A prayer for Owen Meany (13 page)

"He wants you to give them back," Dan Needham said. I
knew from the first that my mother had picked a winner when she picked Dan, but
it was not until the day after my mother's death that I knew she'd picked a
smart man, too. Of course, that's what Owen expected of me: he gave me his
baseball cards to show me how sorry he was about the accident, and how much he
was hurting, too-because Owen had loved my mother almost as much as I did, I
was sure, and to give me all his cards was his way of saying that he loved me
enough to trust me with his famous collection. But, naturally, he wanted all
the cards back! Dan Needham said, "Let's look at a few of them. I'll bet
they're all in some kind of order-even in these boxes." And, yes, they
were-Dan and I couldn't figure out the exact rules under which they were
ordered, but the cards were organized

 
 
under an extreme
system; they were alphabetized by the names of players, but the hitters, I mean
the big hitters, were alphabetized in a group of their own; and your
golden-glove-type fielders, they had a category all to themselves, too; and the
pitchers were all together. There even seemed to be some subindexing related to
the age of the players; but Dan and I found it difficult to look at the cards
for very long-so many of the players faced the camera with their lethal bats
resting confidently on their shoulders. I know many people, today, who
instinctively cringe at any noise even faintly resembling a gunshot or an exploding
bomb-a car backfires, the handle of a broom or a shovel whacks flat against a
cement or a linoleum floor, a kid detonates a firecracker in an empty trash
can, and my friends cover their heads, primed (as we all are, today) for the
terrorist attack or the random assassin. But not me; and never Owen Meany. All
because of one badly played baseball game, one unlucky swing-and the most
unlikely contact-all because of one lousy foul ball, among millions, Owen Meany
and I were permanently conditioned to flinch at the sound of a different kind
of gunshot: that much-loved and most American sound of summer, the good old
crack of the bat! And so, as I often would, I took Dan Needham's advice. We
loaded the cartons of Owen's baseball cards into the car, and we tried to think
of the least conspicuous time of day when we could drive out to the Meany
Granite Quarry-when we would not necessarily need to greet Mr. Meany, or
disturb Mrs. Meany's grim profile in any of several windows, or actually need
to talk with Owen. Dan understood that I loved Owen, and that I wanted to talk
with him-most of all-but that it was a conversation, for both Owen's sake and
mine, that was best to delay. But before we finished loading the baseball cards
in the car, Dan Needham asked me, "What are you giving Mm?"

"What?" I said.

"To show him that you love him," Dan Needham said.
"That's what he was showing you. What have you got to give him?"

Of course I knew what I had that would show Owen that I loved
him; I knew what my armadillo meant to him, but it was a little awkward to
"give" Owen in front of Dan Needham, who'd given it to me-and what if
Owen didn't give it back? I'd needed Dan's help to understand that I was
supposed to return the damn baseball cards. What if Owen decided he was
supposed to keep the armadillo?

"The main thing is, Johnny," Dan Needham said,
"you have to show Owen that you love him enough to trust anything with
him-to not care if you do or don't get it back. It's got to be something he
knows you want back. That's what makes it special."

"Suppose I give him the armadillo?" I said.
"Suppose he keeps it?"

Dan Needham sat down on the front bumper of the car. It was a
Buick station wagon, forest green with real wooden panels on the sides and on
the tailgate, and a chrome grille that looked like the gaping mouth of a
voracious fish; from where Dan was sitting, the Buick appeared ready to eat
him-and Dan looked tired enough to be eaten without much of a struggle. I'm
sure he'd been up crying all night, like me-and, unlike me, he'd probably been
up drinking, too. He looked awful. But he said very patiently and very
carefully, "Johnny, I would be honored if anything I gave you could
actually be used for something important-if it were to have any special
purpose, I'd be very proud."

That was when I first began to think about certain events or
specific things being "important" and having "special
purpose." Until then, the notion that anything had a designated, much less
a special purpose would have been cuckoo to me. I was not what was commonly
called a believer then, and I am a believer now; I believe in God, and I
believe in the "special purpose" of certain events or specific
things. I observe all holy days, which only the most old-fashioned Anglicans
call red-letter days. It was a red-letter day, fairly recently, when I had
reason to think of Owen Meany-it was January , , when the lessons proper for
the conversion of St. Paul reminded me of Owen. The Lord says to Jeremiah, Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated
you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

But Jeremiah says he doesn't know how to speak; he's "only
a youth," Jeremiah says. Then the Lord straightens him out about that; the
Lord says,

 
 
Do not say,
"I am only a youth"; for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and
whatever I command you you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with
you to deliver you, says the Lord. Then the Lord touches Jeremiah's mouth, and
says, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See,  have set you this
day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy
and to overthrow, to build and to plant. It is on red-letter days, especially,
that I think about Owen; sometimes I think about him too intensely, and that's
usually when I skip a Sunday service, or two-and I try not to pick up my prayer
book for a while. I suppose the conversion of St. Paul has a special effect on
a convert like me. And how can I not think of Owen-when I read Paul's letter to
the Galatians, that part where Paul says, "And I was still not known by
sight to the churches of Christ in Judea; they only heard it said, 'He who once
persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.' And they
glorified God because of me."

How well I know that feeling! I trust in God because of Owen
Meany. It was because I trusted Dan Needham that I gave to Owen. I put it in a
brown paper bag, which I put inside another brown paper bag, and although I had
no doubt that Owen would know exactly what it was, before he opened the bags, I
gave brief consideration to how shocked his mother might be if she opened the
bags; but it was not her business to open the bags, I figured. Owen and I were
eleven; we had no other way to articulate what we felt about what had happened
to my mother. He gave me his baseball cards, but he really wanted them back,
and I gave him my stuffed armadillo, which I certainly hoped he'd give back to
me-all because it was impossible for us to say to each other how we really
felt. How did it feel to hit a ball that hard-and then realize that the ball
had killed your best friend's mother? How did it feel to see my mother sprawled
in the grass, and to have the moronic chief of police complain about the
missing baseball-and calling that stupid ball "the instrument of
death" and "the murder weapon"? Owen and I couldn't have talked
about those things-at least, not then. So we gave each other our best-loved
possessions, and hoped to get them back. When you think of it, that's not so
silly. By my calculations, Owen was a day late returning the armadillo; he kept
it overnight for two nights, which in my view was one night too many. But he
did return it. Once again I heard the lowest-possible gear of the granite
truck; once again, there was an early-morning drop-off at  Front Street,
before Mr. Meany went ahead with the rest of the day's heavy business. And
there were the same brown paper bags that I had used on the step by the back
door; it was a little dangerous to leave outside on the step, I thought, given
the indiscriminate appetites of that certain Labrador retriever belonging to
our neighbor Mr. Fish. Then I remembered that Sagamore was dead. But my
greatest indignation was to follow: missing from were the little animal's front
claws-the most useful and impressive parts of its curious body. Owen had
returned the armadillo, but he'd kept the claws! Well-friendship being one
thing, and quite another-I was so outraged by this discovery that I needed to
talk to Dan Needham. As always, Dan made himself available. He sat on the edge
of my bed while I sniveled; without its claws, the beast could no longer stand
upright-not without pitching forward and resting on its snout. There was
virtually no position I could find for that did not make the creature resemble
a supplicant-not to mention, a wretched amputee. I was quite upset at how my
best friend could have done this to me, until Dan Needham informed me that this
was precisely what Owen felt he had done to me, and to himself: that we were
both maimed and mutilated by what had happened to us.

"Your friend is most original," Dan Needham said, with
the greatest respect. "Don't you see, Johnny? If he could, he would cut
off his hands for you-that's how it makes him feel, to have touched that
baseball bat, to have swung that bat with

 
 
those results.
It's how we all feel-you and me and Owen. We've lost a part of ourselves."
And Dan picked up the wrecked armadillo and began to experiment with it on my
night table, trying-as I had tried-to find a position that allowed the beast to
stand, or even to lie down, with any semblance of comfort or dignity; it was
quite impossible. The thing had been crippled; it was rendered an invalid. And
how had Owen arranged the claws? I wondered. What sort of terrible altarpiece
had he constructed? Were the claws gripping the murderous baseball? And so Dan
and I became quite emotional, while we struggled to find a way to make the
armadillo's appearance acceptable-but that was the point, Dan concluded: there
was no way that any or all of this was acceptable. What had happened was
unacceptable! Yet we still had to live with it.

"It's brilliant, really-it's absolutely original," Dan
kept muttering, until he fell asleep on the other twin bed in my room, where
Owen had spent so many nights, and I covered him up and let him sleep. When my
grandmother came to kiss me good night, she kissed Dan good night, too. Then,
in the weak glow from the night-light, I discovered that by opening the shallow
drawer under the top of the night table, I could position in such a way that it
was possible for me to imagine it was something else. Half in and half out of
the drawer, resembled a kind of aquatic creature-it was all head and torso; I
could imagine that those were some sort of stunted flippers protruding where
its claws had been. Just before I fell asleep, I realized that everything Dan
had said about Owen's intentions was correct. How much it has meant to my life
that Dan Needham was almost never wrong! I was not as familiar with Wall's
History of Graves-end as I became when I was eighteen and read the whole thing
for myself; but I was familiar with those parts of it that Owen Meany
considered "important." And just before I fell asleep, I also
recognized my armadillo for what it was-in addition to all those things Dan had
told me. My armadillo had been amputated to resemble Watahantowet's totem, the
tragic and mysterious armless man-for weren't the Indians wise enough to
understand that everything had its own soul, its own spirit? It was Owen Meany
who told me that only white men are vain enough to believe that human beings
are unique because we have souls. According to Owen, Watahantowet knew better.
Watahantowet believed that animals had souls, and that even the much-abused
Squamscott River had a soul- Watahantowet knew that the land he sold to my
ancestors was absolutely/M// of spirits. The rocks they had to move to plant a
field-they were, forever after, restless and displaced spirits. And the trees they
cut down to build their homes-they had a different spirit from the spirits that
escaped those houses as the smoke from firewood. Watahantowet may have been the
last resident of Gravesend, New Hampshire, who really understood what
everything cost. Here, take my land! There go my arms! It would take me years
to learn everything that Owen Meany was thinking, and I didn't understand him
very well that night. Now I know that told me what Owen was thinking although
Owen himself would not until we were both students at Gravesend Academy; it
wasn't until then that I realized Owen had already conveyed his message to
me-via the armadillo. Here is what Owen Meany (and the armadillo) said:
"GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY
HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT."

How could it ever have occurred to me that a fellow
eleven-year-old was thinking any such thing? That Owen Meany was a Chosen One
was the furthest thing from my mind; that Owen could even consider himself one
of God's Appointed would have been a surprise to me. To have seen him up in the
air, at Sunday school, you would not have thought he was at work on God's
Assignment. And you must remember-forgetting about Owen- that at the age of
eleven I did not believe there were "chosen ones," or that God
"appointed" anyone, or that God gave "assignments." As for
Owen's belief that he was "God's instrument," I didn't know that
there was other evidence upon which Owen was basing his conviction that he'd been
specially selected to carry out the work of the Lord; but Owen's idea-that
God's reasoning was somehow predetermining Owen's every move-came from much
more than that one unlucky swing and crack of the bat. As you shall see.
Today-January , -it is snowing in Toronto; in the dog's opinion, Toronto is
improved by snow. I enjoy walking the dog when it's snowing, because the dog's
enthusiasm is infectious; in the snow, the dog establishes his territorial
rights to the St. Clair Reservoir as if he were the first dog to relieve