A prayer for Owen Meany (2 page)

The local sagamore's name was Watahantowet; instead of his
signature, he made his mark upon the deed in the form of his totem-an armless
man. Later, there was some dispute -not very interesting-regarding the Indian
deed, and more interesting speculation regarding why Watahantowet's totem was
an armless man. Some said it was how it made the sagamore feel to give up all
that land-to have his arms cut off-and others pointed out that earlier
"marks" made by Watahantowet revealed that the figure, although
armless, held a feather in his mouth; this was said to indicate the sagamore's
frustration at being unable to write. But in several other versions of the
totem ascribed to Watahantowet, the figure has a tomahawk in its mouth and
looks completely crazy-or else, he is making a gesture toward peace: no arms,
tomahawk in mouth; together, perhaps, they are meant to signify that
Watahantowet does not fight. As for the settlement of the disputed deed, you
can be sure the Indians were The Foid Ball
 
not the beneficiaries of the resolution to that difference of opinion.
And later still, our town fell under Massachusetts authority -which may, to
this day, explain why residents of Gravesend detest people from Massachusetts.
Mr. Wheelwright would move to Maine. He was eighty when he spoke at Harvard,
seeking contributions to rebuild a part of the college destroyed by a
fire-demonstrating that he bore the citizens of Massachusetts less of a grudge
than anyone else from Gravesend would bear them. Wheelwright died in Salisbury,
Massachusetts, where he was the spiritual leader of the church, when he was
almost ninety. But listen to the names of Gravesend's founding fathers: you
will not hear a Meany among them. Barlow

Blackwell Cole

Copeland Crawley

Dearborn Hilton

Hutchinson Littleneld

Read Rishworth

Smart Smith

Walker Wardell

Wentworth Wheelwright

I doubt it's because she was a Wheelwright that my mother never
gave up her maiden name; I think my mother's pride was independent of her
Wheelwright ancestry, and that she would have kept her maiden name if she'd
been born a Meany. And I never suffered in those years that I had her name; I
was little Johnny Wheelwright, father unknown, and-at the time-that was okay
with me. I never complained. One day, I always thought, she would tell me about
it-when I was old enough to know the story. It was, apparently, the kind of
story you had to be "old enough" to hear. It wasn't until she
died-without a word to me concerning who my father was-that I felt I'd

 
 
been cheated out
of information I had a right to know; it was only after her death that I felt
the slightest anger toward her. Even if my father's identity and his story were
painful to my mother-even if their relationship had been so sordid that any
revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable light upon both my
parents-wasn't my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?
Of course, as Owen Meany pointed out to me, I was only eleven when she died,
and my mother was only thirty; she probably thought she had a lot of time left
to tell me the story. She didn't know she was going to die, as Owen Meany put
it. Owen and I were throwing rocks in the Squamscott, the saltwater river, the
tidal river-or, rather, / was throwing rocks in the river; Owen's rocks were
landing in the mud flats because the tide was out and the water was too far
away for Owen Meany's little, weak arm. Our throwing had disturbed the herring
gulls who'd been pecking in the mud, and the gulls had moved into the marsh
grass on the opposite shore of the Squamscott. It was a hot, muggy, summer day;
the low-tide smell of the mud flats was more brinish and morbid than usual.
Owen Meany told me that my father would know that my mother was dead, and
that-when I was old enough-he would identify himself to me.

"If he's alive," I said, still throwing rocks.
"If he's alive and if he cares that he's my father-if he even knows he's
my father."

And although I didn't believe him that day, that was the day
Owen Meany began his lengthy contribution to my belief in God. Owen was
throwing smaller and smaller rocks, but he still couldn't reach the water;
there was a certain small satisfaction to the sound the rocks made when they
struck the mud flats, but the water was more satisfying than the mud in every
way. And almost casually, with a confidence that stood in surprising and
unreasonable juxtaposition to his tiny size, Owen Meany told me that he was
sure my father was alive, that he was sure my father knew he was my father, and
that God knew who my father was; even if my father never came forth to identify
himself, Owen told me, Go* would identify him for me. "YOUR DAD CAN HIDE
FROwi YOU," Owen said, "BUT HE CAN'T HIDE FROM GOD."

And with that announcement, Owen Meany grunted as he released a
stone that reached the water. We were both surprised; it was the last rock
either of us threw that day, and we stood watching the circle of ripples
extending from the point of entry until even the gulls were assured we had
stopped our disturbance of their universe, and they returned to our side of the
Squamscott. For years, there was a most successful salmon fishery on our river;
no salmon would be caught dead there now-actually, the only salmon you could
find in the Squamscott today would be a dead one. Ale wives were also plentiful
back then-and still were plentiful when I was a boy, and Owen Meany and I used
to catch them. Gravesend is only nine miles from the ocean. Although the
Squamscott was never the Thames, the big oceangoing ships once made their way
to Gravesend on the Squamscott; the channel has since become so obstructed by
rocks and shoals that no boat requiring any great draft of water could navigate
it. And although Captain John Smith's beloved Pocahontas ended her unhappy life
on British soil in the parish churchyard of the original Gravesend, the
spiritually armless Watahantowet was never buried in our Gravesend. The only
sagamore to be given official burial in our town was Mr. Fish's black Labrador
retriever, run over by a diaper truck on Front Street and buried-with the
solemn attendance of some neighborhood children-in my grandmother's rose garden.
For more than a century, the big business of Gravesend was lumber, which was
the first big business of New Hampshire. Although New Hampshire is called the
Granite State, granite- building granite, curbstone granite, tombstone
granite-came after lumber; it was never the booming business that lumber was.
You can be sure that when all the trees are gone, there will still be rocks
around; but in the case of granite, most of it remains underground. My uncle
was in the lumber business-Uncle Alfred, the Eastman Lumber Company; he married
my mother's sister, my aunt, Martha Wheelwright. When I was a boy and traveled
up north to visit my cousins, I saw log drives and logjams, and I even
participated in a few log-rolling contests; I'm afraid I was too inexperienced
to offer much competition to my cousins. But today, my Uncle Alfred's business,
which is in his children's hands-my cousins' business, I should say-is real
estate. In New Hampshire, that's what you have left to sell after you've cut
down the trees. But there will always be granite in the Granite State, and
little Owen Meany's family was in the granite business-not ever a recommended
business in our small, seacoast part of New Hampshire, although the Meany
Granite Quarry was situated over what geologists call the Exeter Pluton. Owen
Meany used to say that we residents of Gravesend were sitting over a bona fide
outcrop of intrusive igneous rock; he would say this with an implied
reverence-as if the consensus of the Gravesend community was that the Exeter Pluton
was as valuable as a mother lode of gold. My grandmother, perhaps owing to her
ancestors from Mayflower days, was more partial to trees than to rocks. For
reasons that were never explained to me, Harriet Wheelwright thought that the
lumber business was clean and that the granite business was dirty. Since my
grandfather's business was shoes, this made no sense to me; but my grandfather
died before I was born-his famous decision, to not unionize his shoeshop, is
only hearsay to me. My grandmother sold the factory for a considerable profit,
and I grew up with her opinions regarding how blessed were those who murdered
trees for a living, and how low were those who handled rocks. We've all heard
of lumber barons-my uncle, Alfred Eastman, was one-but who has heard of a rock
baron? The Meany Granite Quarry in Gravesend is inactive now; the pitted land,
with its deep and dangerous quarry lakes, is not even valuable as real
estate-it never was valuable, according to my mother. She told me that the
quarry had been inactive all the years that she was growing up in Gravesend,
and that its period of revived activity, in the Meany years, was fitful and
doomed. All the good granite, Mother said, had been taken out of the ground
before the Meanys moved to Gravesend. (As for when the Meanys moved to
Gravesend, it was always described to me as "about the time you were
born.") Furthermore, only a small portion of the granite underground is
worth getting out; the rest has defects-or if it's good, it's so far underground
that it's hard to get out without cracking it. Owen was always talking about
cornerstones and monuments-a PROPER monument, he used to say, explaining that
what was required was a large, evenly cut, smooth, unflawed piece of granite.
The delicacy with which Owen spoke of this-and his own, physical delicacy-stood
in absurd contrast to the huge, heavy slabs of rock we observed on the flatbed
trucks, and to the violent noise of the quarry, the piercing sound of the rock
chisels on the channeling machine-THE CHANNEL BAR, Owen called it-and the
dynamite. I used to wonder why Owen wasn't deaf; that there was something wrong
with his voice, and with his size, was all the more surprising when you
considered that there was nothing wrong with his ears-for the granite business
is extremely percussive. It was Owen who introduced me to Wall's History of
Graves-end, although I didn't read the whole book until I was a senior at
Gravesend Academy, where the tome was required as a part of a town history
project; Owen read it before he was ten. He told me that the book was FULL OF
WHEELWRIGHTS. I was born in the Wheelwright house on Front Street; and I used
to wonder why my mother decided to have me and to never explain a word about
me-either to me or to her own mother and sister. My mother was not a brazen
character. Her pregnancy, and her refusal to discuss it, must have struck the
Wheelwrights with all the more severity because my mother had such a tranquil,
modest nature. She'd met a man on the Boston & Maine Railroad: that was all
she'd say. My Aunt Martha was a senior in college, and already engaged to be
married, when my mother announced that she wasn't even going to apply for
college entrance. My grandfather was dying, and perhaps this focusing of my
grandmother's attention distracted her from demanding of my mother what the
family had demanded of Aunt Martha: a college education. Besides, my mother
argued, she could be of help at home, with her dying father-and with the strain
and burden that his dying put upon her mother. And the Rev. Lewis Merrill, the
pastor at the Congregational Church, and my mother's choirmaster, had convinced
my grandparents that my mother's singing voice was truly worthy of professional
training. For her to engage in serious voice and singing lessons, the Rev. Mr.
Merrill said, was as sensible an "investment," in my mother's case,
as a college education. At this point in my mother's life, I used to feel there
was a conflict of motives. If singing and voice lessons were so important and
serious to her, why did she arrange to have them only once a week? And if my
grandparents accepted Mr. Merrill's assessment of my mother's voice, why did
they object so bitterly to her spending one night a week in Boston? It seemed
to me that she should have moved to Boston and taken lessons every day! But I
supposed the source of the conflict was my grandfather's terminal illness-my
mother's desire to be of help at home, and my grandmother's need to have her
there. It was an early-morning voice or singing lesson; that was why she had to
spend the previous night in Boston, which was an hour and a half from
Gravesend-by train. Her singing and voice teacher was very popular; early
morning was the only time he had for my mother. She was fortunate he would see
her at all, the Rev. Lewis Merrill had said, because he normally saw only
professionals; although my mother, and my Aunt Martha, had clocked many singing
hours in the Congregational Church Choir, Mother was not a
"professional." She simply had a lovely voice, and she was engaged-in
her entirely unrebellious, even timid way-in training it. My mother's decision
to curtail her education was more acceptable to her parents than to her sister;
Aunt Martha not only disapproved-my aunt (who is a lovely woman) resented my
mother, if only slightly. My mother had the better voice, she was the prettier.
When they'd been growing up in the big house on Front Street, it was my Aunt
Martha who brought the boys from Gravesend Academy home to meet my grandmother
and grandfather-Martha was the older, and the first to bring home
"beaus," as my mother called them. But once the boys saw my
mother-even before she was old enough to date-that was usually the end of their
interest in Aunt Martha. And now this: an unexplained pregnancy! According to
my Aunt Martha, my grandfather was "already out of it"-he was so very
nearly dead that he never knew my mother was pregnant, "although she took
few pains to hide it," Aunt Martha said. My poor grandfather, in Aunt
Martha's words to me, "died worrying why your mother was overweight."

In my Aunt Martha's day, to grow up in Gravesend was to
understand that Boston was a city of sin. And even though my mother had stayed
in a highly approved and chaperoned women's residential hotel, she had managed
to have her