Joy Williams: 99 Stories of God

Hang more in the world of men, they begged Him.

But the Lord said He was lonely there.

He was in the chapel, waiting. He was a little early.

A man came in, genuflected carelessly before the altar, and sat down beside him. “How’s it going?” he said.

“My mother has to do something in the undercroft,” the boy said. “She’ll be up shortly.”

“You know that’s just the basement,” the man said, “another word for basement .”

“I’m here for the blessing of the backpacks. It’s the blessing of the backpacks today.”

The man grinned. “What a lovely idea. Reverend Margaret has the loveliest ideas. What’s in your backpack?”

“Nothing. Some pencils.”

“Gum.”

“Gum too,” he admitted.

“My name’s Joe,” the man said. “You ever hear the song?”

Hello! My name is Joe.

And I work at the button factory!

I have a house and a dog and a family!

One day my boss came to me.

He said: Joe! Are you busy?

I said No!

He said …

“I don’t know it,” the boy said.

“What’s your name?”

“Tobias.”

“You ever seen the painting Tobias and the Three Archangels ? Botticini. Fifteenth century. Listen, I want to tell you something, because this blessing of the backpacks or whatever silliness Margaret has dreamed up will happen any minute. I want to tell you: Christ and Jesus were separate souls. Okay?”

“I guess,” Tobias said.

“Jesus prepared his physical body to receive Christ, and at a certain point in his life vacated this body so as to allow Christ to take it over and preach to the world. Christ was such a highly evolved soul that it would have been impossible for him to have incarnated as a baby, and even if he could have done so, it would have been a waste of precious time to have to go through childhood.”

“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t going into just the second grade,” Tobias said.

“Exactly! Childhood is unnecessary for certain individuals.”

Joe patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe I’ll see you around,” he said. “Maybe we’ll talk again.” He went out just as a half a dozen children were coming in, through the big red doors. Tobias knew them and all their pretty, friendly mothers. His own mother appeared then, too, along with the Reverend Margaret.

I wish I was going into the fourth grade, Tobias thought.

Jesus spoke in Aramaic, but His sayings were transcribed in Greek, a generation after His time on earth. Aramaic and Greek are different languages. Very different. The differences are profound. This fact cannot be emphasized enough.

But none of Jesus’s teachings were written down in Aramaic.

She was reading a review of a book about the life of Houdini. No one knew how he had made the elephant disappear. She was at that moment in the review where this was discussed for the first time. It was in 1918. The elephant’s name was Jennie, not with a Y . She thought she might buy this book, but even then she would not learn how Houdini had made Jennie disappear, because it simply was not known. And no illusionist had managed to reproduce the trick or even put forth a plausible explanation of how it had been accomplished.

She was reading a broadside that reviewed a number of books. The reviews were extremely intelligent and gracefully presented. She read about a cluster of works by Thomas Bernhard, the cranky genius of Austrian literature, works that had just been translated into English. She doubted that she would buy these books. She learned that he always referred to his lifelong companion, Hedwig Stavianicek, as his “aunt.” She was thirty-seven years older than Bernhard. She couldn’t imagine that she had been his lifelong companion for long.

She had had a fever for several days and she was loafing around, drinking fluids and reading. With her fever, the act of reading became ever stranger to her. First the words were solid, sternly limiting her perception of them to what she already knew. Then they became more frighteningly expansive, tapping into twisting arteries of memory. Then they became transparent, rendering them invisible.

She liked her fevers. They brought her information she could not express to others.

Then she thought that the gangster phrase If I told you, I’d have to kill you came directly from the Gnostic Book of Thomas.

Five days before his death on May 16, 1958, the writer and film critic James Agee wrote a letter to his beloved longtime correspondent the Reverend James Harold Flye. The letter, never mailed, speaks of a film Agee wished to make concerning elephants.

He was haunted by the cruel death of a circus elephant in Tennessee in 1916. The elephant had gone berserk and killed three men. It was decided that she should be hung, and thousands of people turned out for the execution. She was strung to a railroad derrick and, after several hours, died.

This would be the basis for the film, but he also envisioned the choreographer George Balanchine training a troupe of elephants in a corps de ballet who perform their duties to the music of Stravinsky while a crowd roars with laughter. So humiliated are the elephants that they later set themselves ablaze, whereupon “their huge souls, light as clouds, settle like doves, in the great secret cemetery back in Africa.”

Agee never explained how he would go about making such a film.

My father’s fourth wife lived the long death, as they say. In other words, she became mad as a hatter while still quite young. She believed my father, a novelist, had quite imagined every aspect of her life before they met and there was nothing for her to do other than thwart this unholy talent and become brutishly mad, quite unlike the gracious creature he had imagined. She lived in soiled pajamas, collected rocks, and drank staggeringly inventive gin concoctions all day long.

My father had imagined his other wives as well, even my mother, but rather than take such dramatic measures to command their own fate, they had simply divorced him. The fourth wife, however, found her own way and stuck with it. Our days are as grass and our years as a tale that is told, she quite rightly believed.

She just did not want her tale to be my father’s.

He could have written another novel, of course — he was always writing — in which a fourth young wife became quite mad, but this would be quite after the fact, she was clever enough to realize, and quite irrelevant.

There was a famous writer who had a house on the coast. He was entertaining another writer for the weekend, this one less well known, but nonetheless with a name that was recognized by many. A third writer, whose husband had died unexpectedly only two days before, had also been invited for the evening. This was done at the last minute, an act of graciousness, as the woman was on her way south, on a trip she and her husband had long intended.

This writer was the least famous of the three. People couldn’t get a handle on her stuff.

The famous writer and his wife made fish baked in salt for supper. There were many bottles of wine. The third writer’s husband was remembered off and on, fondly.

There was a guest house on the property, and she was invited to spend the night there. Her dog, however, would have to stay in a kennel that was also on the acreage. Or, if she preferred, her car. But not in the guest house.