A prayer for Owen Meany (28 page)

        
 
like November; by the time Owen and I had
dragged Sagamore in the sack to Mr. Fish's yard, the sun was clouded over, the
vividness seemed muted in the maple trees, and the wind that stirred the dead
leaves about the lawn had grown cold. Mr. Fish told my mother that he would
make a "gift" of Sagamore's body-to my grandmother's roses. He
implied that a dead dog was highly prized, among serious gardeners; my
grandmother wished to be brought into the discussion, and it was quickly agreed
which rose bushes would be temporarily uprooted, and replanted, and Mr. Fish
began with the spade. The digging was much softer in the rose bed than it would
have been in Mr. Fish's yard, and the young couple and their baby from down the
street were sufficiently moved to attend the burial, along with a scattering of
Front Street's other children; even my grandmother asked to be called when the
hole was ready, and my mother-although the day had turned much colder-wouldn't
even go inside for a coat. She wore dark-gray flannel slacks and a black,
V-necked sweater, and stood hugging herself, standing first on one foot, then
on the other, while Owen gathered strange items to accompany Sagamore to the
underworld. Owen was restrained from putting the football in the burlap sack,
because Mr. Fish-while digging the grave-maintained that football was still a
game that would give us some pleasure, when we were "a little older."
Owen found a few well-chewed tennis balls, and Sagamore's food dish, and his
dog blanket for trips in the car; these he included in the burlap sack,
together with a scattering of the brightest maple leaves-and a leftover lamb
chop that Lydia had been saving for Sagamore (from last night's supper). The
lights were turned on in some houses when Mr. Fish finished digging the grave,
and Owen decided that the attendant mourners should hold candles, which Lydia
was reluctant to provide; at my mother's urging, Lydia produced the candles,
and my grandmother was summoned.

"HE WAS A GOOD DOG," Owen said, to which there were
murmurs of approval.

"I'll never have another one," said Mr. Fish.

"I'll remind you of that," my grandmother remarked;
she must have found it ironic that her rose bushes, having suffered years of
Sagamore's blundering, were about to be the beneficiaries of his decomposition.
The candlelit ritual must have looked striking from the Front Street sidewalk;
that must be why the Rev. Lewis Merrill and his wife were drawn to our yard.
Just as we were faced with a loss for words, the Rev. Mr .-Merrill-who was
already as pale as the winter months-appeared in the rose garden. His wife,
red-nosed from the autumn's first good dose of the common cold, was wearing her
winter coat, looking prematurely sunk in deepest January. Taking their fragile
constitutional, the Mer-rills had detected the presence of a religious
ceremony. My mother, shivering, seemed quite startled by the Merrills'
appearance.

"It makes me cold to look at you, Tabby," Mrs. Merrill
said, but Mr. Merrill glanced nervously from face to face, as if he were
counting the living of the neighborhood in order to determine which poor soul
was at rest in the burlap sack.

"Thank you for coming, Pastor," said Mr. Fish, who was
born to be an amateur actor. "Perhaps you could say a few words
appropriate to the passing away of man's best friend?"

But Mr. MerruTs countenance was both stricken and
uncomprehending. He looked at my mother, and at me; he stared at the burlap
sack; he gazed into the hole in the rose bed as if it were his own grave-and no
coincidence that a short walk with his wife had ended here. My grandmother,
seeing her pastor so tense and tongue-tied, took his arm and whispered to him,
"It's just a dog. Just say a little something, for the children."

But Mr. Merrill began to stutter; the more my mother shivered,
the more the Rev. Mr. Merrill shivered in response, the more his mouth trembled
and he could not utter the simplest rite-he failed to form the first sentence.
Mr. Fish, who was never a frequenter of any of the town churches, hoisted the
burlap sack and dropped Sagamore into the underworld. It was Owen Meany who
found the words: " 'I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE, SAITH THE LORD: HE
THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER
LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.' "

It seemed a lot to say-for a dog-and the Rev. Mr. Merrill, freed
from his stutter, was struck silent.

" '. . . SHALL NEVER DIE,' " Owen repeated. The wind,
gusting, covered my mother's face with her hair as she reached for Owen's hand.

 
 
Over all rituals,
over all services-over every rite of passage-Owen Meany would preside. That
Christmas of ', whether rehearsing the Nativity, or testing Potter's
prophylactic on the third floor of Waterhouse Hall, I was only dimly aware of
Owen as the conductor of an orchestra of events-and totally unaware that this
orchestration would lead to a single sound. Not even in Owen's odd room did I
perceive enough, although no one could escape the feeling that-at the very
least-an altar-in-progress was under construction there. It was hard to tell if
the Meanys celebrated Christmas. A clump of pine boughs had been crudely
gathered and stuck to the front farmhouse door by a huge, ugly staple-the kind
fired from a heavy-duty, industrial staple gun. The staple looked strong enough
to bind granite to granite, or to hold Christ fast to the cross. But there was
no particular arrangement to the pine boughs-it certainly did not resemble a
wreath; it was as shapeless a mass as an animal's nest, only hastily begun and
abandoned in a panic. Inside the sealed house, there was no tree; there were no
Christmas decorations, not even candles in the windows, not even a decrepit
Santa leaning against a table lamp. On the mantel above the constantly
smoldering fire- wherein the logs were either chronically wet, or else the
coals had been left unstirred for hours-there was a creche with cheaply painted
wooden figures. The cow was three-legged- nearly as precarious as one of Mary
Beth Baud's cows; it was propped against a rather menacing chicken that was
almost half the cow's size, not unlike the proportions of Barb Wiggin's
turtledoves. A gouge through the flesh-toned paint of the Holy Mother's face
had rendered her obviously blind and so ghastly to behold that someone in the
Meany family had thoughtfully turned her face away from the Christ Child's
crib-yes, there was a crib. Joseph had lost a hand- perhaps he had hacked it
off himself, in a jealous rage, for there was something darkly smoldering in
his expression, as if the smoky fire that left the mantel coated with soot had
also colored Joseph's mood. One angel's harp was mangled, and from another
angel's O-shaped mouth it was easier to imagine the wail of a mourner than the
sweetness of singing. But the creche's most ominous message was that the little
Lord Jesus himself was missing; the crib was empty-that was why the Virgin Mary
had turned her mutilated face away; why one angel dashed its harp, and another
screamed in anguish; why Joseph had lost a hand, and the cow a leg. The Christ
Child was gone-kidnapped, or run away. The very object of worship was absent
from the conventional assembly. There appeared to be more order, more divine
management in evidence in Owen's room; still, there was nothing that
represented anything as seasonal as Christmas-except the poinsettia-red dress that
my mother's dummy wore; but I knew that dress was all the dummy had to wear,
year 'round. The dummy had taken a position at the head of Owen's bed-closer to
his bed than my mother had formerly positioned it in relationship to her own
bed. From where Owen lay at night, it was instantly clear to me that he could
reach out and touch the familiar figure.

"DON'T STARE AT THE DUMMY," he advised me. "IT'S
NOT GOOD FOR YOU."

Yet, apparently, it was good for him-for there she was, standing
over him. The baseball cards, at one time so very much on display in Owen's
room, were not-I was sure-gone; but they were out of sight. There was no
baseball in evidence, either-although I was certain that the murderous ball was
in the room. The foreclaws of my armadillo were surely there, but they were
also not on display. And the Christ Child snatched from the crib ... I was
convinced that the Baby Jesus was somewhere in Owen's room, perhaps in company
with Potter's prophylactic, which Owen had taken home with him but which was no
more visible than the armadillo's claws, the abducted Prince of Peace, and the
so-called instrument of my mother's death. It was not a room that invited a
long visit; our appearances at the Meanys' house were brief, sometimes only for
Owen to change his clothes, because-during that Christmas vacation,
especially-he stayed overnight with me more than he stayed at home. Mrs. Meany
never spoke to me, or took any notice of me at all, when I came to the house; I
could not remember the last time Owen had bothered to announce my presence-or,
for that matter, his own presence-to his mother. But Mr. Meany was usually
pleasant; I wouldn't say he was cheerful, or even enthusiastic, and he was not a
fellow for small talk, but he

        
 
offered me his cautious version of humor.
"Why, it's Johnny Wheelwright!" he'd say, as if he were surprised I
was there at all, or he hadn't seen me for years. Perhaps this was his unsubtle
way of announcing my presence to Mrs. Meany, but that lady was unchanged by her
husband's greeting; she remained in profile to both the window and to us. For
variety, she would at times gaze into the fire, although nothing she saw there
ever prompted her to tend to the logs or the coals; possibily she preferred
smoke to flames. And one day, when he must have been feeling especially
conversational, Mr. Meany said: "Why, it's Johnny Wheelwright! How goes
all that Christmas rehearsin'?"

"Owen's the star of the pageant," I said. As soon as I
spoke, I felt the knuckles of his tiny fist in my back.

"You never said you was the star," Mr. Meany said to
Owen.

"He's the Baby Jesus!" I said. "I'm just old
Joseph."

"The Baby Jesus?" said Mr. Meany. "I thought you
was an angel, Owen."

"NOT THIS YEAR," Owen said. "COME ON, WE GOTTA
GO," he said to me, pulling the back of my shirt.

"You're the Christ Child?" his father asked him.

"I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN FIT IN THE CRIB," Owen said.

"Now we're not even using a crib," I explained.
"Owen's in charge of the whole thing-he's the star and the director."
Owen yanked my shirt so hard he untucked it.

"The director," Mr. Meany repeated flatly. That was
when I felt cold, as if a draft had pushed itself into the house in an
unnatural way-down the warm chimney. But it was no draft; it was Mrs. Meany.
She had actually moved. She was staring at Owen. There was confusion in her
expression, a mix of terror and awe-of shock; but also of a most familiar
resentment. By comparison to such a stare, I realized what a relief his
mother's profile must be to Owen Meany. Outside, in the raw wind off the
Squamscott, I asked Owen if I had said anything I shouldn't have said.

"I THINK THEY LIKE ME BETTER AS AN ANGEL," he said.
The snow never seemed to stick on Maiden Hill; it could never get a grip on the
huge, upthrust slabs of granite that marked the rims of the quarries. In the
pits themselves the snow was dirty, mixed with sand, tracked by birds and
squirrels; the sides of the quarries were too steep for dogs. There is always
so much sand around a granite quarry; somehow, it works its way to the top of
the snow; and around Owen's house there was always so much wind that the sand
stung against your face-like the beach in winter. I watched Owen pull down the
earflaps of his red-and-black-checkered hunter's cap; that was when I realized
that I'd left my hat on his bed. We were on our way down Maiden Hill; Dan had
said he'd meet us with the car, at the boathouse on the Swasey Parkway.

"Just a second," ItoldOwen. "I forgot my
hat." Iran back to the house; I left him kicking at a rock that had been
frozen in the ruts of the dirt driveway. I didn't knock; the clump of pine
boughs on the door was blocking the most natural place to knock, anyway. Mr.
Meany was standing by the mantel, either looking at the creche or at the fire.
"Just forgot my hat," I said, when he looked up at me. I didn't knock
on the door of Owen's room, either. At first, I thought the dressmaker's dummy
had moved; I thought that somehow it had found a way to bend at the waist and
had sat down on Owen's bed. Then I realized that Mrs. Meany was sitting on the
bed; she was staring quite intently at my mother's figure and she did not
interrupt her gaze when I entered the room.

"Just forgot my hat," I repeated; I couldn't tell if
she heard me. I put on my hat and was leaving the room, closing the door as
quietly as I could behind me, when she said, "I'm sorry about your poor
mother." It was the first time she had ever spoken to me. I peeked back
into the room. Mrs. Meany hadn't moved; she sat with her head slightly bowed to
the dressmaker's dummy, as if she were awaiting some instructions. It was noon
when Owen and I passed under the railroad trestle bridge at the foot of the
Maiden Hill Road, a few hundred yards below the Meany Granite Quarry; years
later, the abutment of that bridge would be the death of Buzzy Thurston, who
had successfully evaded the draft. But that Christmas of ', when Owen and I
walked under the bridge, was the first time our being there coincided with the
passing of The Flying Yankee-the express train that raced between Portland and
Boston, in just two hours. It screamed through Gravesend every day at noon; and
although Owen and I had watched it hurtle through town

 
 
from the Gravesend
depot, and although we had put pennies on the tracks for The Flying Yankee to
flatten, we had never before been directly under the trestle bridge exactly as
The Flying Yankee was passing over us. I was still thinking of Mrs. Meany's
attitude of supplication before my mother's dummy when the trestlework of the
bridge began to rattle. A fine grit sifted down between the railroad ties and
the trestles and settled upon Owen and me; even the concrete abutments shook,
and-shielding our eyes from the loosened sand-we looked up to see the giant,
dark underbelly of the train, speeding above us. Through the gaps between the
passing cars, flashes of the leaden, winter sky blinked down on us.