Joy Williams - 99 Stories of God

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 mischievously 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.

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.

A spokesperson for the City Council said all petitions concerning the smokestack were welcome but that the animal rights group’s intention was divisive and inappropriate.

Those people are practically terrorists, the spokesperson said. We’d be a laughingstock if we gave them the time of day.

The Sinclair operation mostly processed horses.

The Lord wants to give a dinner party but can never come up with twelve guests.

Whatever steward He has at the time suggests many names, but the Lord can’t get excited about any of them.

At least the menu was determined long ago. There would be a mixture of fifty pure chemicals — sugar, amino and fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, all made from rocks, air, and water without any killing at all.

She was a student of literature. She loved the life of the mind and languages, though she was fluent in only five. The thought of the world’s peoples thinking and feeling, quarreling and praying, in so many different languages humbled and delighted her.

In 1968, she traveled to the Soviet Union to visit with the great Pavel Naumovich Berkov, the preeminent specialist of eighteenth-century Russian literature. This was shortly before his death,