A prayer for Owen Meany (20 page)

        
 
and garage; she didn't press charges, but she
was gossiped about as a corrupter of the morals of youth. Although she was a
plain, even dowdy woman, she was accused of seducing several of her young draft
counselees, and she eventually moved away from Gravesend-I think she moved to
Portsmouth; that was far enough away. I remember her at my mother's funeral;
she didn't sit with her son Harry, where Mr. Chickering had gathered the team
in adjacent pews. She was never a team player, Mrs. Hoyt; but Harry was. Mrs.
Hoyt was the first person I remember who said that to criticize a specific
American president was not anti-American; that to criticize a specific American
policy was not antipatri-otic; and that to disapprove of our involvement in a
particular war against the communists was not the same as taking the
communists' side. But these distinctions were lost on most of the citizens of
Gravesend; they are lost on many of my former fellow Americans today. I don't
remember seeing Buzzy Thurston at my mother's funeral. He should have been
there. After Harry Hoyt walked, Buzzy Thurston should have been the last out.
He hit such an easy grounder-it was as sure an out as I've ever seen-but
somehow the shortstop bobbled the ball. Buzzy Thurston reached base on an
error. Who was that shortstop? He should have been in Kurd's Church, too.
Possibly Buzzy wasn't there because he was Catholic; Owen suggested this, but
there were other Catholics in attendance- Owen was simply expressing his
particular prejudice. And I may be doing Buzzy an injustice; maybe he was
there-after all, Kurd's was packed; it was as full as it had been for my
mother's wedding. All those same crones of my grandmother were there. I know
what they came to see. How does royalty react to this! How will Harriet
Wheelwright respond to Fate with a capital F-to a Freak Accident (with a
capital F, too), or to an Act of God (if that's what you believe it was)? All
those same crones, as black and hunchbacked as crows gathered around some road
kill-they came to the service as if to say: We acknowledge, O God, that Tabby
Wheelwright was not allowed to get off scot-free. Getting off
"scot-free" was a cardinal crime in New Hampshire. And by the birdy
alertness visible in the darting eyes of my grandmother's crones, I could tell
that-in then-view-my mother had not escaped her just reward. Buzzy Thurston,
there or not there, would not get off scot-free, either. I really didn't
dislike Buzzy-especially after he spoke up for Owen, when Owen and I got
ourselves in hot water with some of Buzzy's Catholic classmates because of a
little incident at St. Michael's, the parochial school. But Buzzy was judged
harshly for his role in reaching base and bringing Owen Meany up to bat (if
judgment is what you believe it was). He was not Gravesend Academy material,
either; yet he did a postgraduate year at the academy, because he was a fair
athlete-your standard outdoor New England variety: a football, hockey, and
baseball man. He did not always need to reach base on an error. He was not
outstanding, not at anything, but he was good enough to go to the state
university, and he lettered in three sports there. He missed a year of
competition with a knee injury, and managed to finagle a fifth year of college-
retaining his student draft deferment for the extra year. After that, he was
"draft material," but he rather desperately strove to miss the trip
to Vietnam by poisoning himself for his physical. He drank a fifth of bourbon a
day for two weeks; he smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a
cupboard crammed with oregano; he started a fire in his parents' oven, baking peyote;
he was hospitalized with a colon disorder, following an LSD experience wherein
he became convinced that his own Hawaiian sports shirt was edible, and he
consumed some of it-including the buttons and the contents of the pocket: a
book of matches, a package of cigarette papers, and a paper clip. Given the
provincialism of the Gravesend draft board, Buzzy was declared psychologically
unfit to serve, which had been his crafty intention. Unfortunately, he had
grown to like the bourbon, the marijuana, the peyote, and the LSD; in fact, he
so worshiped their excesses that he was killed one night on the Maiden Hill
Road by the steering column of his Plymouth, when he drove head-on into the
abutment of the railroad bridge that was only a few hundred yards downhill from
the Meany Granite Quarry. It was Mr. Meany who called the police. Owen and I
knew that bridge well; it followed an especially sharp turn at the bottom of a
steep downhill run-it called for caution, even on our bicycles. It was the
ill-treated Mrs. Hoyt who observed that Buzzy Thurston was simply another
victim of the Vietnam War; although no one listened to her, she maintained that
the war was the cause of the many abuses Buzzy had practiced upon

        
 
himself-just as surely as the war had axed
her Harry. To Mrs. Hoyt, these things were symptomatic of the Vietnam years:
the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the suicidally fast driving, and the
whorehouses in Southeast Asia, where many American virgins were treated to
their first and last sexual experiences- not to mention the Russell's vipers,
waiting under the trees! Mr. Chickering should have wept-not only for the
whimsy with which he'd instructed Owen Meany to "Swing away!" Had he
known everything that would follow, he would have bathed his chubby face in
even more tears than he produced that day in Kurd's when he was grieving for
and as a team. Naturally, Police Chief Pike sat apart; policemen like to sit by
the door. And Chief Pike wasn't weeping. To him, my mother was still a
"case"; for him, the service was an opportunity to look over the
suspects-because we were all suspects in Chief Pike's eyes. Among the mourners,
Chief Pike suspected the ball-thief lurked. He was always "by the
door," Chief Pike. When I dated his daughter, I always thought he would be
bursting through a door-or a window-at any moment. It was doubtless a result of
my anxiety concerning his sudden entrance that I once tangled my tower lip in
his daughter's braces, retreating too quickly from her kiss-certain I had heard
the chief's boots creaking in my near vicinity. That day at Kurd's, you could
almost hear those boots creaking by the door, as if he expected the stolen
baseball to loose itself from the culprit's pocket and roll across the dark
crimson carpeting with incriminating authority. For Chief Pike, the theft of
the ball that killed my mother was an offense of a far graver character than a
mere misdemeanor; at the very least, it was the work of a felon. That my poor
mother had been killed by the ball seemed not to concern Chief Pike; that poor
Owen Meany had hit the ball was of slightly more interest to our chief of
police-but only because it established a motive for Owen to possess the
baseball in question. Therefore, it was not upon my mother's closed coffin that
our chief of police fixed his stare; nor did Chief Pike pay particular
attention to the formerly airborne Captain Wiggin-nor did he show much interest
in the slight stutter of the shaken Pastor Merrill. Rather, the intent gaze of
our chief of police bore into the back of the head of Owen Meany, who sat
precariously upon six or seven copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal; Owen tottered on
the stack of hymnals, as if the police chief's gaze unbalanced him. He sat as
near to our family pews as possible; he sat where he'd sat for my mother's
wedding-behind the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular.
This time there would be no jokes from Simon about the inappropriateness of
Owen's navy-blue Sunday school suit-such a little clone of the suit his father
wore. The granitic Mr. Meany sat heavily beside Owen.

" 'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,'
" said the Rev. Dudley Wiggin. " 'Blessed are the dead who die in the
Lord.' "

" 'O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered,' " said
the Rev. Lewis Merrill. " 'Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant
Tabby, and grant her an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the
fellowship of thy saints.' "

In the dull light of Kurd's Church, only Lydia's wheelchair
gleamed-in the aisle beside my grandmother's pew, where Harriet Wheelwright sat
alone. Dan and I sat in the pew behind her. The Eastmans sat behind us. The
Rev. Captain Wiggin called upon the Book of Revelation-"God shall wipe
away all tears"-whereupon, Dan began to cry. The rector, eager as ever to
represent belief as a battle, brought up Isaiah-"He will swallow up death
in victory." Now I heard my Aunt Martha join Dan; but the two of mem were
no match for Mr. Chickering, who had started weeping even before the ministers
began their readings of the Old and the New Testament. Pastor Merrill stuttered
his way into Lamentations-"The Lord is good unto them that wait for
him."

Then we were led through the Twenty-third Psalm, as if there
were a soul in Gravesend who didn't know it by heart: "The Lord is my
shepherd; I shall not want"-and so forth. When we got to the part that
goes, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
will fear no evil," that was when I began to hear Owen's voice above all
the others. When the rector said, " 'Give courage to those who are
bereaved,' " I was already dreading how loud Owen's voice would be during
the final hymn; I knew it was one he liked. When the pastor said, " 'Help
us, we pray, in the midst of things we cannot understand," " I was
already humming the hymn, trying to drown out Owen's voice-in advance. And when
Mr. Wiggin and Mr. Merrill struggled to say, in unison, " 'Grant us to
entrust Tabitha to thy never-failing love,' " I knew it was time; I almost
covered my ears.

        
 
What else do we sing at an untimely death,
what else but that catchy number that is categorized in The Pilgrim Hymnal as a
favorite hymn of "ascension and reign"-the popular "Crown Him
with Many Crowns," a real organ-breaker? For when else, if not at the
death of a loved one, do we most need to hear about the resurrection, about
eternal life-about him who has risen! Crown him with man-y crowns, The Lamb
up-on his throne; Hark! how the heaven-ly an-them drowns All mu-sic but its
own;

A-wake, my soul, and sing Of him who died for thee, And hail him
as thy match-less king Through all e-ter-ni-ty. Crown him the Lord of love;
Be-hold his hands and side, Rich wounds, yet vis-i-ble above, In beau-ty
glo-ri-fied; No an-gel in the sky Can ful-ly bear that sight, But down-ward bends
his burn-ing eye At mys-ter-ies so bright.

But it was the third verse that especially inspired Owen. CROWN
HIM THE LORD OF LIFE, WHO TRI-UMPHED O'ER THE GRAVE, AND ROSE VIC-TO-RIOUS IN
THE STRIFE FOR THOSE HE CAME TO SAVE; HIS GLO-RIES NOW WE SING WHO DIED AND
ROSE ON HIGH, WHO DIED, E-TER-NAL LIFE TO BRING, AND LIVES THAT DEATH MAY DIE.
Even later, at the committal, I could hear Owen's awful voice ringing, when Mr.
Wiggin said, " 'In the midst of life we are in death.' " But it was
as if Owen were still humming the tune to "Crown Him with Many
Crowns," because I seemed to hear nothing else; I think now that is the
nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them, and repeat them; they are a
part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes
us feel everything is acceptable. Certainly, the burial is unacceptable; doubly
so, in my mother's case, because-after the reassuring numbness of Kurd's
Church-we were standing exposed, outside, on a typical Gravesend summer day,
muggy and hot, with the inappropriate sounds of children's voices coming from
the nearby high-school athletic fields. The cemetery, at the end of Linden
Street, was within sight of the high school and the junior high school. I would
attend the latter for only two years, but that was long enough to hear-many
times-the remarks most frequently made by those students who were trapped in
the study hall and seated nearest the windows that faced the cemetery:
something to the effect that they would be less bored out there, in the
graveyard.

"In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal
life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our sister
Tabitha, and we commit her body to the ground," Pastor Merrill said. That
was when I noticed that Mr. Merrill's wife was holding her ears. She was
terribly pale, except for the plump backs of her upper arms, which were painful
to look at because her sunburn there was so intense; she wore a loose,
sleeveless dress, more gray than black-but maybe she didn't have a proper black
dress that was sleeveless, and she could not have been expected to force such a
sunburn into sleeves. She swayed slightly, squinting her eyes. At first I
thought that she held her ears due to some near-blinding pain inside her head;
her dry blond hair looked ready to burst into flames, and one of her feet had
strayed out of the straps of her sandals. One of her sickly children leaned
against her hip. " 'Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' "
said her husband, but Mrs. Merrill couldn't have heard him; she not only held
her ears, she appeared to be pressing them into her skull. Hester had noticed.
She stared at Mrs. Merrill as intently as I stared at her; all at once Hester's
tough face was constricted by pain-or by some sudden, painful memory-and she,
too, covered her ears. But the tune to "Crown Him with Many Crowns"
was still in my head; I didn't hear what Mrs. Merrill and Hester heard. I
thought they were both guilty of extraordinary rudeness toward Pastor Merrill,
who was doing his best with the benediction-although he was rushing now, and
even the usually unflappable Captain Wiggin was shaking his head, as if to rid
his ears of water or an unpleasant sound.

" 'The Lord bless her and keep her,' " Lewis Merrill
said. That was when I looked at Owen. His eyes were shut, his lips were moving;
he appeared to be growling, but it was the best he could do at humming-it was
"Crown Him with Many Crowns" that I heard; it was not my imagination.
But Owen held his hands over his ears, too. Then I saw Simon raise his hands;
Noah's hands were already in place-and my Uncle Alfred and my Aunt Martha: