Faith and the Good Thing by Charles Johnson

Author:Charles Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scribner

8

Faith Cross was among the dead living. We hear all the time of the living dead, those restless, glassy-eyed ghouls whispered of in a trembling voice by our white-haired elders—dead, because their bodies move only at the bidding of witchmen working black magic along the bayou, or in the swamps where, in the stench of black soil teeming with floral decay, their zombies wait, tight-lipped and reeking with age, calling for release—living, because their souls, freed like jinn from ancient fire-forged urns, drift between our troubled realm and the netherworld. They wander through our world as elusive as smoke, peering through our windows while we sleep, gibbering. Snickering. They have no names now, so we call them ITs. Yet the elders don’t tell the entire tale. Seldom is it pleasant. There are, as well, the dead living—their bodies grow, move, but their souls, alas! are as still as stone.

Now, Faith Cross was such a one.

Objects have no name. They are ITs, and this is what Faith saw reflected in her bedroom mirror on the day of her first wedding anniversary. IT was portly, IT stared with puffy eyes at her from the smooth glass, IT’s body was well fed, but was losing IT’s health; IT was lugubrious with a gleam along IT’s round limbs, as swollen as a corpse in its seventh day. To tell the truth, Maxwell would have to hug her on the installment plan. Faith, dissatisfied and filled with disgust, turned from the mirror to glare at Maxwell, who had inspired her self-inspection with a smug remark about her widening derrière.

There were chintz draperies and valances framing the old iron bed Maxwell had restored, bracket tables on both sides of the bed, and old-fashioned pillow shams. At the cluttered bedroom dresser, Maxwell tightened a triple knot in his tie, then folded the dimple in with his thumbnail. “Like I said, you’d just better get your fat ass in the kitchen and fix dinner. If I come back here with company and there’s nothing on the table—”

Behind him, Faith frowned at his reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Said, “You’ll what?”

Maxwell sighed and threw up his hands, turning to face her. She could see he was tired, and without his wig he looked old, old. The job, the exigencies of editing, laying out picture pages, and the almost one-year postponement of his prison column were wearing him a bit thin. You could see it in his chin. It seemed to grow smaller day by day.

“I don’t want to argue,” Maxwell said tepidly. He pulled his wig off the dresser, trying to remain calm, and dusted it off. He tugged it on—backward, and Faith bent down, doubled up with laughter. He began to color, and she came to herself, angry again.

“You never want to argue!” she shouted. “Well, I do!” Then she stormed after him as he hurried away from her out into the hallway, his palms pressed over his ears, into the living room. Maxwell’s pickled-pine eighteenth-century

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