99 Stories of God

by Joy Williams

  The heavy knees are passed around.

  Later, Martha tells the story of the tenant in her Palm Beach condominium (willed to Martha by her mother) who committed suicide there by shotgun. It cost two thousand dollars to get the blood out of the carpets.

  The other tenants of the condominium are annoyed at Martha because she didn’t come up right away from Key West to deal with the situation.

  Why didn’t you? I ask.

  Because I didn’t want to, she says, smiling in that way she smiles.

  Moms

  14

  A newborn baby abandoned in the Kenyan capital was saved by a stray dog that apparently carried her across a busy road and through a barbed wire fence to a shed, where the infant was discovered nestled with a litter of puppies, witnesses said.

  The short-haired dog with light brown eyes has no name, residents said.

  Cozy

  15

  His grandmother was reading to him a story by Hans Christian Andersen, the other gloomy Dane, she said. Her memory had become spotty. She really couldn’t remember the tales very well.

  It was bedtime, his mother was off doing god knows what with her husband. It was only the grandmother who strove to maintain the standards of what had once been their station. The child understood there was what was called a Trust, which the grandmother described as “not being grand enough to corrupt you but sufficient to keep you from being entirely at the mercy of your worthless father’s salary.”

  The grandmother didn’t read “The Bog King’s Daughter” or “The Ice Maiden,” for they were too long. She read “The Shirt Collar,” for it was short, then “The Jumping Competition,” for it was shorter. Still he wanted another, for at bedtime he never wanted to go to bed and his thirst for stories seemed unquenchable.

  She commenced reading “The Storks,” which concerned how it came to pass that storks delivered babies to families.

  “There is a pond,” Hans Christian Andersen wrote, “where all the little children lie until the stork comes and gets them for delivery to their parents. There they lie dreaming far more pleasantly than they ever will later in their lives. All parents love and desire such sweet little babes and all children want a little sister or brother. Now we will fly to that pond and bring all the good children who didn’t sing the ugly song a little brother or sister but the bad ones shan’t ever get any.”

  Apparently, some awful child had sung some awful hurtful song about the young storks. The grandmother was so exhausted after all the reading, she scarcely remembered that part.

  “But the one who started it all, that ugly horrible little boy,” screamed all the young storks, “what shall we do with him?” Hans Christian Andersen wrote.

  “In the pond there is a dead child,” the mother stork said. “He has dreamed himself to death. We will bring that baby to the boy and he will cry because we have brought him a dead little brother.”

  The boy and his grandmother looked at one another in horror. As fate would have it, the mother was with child by the father, but several months later the infant arrived stillborn. Of course, it was not the little boy’s fault. He had never sung a cruel and hurtful song to young storks.

  His grandmother, his best and most faithful friend and advocate, lost her mind shortly thereafter, whereas he grew up to be a formidable jurist, quite ruthless and exact in his opinions, none of which in his long career was ever overturned.

  Story

  16

  A child had drowned that August morning, and two women were walking in what the town referred to as the moors but which were technically not moors.

  “It’s so dreadful,” Susan said. “I just can’t get it out of my mind.”

  “In cases like this, my heart always goes out to the other children, the camp counselors, their parents, and the emergency room personnel,” Francine said.

  “It does?” Susan said.

  “The child’s mother is an artist. She shows at the Main Street Gallery. Maybe people will buy her work now.”

  “I prayed for the family, but I really didn’t know what to say.”

  “When I was eighteen I was a camp counselor one summer and I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. None of the counselors did. That’s why I never sent my children to camp.”

  Francine was in her sixties now. Neither woman would ever see sixty-four again.

  “That poor, poor child,” Susan said. “I can’t understand how it happened. There are no dangerous currents there.”

  “I heard that the child’s father’s brother drowned,” Francine said, wincing pleasurably at the strange circumstance. “But he was much older, and it was before this child was even born.”

  “I guess that would make him his uncle,” Susan said vaguely.

  “My Lucy’s best friend—well, she’s not really that good a friend anymore—dated him for a while, the brother. He was sort of a bad apple.”

  “A bad apple?” Susan said.

  “Oh, look at these pearly everlastings! They say not to pick them, but someone will. I’ll just take one.”

  Francine bent toward the flowers, her striking slender neck handsomely exposed. Susan picked up a stone and smacked her with it. There was a sharp, even satisfying, crack.

  There were two funerals but only one trial.

  If Picked or Uprooted These Beautiful Flowers Will Disappear

  17

  Our mother was an alcoholic, though she’d stopped drinking twelve years before, but once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. She’d had all those cakes. She moved around a lot, but wherever she was when the anniversary rolled around she’d get the cake.

  Now she was dying. She’d stopped eating and was skin and bones, lying on a bed in her house, a house she’d said more than once she’d bequeathed to me. The house was the last thing I wanted.

  I’m there with my sister, who is useless in situations like this, though for both of us it was a unique situation, one’s mother dying only once.

  Our mother’s eyes were dark, black almost. Earlier that morning the skin on her arms was bleeding, but then it stopped.

  She’d been quiet for hours, but then she said in this surprisingly strong voice, “Where is the refuge for my bewildered heart?”

  It made me shudder. It was beautiful.

  “Guide me, Good Shepherd,” she said. “Walk with me.”

  My sister had to leave the room. I could hear her crying into the telephone. Who on earth could she be calling, I wondered, and why, at this moment? We know nothing about one another really, though we’re only a year apart.

  Then our mother said in that same strong voice, like a singer’s voice:

  “Tony, I’d like a martini. Make me a martini, honey.”

  But I didn’t, I wouldn’t. I felt she’d regret it. I felt it just wasn’t right.

  Dresser

  18

  The tarpaulin should be 20' x 20'. When not in use, keep it rolled or folded up in a large garbage bag.

  This Is Not a Maze

  19

  When he was a boy, someone’s great-grandfather told him this story about a traveler in thirteenth-century France.

  The traveler met three men wheeling wheelbarrows. He asked in what work they were engaged, and he received from them the following three answers.

  The first said: I toil from sunrise to sunset and all I receive for my labor is a few francs a day.

  The second said: I’m happy enough to wheel this wheelbarrow, for I have not had work for many months and I have a family to feed.

  The third said: I am building Chartres Cathedral.

  But as a boy he had no idea what a chartres cathedral was.

  Perhaps a Kind of Cake?

  20

  Our ferry’s crossing seemed to be taking longer than usual. From what we could remember of previous crossings, this seemed longer to us. Otherwise, matters proceeded in their usual fashion and things appeared to be the same, with none of us entertaining the notion that we hadn’t wanted to come.
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  This Time

  21

  If there is a crash at an American airport, the wreckage is removed immediately so as not to alarm the passengers on the flights that will come after.

  This is not true at Russian airports.

  While at some airports in the major cities, such as Moscow or St. Petersburg, the wreckage might be taken away quite as if nothing had occurred, small runways in Siberia are littered with failed flights, their rusting hulks simply pushed to one side.

  On a recent flight from Nome to Chukotka, the woman in the seat opposite us became quite agitated as we dropped rather peremptorily through the dark skies. She began loudly praying to God for deliverance. My companion remarked that her fervent request was useless, as God had long ago turned his great back on Russia. She might just as well have prayed to the luxurious black sable coat that enveloped her from chin to ankle. We had earlier been half-hypnotized by its beauty, what my companion had dared to describe as the glimmering, endless depths in the fur of so many little animals.

  Coat

  22

  When God abandoned the Aztecs, He turned their chocolate trees into mesquite.

  Some Difference

  23

  Who was that old guy at the wedding? Nobody knew him. He was old and smiling. This was not good. He wore one of those tall, silvery boots that are supposed to assist in the healing of fractured bones. He had long, gray, undistinguished hair.

  Finally, one of the groom’s brothers went up to him and said, Who are you?

  I’m Caradoc, the old man said. Caradoc.

  Well, were you invited? You’re creeping out the invited guests.

  I’m not here to nibble on your fucking salmon, Caradoc said.

  Later, the bride said: We should have let him stay. This is not good. What if he were Jesus or something?

  The divorce cost seventeen times what the wedding had, and the children didn’t turn out all that well either.

  And You Are …

  24

  In the Midwest for a medical procedure, she attended a small Welsh Congregational Church for several months. There were about fifty members, but the number attending each week was much smaller.

  She brought altar flowers for Easter Sunday. Others did as well, tulips and lilies and wildflowers. But her arrangement was from a florist and quite extravagant.

  At the end of the service, one of the parishioners picked up the large and lovely display and commenced to walk away with it.

  Excuse me, she said. I thought the flowers would remain on the altar for the glory of God. Allelujah.

  He said, We have a lot of family coming over for dinner, and I want this as a centerpiece for the table.

  But they’re my gift to the church, she said. And if they’re not going to remain here, I’ll take them home.

  She was bluffing a bit, for she was staying in a hotel while undergoing her procedures.

  The man reluctantly handed over the lilies.

  I hope you continue to enjoy the coffee at our hospitality hour, he said.

  She thought this a most curious thing to say. After she left Iowa, she came across an article in the newspaper about a church poisoning where a parishioner had poured liquid from an old spray can on his potato farm into the percolating coffee. One person died and another suffered damage to the nerves in her feet. The poisoner was quoted as telling his lawyer that he felt someone had made bad coffee for him once, though he could not prove it and he had a tummy ache and was going to get back at them.

  He just obviously overreacted, the lawyer said.

  But this incident happened years before in the state of Ohio, and the church was Lutheran.

  Nid Duw Ond Dim

  (Without God There Is Nothing)

  25

  Churches have pews, and when the congregation falters they have too many pews. They end up in the kindergartens and the music rooms and the covered walkways. They seem to multiply. Fine old oak uncomfortable pews.

  Then they start showing up in bars and finished basements and in mudrooms where people take off their boots and shoes.

  There was a little girl once in a birthday bounce house that wasn’t tied down properly. A freak gust of wind picked it up and sailed it three backyards over, where it killed a beagle eating his supper.

  Nothing happened to the little girl. She was a funny kid anyway. She never showed emotion about anything. But people felt terrible about the dog.

  The young couple whose dog it had been had a pew in their kitchen, but they got rid of it. They replaced it with a bar made from the rear of a ’64 Airstream Globetrotter. It became apparent pretty early on that it wasn’t an actual rear of a Globetrotter but a copy. The neighbors who had felt so sorry for them began thinking they were frivolous and, even more, couldn’t be trusted.

  Veracity

  26

  There was a preacher at her parish whom she simply loathed. He did not preach every Sunday, but on the Sundays he did not he was the celebrant, which was even worse. He droned, he stumbled, he maundered. The grace inherent in the words he uttered became as cold, gray cinders.

  He mauled the Fraction, he trivialized the Great Thanksgiving, he mangled the Absolution and was forever losing his place in the Comforting Words.

  When she died she didn’t want him anywhere near her. Absolutely not in the same room, not even in the same building. With dismay, she thought of him approaching her with his worn sacrament case as she was drawing her last breath.

  Out! she was determined to say. Out! if he presumed to ease her fears in his bumbling fashion.

  She really thought of this quite often, certainly each Sunday when he was either preacher or celebrant.

  Satisfaction

  27

  You don’t get older during the time spent in church, he told us.

  He pushed a shopping cart with a few rags and a bottle of Windex in it.

  We gave him a dollar.

  A Good Reason

  28

  He was reading the fourteenth canto of Dante’s Inferno at 2:30 on Good Friday morning. The readings had begun the evening before. Readers read twenty-seven cantos at half-hour intervals. He liked his slot. It was a good canto—lively—some of them could put you to sleep. His was the third ring of the Seventh Circle, the ring of burning sand which torments those who were violent against God, Art, and Nature.

  There were only half a dozen people there, but he read in a powerful, pleasant voice, stumbling over no word. It was a moving presentation, with the bells and silences. It was a tradition at St. Philip’s.

  When he left, the stars were shining. It was a beautiful night, save for someone in a BMW cutting through the church’s parking lot at high speed to shave forty seconds off of wherever he was going.

  Without reflection, he put out his hand and extended the middle finger.

  Abandon All Hope

  29

  One of the schools I attended as a child arranged for our class to visit a slaughterhouse. This was both to prepare us for what the authorities called the real world as well as to show us what real work rather than intellectual labor sometimes consists of. We were bused to the facility, but there, more sensible heads prevailed, for we were not allowed inside. We neither saw nor heard any pigs, but we did see vast brown lagoons, which we were told were part of the operation, as well as a number of gleaming refrigerated trucks, their engines idling. There was also a smell that we had never been subjected to before.

  Later in the semester, someone brought to our attention a newspaper article concerning a pig who saved a man from drowning. This pig, a pet, was swimming in a lake with its master. There were a number of people playing in the lake at the time, this being a holiday weekend. The pig, noticing a man in distress, swam over to him and by its actions indicated that he should grasp on to the harness which it always wore, being a pet. It then towed the fellow to safety.

  The newspaper, which was a reliable one, maintained this story to be true. Later, the reporter m
ischievously posed this question:

  Would the pig have rescued the man if she had known that he and his companions had just enjoyed a picnic of ham sandwiches?

  The pig’s owner replied that pigs are intelligent, more intelligent than dogs, but they are not omniscient.

  Ignorance

  30

  The Cedar Rapids Historic Preservation Commission is asking the City Council to examine alternatives to razing the one-hundred-year-old smokestack at the former Sinclair slaughterhouse complex.

  The Commission requests additional time for professionals to study the brick chimney and building surround for possible uses.

  It’s really beautifully constructed, a member of the Commission wrote. You just don’t see this quality of construction anymore. And of course, it’s a landmark. It’s the city’s one landmark, really.

  An animal rights group also hopes to save the smokestack from demolition and is collecting signatures and money for the purpose of creating a museum addressing animal cruelty.