways, and every whichaway, until his eyes hurt. He couldn’t figure it out. Cotton? Shoes? Corn? Finally, he gave up and hung his head.
“Hit looks,” he said, “like you got this heah coon. ”
“What?” the bossman cried. His eyes strained at Jones. “Tha’s hit, tha’s hit!”
Jones looked inside the bag. He felt light as a feather, and turned to point his finger at the boss. “Yep, and I can tell the future, too. I can tell that in ten seconds your heart’s gonna give out like a cheap watch. Believe hit! Hit’s gonna draw into itself real tight like a spring, and BURST!” Jones glanced at the clock on the wall of the shed and counted, “One, two. ” and by the time he got to ten the bossman was stone-cold dead.
Faith was silent for a second. She ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth, then stared at the unfinished portrait on his easel. “But what about the Good Thing? You didn’t tell me what it was—”
Jones laughed. It sounded like barking. “You were good.” He looked down at the tablecloth and their empty plates. “That story was good. The dinner was good. ”
Somehow it made sense. Faith went again to the Swamp Woman’s portrait. She could almost hear it sniggering. The good things were the things of the moment, the things that had been felt and tasted and touched in the past, and might be tasted still. Kujichagulia should have stayed in the village of mountain vales. He should have loved and worked and lived to feel the Good Thing in its small reflections. He might have lived longer that way.
Jones stood up and threw out his arms. Stretched. She watched his easy progress to the portrait of the Swamp Woman. He took his palette from the floor, studied it, and, as he said something to her she would never recall, began squeezing paint from twisted half-empty tubes of alizarin crimson and thalo green. What she felt about Alpha,
It was difficult to say, but she’d sensed something different about him as they made love, his weight smothering her comfortably like the curtain of evening on a weary farmer after a hard day in the fields. Unlike Maxwell and the Alpha of her youth, he had not asked if it was good: he’d changed. She could smell that change in his odor, no longer that of barley and cotton and Hatten County, but of turpentine and paint. Jones walking through the dry weeds on the land behind his father’s farm was not what she saw: but Jones, his broad shoulders framed by the square canvas and his movements strangely ritualistic, merged, so to speak, with the canvas itself; Jones to her seemed no longer a boy. But not a man either. An eternal child, perhaps. Yes. It came through now as clear as the lines in a wet leaf: when he created, he tried to create himself anew. She counted off long minutes while he spent preparing his tools — rusty palette knives, old brushes with cracked stems, waste rags, and a wide range of pigments, cleaning them with all the care a paraplegic might take to clean his added appendages. Thirty minutes. Then he began: the unfinished corners of the Swamp Woman’s face were conjured beneath his brush, as were shadows and illusions of light, depth, and space in images as clear as those she’d seen on the blank pages of Barrett’s Doomsday Book. Every inch of the lush, rolling background, every curve of the hills and angle of the farmhouse, every line of the fields crisscrossed with primitive industry was incredibly precise. But unreal. Jones had no truck with describing the scene. He was, she realized, calling these things, changing, twisting, and transforming them into — what? Order. The scene puzzled her because there could be no doubt that Jones, though he had no reason to be happy in his present situation, was, when he painted, freer, happier, and more whole than anyone she’d seen since she arrived in Chicago.
She was slightly touched, slightly saddened by the truth of it all. There was Jones and his canvas, his object, but through his object, not in spite of it, he seemed to find release: the Good Thing. She envied him, then felt terrible, for since she could not create, how then could she realize her goal?
Almost in spite, she said, “That doesn’t look like her at all. ”
Jones looked over his shoulder, his grin more peevish than warm. “I gave up realism a long time ago — there’s enough of that in movies.” Seeing her jealousy, he smiled. “I started paintin’ in prison. Durin’ the day hit was the only time I was in control of my life. In the mornin’s they led me to the machine shop; in the afternoons I sweated through exercises in the yard, but at night — when I was just a little tired and, therefore, alert — before they’d turn out the lights, I could paint.” Jones’s eyes gleamed. “Hit was the only time in my whole life that I had something to say about what went into, or was taken out of, my world. ”
Completing a black boil on the Swamp Woman’s nose, he dried his brush, then stood back to admire his work. “Hit made bein’ in jail bearable,” he said. “And when your husband convinced them to set me free, hit made bein’ back in the world bearable, too. Hit ain’t easy to explain — I tried to study up on hit to make hit clearer to me, but hit’s still fuzzy.” For a moment, he stroked his jaw and pulled at the wings of his nose; then he gestured at the canvas. “I ain’t even certain what this thing is! A fellah in the joint told me hit was all a trick, that your eyes are fooled by the points and planes and lines. One guy told me hit was supposed to show life as hit is, another said hit wasn’t no good unless hit made him forget alla his problems.” Jones frowned, bending toward the canvas, pointing at it. “A teacher in the joint said what I painted wasn’t as important as how I did hit. A Muslim said my work was worthless unless hit was instrumental to his cause, and another guy — a damned fool! — said all that mattered was my puttin’ alla my feelings in hit, like kids do, and forgettin’ form.” Jones slammed his left fist into his right hand; he glared at the painting, then at Faith. “All I know is that doin’ hit makes me feel good, the way goin’ to Sunday meeting with Reverend Brown never could. In fact, if I paint on Sunday I don’t even feel like I need to go to church!”
Now she knew she didn’t know him. Yet what he said was familiar. She remembered the feeling of sanctity she’d felt when sitting under a tree, catching its hard sap in her hands on the Sundays she’d not gone to church but had felt — though she was miles from Reverend Brown’s moaning bench — wedded with the warmth of the earth and the wind. Art, perhaps, was not confined to a canvas. Not at all.
“See, I don’t call myself an artist,” Jones said, slapping his chest. “That’s a special word. A real artist doesn’t play with colors like I do. He doesn’t have to. It’s as crazy as a coon dog with the tics, but it’s true: a real artist is his own canvas. Me — I still need that empty surface. I ain’t ready yet. But someday, when I’ve got hit all together, there won’t be a dime’s worth of difference between what I’m creatin’ and myself — you won’t be able to separate me from my work by space, or by a difference in materials, because — and I know it sounds crazy — my life’ll be the finished work. ”
Jones rubbed his nose, unconsciously smearing paint along his lips and, equally unaware, licking at it. Faith smiled to herself. He’d probably done that often — taken paint unconsciously on his tongue during the intoxication of creation, swallowed it, and sent it streaming through his system. He was that close to this thing.
“About the only real artist I ever knew was the Swamp Woman,” Jones said. “She didn’t need no paints, or stone, or sheet music, and I swear I believe she could change herself into any damn thing she pleased. No paints, just ideas. That’s what you work on the world with, right? But the trick’s in not comparin’ the ideas to the world to see if they’re right. She compared them to other ideas.” Jones, cleaning his brushes, sighed. “The world’ll never challenge your ideas — only other ideas can do that. ”
Without knowing why, Faith was alarmed. Something in her rebelled against this. She gave it voice. “If you don’t compare what you know, or think you know about the world to it, then how can you ever know if what you think is true?”
Jones blinked stupidly, trying to unravel her question. “I don’t—”
“You have to have something to compare things by, don’t you? The Good Thing — isn’t that the standard?”
He laughed. It did not sound wholly sane.
“There ain’t no standard.”
Faith said no more of this. Like so many ideas she’d been exposed to, she tucked this one away deep in her memory, refusing to dwell on it now and reserving it for those hours when she was alone, aching with wonder, and could inspect it like the contents of a lost purse one finds on the street.
Jones changed the subject. “What’re you going to tell your husband?”
“Isaac?”
“You’ve got more than one?”
Faith wrung her fingers. “What can I do?” The question seemed to pain him as much as it did her. He lit another cigarette, then pulled on his coat. Without speaking for a long time, he walked Faith back to the subway, then stood, his hands in his pockets, beside her on the empty platform.
“Alpha,” she said, “what do I do?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Be thankful that we had a good time — you can’t ask for more than that.” And he kissed her on both eyes as her El train roared up behind them.
Children, sweet Faith rode that subway train for hours, back and forth, from the West Side to the North Shore. Finally, to avoid going to the apartment, she walked around the block several times, paced the street, and looked up the sixteen stories to the lighted front windows where she knew Maxwell sat at his desk, working. Waiting. At the corner, she stopped in a bar, had three Bloody Marys for courage, then headed, coiled up inside, for home. The words were framed and well edited in her mind. “Isaac, this is all wrong! We’ve been lying to each other for too long. I’ve lost something, and I’ve got to get it back. I haven’t been fair with you, but I want to settle all that now. You can have everything: the money, the furniture, everything, but just let me go free.” As she stepped from the elevator to her floor Faith thought of Jones and added more to her confession. “Every life should be a kind of painting. We don’t have that together. We keep slashing the canvas with lies and—”
“Honey, come in here!” She heard him the instant she’d thrown open the door. She entered the front room, her head erect, and found him hunched over his desk, papers scattered over its surface beside empty coffee cups and an ashtray overflowing with ashes and half-smoked cigarettes. His collar was open and stained black along its length with perspiration; both his eyes were red and pinched against the light in the room. Faith sensed her confession slipping from her. It wasn’t going to be easy. Maxwell, despite his faults, despite the deadly chemistry destroying them, could—if she denied herself everything she valued — be loved. She admitted it: I love something about him. But not Maxwell himself. It was some general, vague thing about him that she knew she could love — the same thing she could love in a tree or a rock. Simply, that it was. But even that, no doubt, would be destroyed in the divorce courts. They might like, even slightly love each other when they went in, but the lawyers, to make a case, would have her and Maxwell at each other’s throats. They would part in hatred. It wasn’t right.
“They loved my first column on Jones,” Maxwell said. Though tired, he was ebullient.
“They did?”
“Ragsdale said Jones brought a kind of ‘understanding’ to the prison issue. Don’t look at me! I just wrote down what your home boy said. The editors especially liked the stuff he said about being free in prison — spirit transcending confinement, and all that — like Boethius, Lowell said, whoever that is.” Maxwell beamed. “They’re going to run it next week, and feature it in all The Sentry’s sister papers.”
Faith tried to remember the opening lines of her confession. “Isaac—”
“Sssshl” he said, his left forefinger to his lips. He got up and went to the front closet, flung open its door, and let Faith look in. Side by side on the rack hung an ebony Persian lamb coat with mink trimmings and an ermine evening cloak.
She caught her breath. Maxwell grabbed her hand and led her through the front door, down the quiet hallway, and to the freight elevator. Inside, as they descended, she regained her composure. “Where are we going?”
Maxwell chuckled, then handed her a set of silver car keys. Faith’s hand shook as she looked at them. “These aren’t ours.”
“They’re yours,” he said. Downstairs in the parking lot beneath the apartment, he directed her to a sportscar so new there was hardly dirt on its tires. She knew little of these matters but sensed it was a foreign car, one of a limited line, and expensive. She felt her excitement building. And fought it. A car was merely metal, its chassis designed to cover as pleasingly as possible the ugly instruments, oil, and tubing inside. But the chassis was beautiful — long and sleek and silver like a newly polished bullet. The doors were cleverly concealed to give its surface the effect of uninterrupted steel, or an imporous surface like the robe of Christ, of power hidden beneath the hood.
“I got it all on credit, but the money’s finally coming in,” Maxwell said, “and I figure that it was mainly you, and what you did for me with Lowell, that turned the trick. He was raving about Jones’s column all morning long, and I know it’s not that good!”
She was in a dream — a maple tree still slumbering through a nightmare that would evaporate at dawn.
“Don’t you like it?” Maxwell asked. He sounded hurt; he waited nervously, his hands on his hams.
“Its’ beautiful. ” Faith said.
“I knew you’d like it,” he said. “It cost an easy ten grand, but that’s just the beginning! I’ve been checking on houses out in the suburbs. There’s a ranch house in Evanston, right near the lake. You’ll love it.”
“We can’t afford that,” Faith blurted. “You don’t have the money—”
Maxwell laughed and led her back upstairs, the car keys burning in her hand. “As long as you carry the ball there’s nothing we can’t do together. In a year, maybe two, we’ll have every damn thing we want.”
He went to the refrigerator, mixed them drinks, and returned to the front room to click on the record player. Something old and blue by Billie Holiday came on. Maxwell plopped down beside her on the couch, crossing his legs, feeling good, and nibbling at her ear lobe. Faith sat erect, as stiff as Lavidia in her casket, ice dripping from her drink to the thick carpet on the floor.
“Watch that,” Maxwell said irritably. Then he grew warm again, whispering in her ear, “I knew we were going to make it — things just had to start happening.” His lips curled with deep, trembling laughter. “You’re a great ball-carrier, baby. ”
Faith smiled. Her five was sluggish, her six heavy on her tongue, and she never got to seven at all.