Joy Williams - 99 Stories of God

But she wanted the dog to be with her. It was only the third night of her husband’s death. She probably just should have driven off and found a motel somewhere. But it was late. So late.

She didn’t want the dog to sleep on the cold earth of the kennel. He was old, almost thirteen years old. She and her husband had had him all that time.

Finally, irritably, the famous writer allowed them to stay in one small room in the guest house. The rather known writer said nothing during this battle of wills. She smiled and shrugged. She herself had never had a dog, though she used them freely in her fiction, where they appeared real enough.

The widow lay in the smallest room of the guest house with her dog. Never had she felt so bereft. She had signed a number of papers only that morning at the funeral home. Cremation is not reversible, someone there said. She couldn’t imagine why they would say such a thing. She wished she had requested his belt. And the black cashmere sweater the medics had ripped in half when they first arrived.

He had worn that belt every day for years. Sometimes she’d put some leather preservative on it. And now she didn’t have it.

Oh God, she thought.

Over the years, our succession of beloved dogs were always losing their identification tags.

Since we traveled frequently and often chose areas to pass through where the dogs could run free and tussle, our dogs lost their identification tags in at least a dozen states. Frequently these tags, which included our home address as well as a telephone number, would be returned to us through the mail with a short note of greeting and good wishes.

With the exception of one finder who was not a realtor or an insurance agent, all the finders who contacted us were realtors or insurance agents who enclosed their business cards.

Late in every summer, our local paper prints an article about recreational hiking in the desert. Each year several hikers die of dehydration in our scenic mountains. The question the article always addresses is: How much water should be shared with a needy stranger gasping trailside from the heat?

“If it came down to having enough for myself or helping someone, I’d have to drink my own water,” a Phoenix businesswoman said most recently, adding that for her it was an ethical decision, with a bit of belief in the survival of the fittest mixed in.

She liked traveling through the American Southwest and staying in the rooms of old hotels in forgotten towns. The questionable cleanliness of the rooms did not bother her, nor did the indifferent food served at erratic times in the local cafés. She went to markets and churches, bought trinkets and the occasional rug. She never had any real experiences, but she was content. This was how she spent her monthlong vacation year after year. She was a teacher of history and mathematics, though not a particularly dedicated one. She moved them along, the little ones.

One evening, in a particularly garish room of awkward dimension, jammed with oak furniture, with prints of long-ago parades covering the walls, after preparing a drinking a cup of tea — she always brought the supplies for tea time with her, including a heating coil — she realized she had no idea who she was or why the end of a day would find her in this close room. She felt anxious but did not give in to the temptation of making herself a stronger cup. Instead she decided to remove the few articles of clothing she had placed in the bureau drawer and return them to her valise. This gave her the feeling she would soon be on her way again.

Removing the cargo pants with just the touch of spandex to add stretch and the linen shirt with hidden button-front placket — garments as yet unworn, which added to the sense of unfamiliarity and unease — she noticed writing in the bottom of the drawer. Under the sensible beam of the flashlight she always carried with her, she read:

On the displacement and destruction of the American Indian, George Catlin wrote in 1837:

For the American citizens who live, everywhere proud of their growing wealth and their luxuries, over the bones of these poor fellows, there is a lingering terror for reflecting minds: Our mortal bodies must soon take their humble places with their red brethren, under the same glebe: to appear and stand at last, with guilt’s shivering conviction, amid the myriad ranks of accusing spirits, that are to rise in their own fields, at the final day of resurrection!

She immediately vowed to no longer frequent public accommodations. She would purchase a mobile home and continue her travels unharried by the sentiments of others. Still, she had no idea who this person who would continue was now.

The notion of cyclical time was crucial to Native Americans. For them, sacred events recur again and again in a pattern that repeats the cycles of the celestial sphere.

Time does not progress along a linear path but moves in a cyclical manner so as to provide an enclosure within which events occur.

Past, present, and future all exist together because the cycles turn continually upon themselves.

The progression of time along a developmental path was a concept foreign to Native Americans until the Europeans forced them into history.

We all have one foot in the grave, the poet insisted.

Well, if that’s the case, the pretty girl drawled, I should get a pedicure every week instead of just a coupla weeks.

They looked at her slim, tanned feet in their strappy sandals. It was summer. The grass was green as jade and freshly cut.

Who had been the first to notice, they wondered later, that swelling on her instep? The swelling, tender to the touch, that, even she would later say, hadn’t been there yesterday.

Jung tells a story of a woman who came to him with a secret. She was an elegantly dressed woman of refinement. She had been a doctor. Her husband had died relatively young, and her only child insisted upon being estranged from her. She was a passionate horsewoman and owned several horses of which she was extremely fond. But the horses had become nervous around her, and even her favorite reared and threw her. She then devoted herself to her dogs.

She owned an unusually beautiful wolfhound to which she was greatly attached, wrote Jung. But the dog sickened, suffered paralysis, and died.

She came to Jung to confess that she was a murderess. She had poisoned her best friend, whose husband she coveted, the very man she had made her own who later died. She no longer had a relationship with anything she loved. In seeking out Jung, she wanted to find someone who would accept her confession without judging her.

Sometimes I have asked myself what might have become of her, wrote Jung. Perhaps she was driven ultimately to suicide.

Though would that not have been the final thing denied her, after so much had been taken away, even her secret?

The friendship of the two men was based on eczema. They had terrible eczema, and all they talked about was eczema. They tried everything — creams, shots, diets. The one thing they agreed not to give up, never to give up, was liquor. Liquor was their bond. They drank and talked, talked and drank.

Finally one of them, in such torment and despair over his eczema, sailed his small boat out into the Gulf of Mexico and was never seen again, though the broken boat was eventually recovered.