A prayer for Owen Meany (61 page)

Then I think the headmaster hung up on him; at least, it
appeared to me that Dan Needham had much more to say, but he suddenly stopped
talking and, slowly, he returned the receiver to its cradle. "Shit,"
he said. Later that night, my grandmother called Dan and me to say that she had
heard from Owen.

"MISSUS WHEELWRIGHT?" Owen had said to her, over the
phone.

"Where are you, Owen?" she asked him.

"IT DOESN'T MATTER," he told her. "I JUST WANTED
TO SAY I WAS SORRY THAT I LET YOU DOWN. I DON'T WANT YOU TO THINK I'M NOT
GRATEFUL FOR THE OPPORTUNITY YOU GAVE ME- TO GO TO A GOOD SCHOOL."

"It doesn't sound like such a good school to me-not
anymore, Owen," my grandmother told him. "And you didn't let me down."

"I PROMISE TO MAKE YOU PROUD OF ME," Owen told her.

"I am proud of you, Owen!" she told him.

"I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU PROUDER!" Owen said;
then-almost as an afterthought-he said, "PLEASE TELL DAN AND JOHN TO BE
SURE TO GO TO CHAPEL IN THE MORNING."

That was just like him, to call it "chapel" after
everyone else had been converted to calling it morning meeting.

"Whatever he's going to do, we should try to stop
him," Dan told me. "He shouldn't do anything that might make it
worse-he's got to concentrate on getting into college and getting a
scholarship. I'm sure that Gravesend High School will give him a diploma-but he
shouldn' t do anything crazy.'' Naturally, we still couldn't locate him. Mr.
Meany said he was "in Durham"; Hester said she didn't know where he
was-she thought he was doing some job for his father because he had been
driving the big truck, not the pickup, and he was carrying a lot of equipment
on the flatbed.

"What sort of equipment?" I asked her.

"How would I know?" she said. "It was just a lot
of heavy-looking stuff."

"Jesus Christ!" said Dan. "He's probably going to
dynamite the headmaster's house!"

We drove all around the town and the campus, but there was no
sign of him or the big truck. We drove in and out of town a couple of times-and
up Maiden Hill, to the quarries, just to see if the hauler was safely back at
home; it wasn't. We drove around all night.

"Think!" Dan instructed me. "What will he
do?"

"I don't know," I said. We were coming back into town,
passing the gas station next to St. Michael's School. The predawn light had a
flattering effect on the shabby, parochial playground; the early light bathed
the ruts in the ruptured macadam and made the surface of the playground appear
as smooth as the surface of a lake unruffled by any wind. The house where the
nuns lived was completely dark, and then the sun rose-a pink sliver of light
lay flat upon the playground; and the newly whitewashed stone archway that
sheltered the statue of the sainted Mary Magdalene reflected the pink light brightly
back to me. The only problem was, the holy goalie was not in her goal.

"Stop the car," I said to Dan. He stopped; he turned
around. We drove into the parking lot behind St. Michael's, and Dan inched the
car out onto the ratted surface of the playground; he drove right up to the
empty stone archway.

        
 
Owen had done a very neat job. At the time, I
wasn't sure of the equipment he would have used-maybe those funny little
chisels and spreaders, the things he called wedges and feathers; but the tap-tap-tap
of metal on stone would have awakened the ever-vigilant nuns. Maybe he used one
of those special granite saws; the blade is diamond-studded; I'm sure it would
have done a faultless job of taking Mary Magdalene clean off her feet-actually,
he'd taken her feet clean off her pedestal. It's even possible that he used a
touch of dynamite- artfully placed, of course. I wouldn't put it past him to
have devised a way to blast the sainted Mary Magdalene off her pedestal-I'm
sure he could have muffled the explosion so skillfully that the nuns would have
slept right through it. Later, when I asked him how he did it, he would give me
his usual answer.

"FAITH AND PRAYER. FAITH AND PRAYER-THEY WORK, THEY REALLY
DO."

"That statue's got to weigh three or four hundred
pounds!" Dan Needham said. Surely the heavy equipment that Hester had seen
would have included some kind of hydraulic hoist or crane, although that
wouldn't have helped him get Mary Magdalene up the long staircase in the Main
Academy Building-or up on the stage of The Great Hall. He would have had to use
a hand dolly for that; and it wouldn't have been easy.

"I'VE MOVED HEAVIER GRAVESTONES," he would say, later;
but I don't imagine he was in the habit of moving gravestones upstairs. When
Dan and I got to the Main Academy Building and climbed to The Great Hall, the
janitor was already sitting on one of the front-row benches, just staring up at
the saintly figure; it was as if the janitor thought that Mary Magdalene would
speak to him, if he would be patient enough-even though Dan and I immediately
noticed that Mary was not her usual self.

"It's him who did it-that little fella they threw out,
don't you suppose?" the janitor asked Dan, who was speechless. We sat
beside the janitor on the front-row bench in the early light. As always, with
Owen Meany, there was the necessary consideration of the symbols involved. He
had removed Mary Magdalene's arms, above the elbows, so that her gesture of
beseeching the assembled audience would seem all the more an act of
supplication-and all the more helpless. Dan and I both knew that Owen suffered
an obsession with armlessness-this was Watahantowet's familiar totem, this was
what Owen had done to my armadillo. My mother's dressmaker's dummy was armless,
too. But neither Dan nor I was prepared for Mary Magdalene being headless-for
her head was cleanly sawed or chiseled or blasted off. Because my mother's
dummy was also headless, I thought that Mary Magdalene bore her a stony three-
or four-hundred-pound resemblance; my mother had the better figure, but Mary
Magdalene was taller. She was also taller than the headmaster, even without her
head; compared to Randy White, the decapitated Mary Magdalene was a little
bigger than life-sized-her shoulders and the stump of her neck stood taller
" above the podium onstage than the headmaster would. And Owen had placed
the holy goalie on no pedestal. He had bolted her to the stage floor. And he
had strapped her with those same steel bands the quarrymen used to hold the
granite slabs on the flatbed; he had bound her to the podium and fastened her
to the floor, making quite certain that she would not be as easily removed from
the stage as Dr. Dolder's Volkswagen.

"I suppose," Dan said to the janitor, "that those
metal bands are pretty securely attached."

"Yup!" the janitor said.

"I suppose those bolts go right through the podium, and
right through the stage," Dan said, "and I'll bet he put those nuts
on pretty tight."

"Nope!" the janitor said. "He welded everything
together."

"That's pretty tight," said Dan Needham.

"Yup!" the janitor said. I had forgotten: Owen had
learned welding-Mr. Meany had wanted at least one of his quarrymen to be a
welder, and Owen, who was such a natural at learning, had been the one to
learn.

"Have you told the headmaster?" Dan asked the janitor.

"Nope!" the janitor said. "I ain't goin' to,
either," he said-"not this time."

"I suppose it wouldn't do any good for him to know,
anyway," Dan said.

"That's what I thought!" the janitor said. Dan and I
went to the school dining hall, where we were unfamiliar faces at breakfast;
but we were very hungry, after driving around all night-and besides, I wanted
to pass the

        
 
word: "Tell everyone to get to morning
meeting a little early," I told my Mends. I heard Dan passing the word to
some of his friends on the faculty: "If you go to only one more morning
meeting for the rest of your life, I think this should be the one."

Dan and I left the dining hall together. There wasn't time to
return to Waterhouse Hall and take a shower before morning meeting, although we
badly needed one. We were both anxious for Owen, and agitated-not knowing how
his presentation of the mutilated Mary Magdalene might make his dismissal from
the academy appear more justified than it was; we were worried how his
desecration of the statue of a saint might give those colleges and universities
that were sure to accept him a certain reluctance.

"Not to mention what the Catholic Church-I mean, Saint
Michael's-is going to do to him," Dan said. "I better have a talk
with the head guy over there-Father What's-His-Name.''

"Do you know him?" I asked Dan.

"No, not really," Dan said; "but I think he's a
friendly sort of fellow-Father O'Somebody, I think. I wish I could remember his
name-O'Malley, O'Leary, O'Rourke, O'Some," he said.

"I'll bet Pastor Merrill knows him," I said. And that
was why Dan and I walked to Kurd's Church before morning meeting; sometimes the
Rev. Lewis Merrill said his prayers there before walking to the Main Academy
Building; sometimes he was up early, just biding his time in the vestry office.
Dan and I saw the trailer-truck from the Meany Granite Company parked behind
the vestry. Owen was sitting in the vestry office-in Mr. MerrilFs usual chair,
behind Mr. Mer-rill's desk, tipping back in the creaky old chair and rolling
the chair around on its squeaky casters. There was no sign of Pastor Merrill.

"I HAVE AN EARLY APPOINTMENT," Owen explained to Dan
and me. "PASTOR MERRILL'S A LITTLE LATE."

He looked all right-a little tired, a little nervous, or just
restless. He couldn't sit still in the chair, and he fiddled with the desk
drawers, pulling them open and closing them-not appearing to pay any attention
to what was inside the drawers, but just opening and closing them because they
were there.

"You've had a busy night, Owen," Dan told him.

"PRETTY BUSY," said Owen Meany.

"How are you?" I asked him.

"I'M FINE," he said. "I BROKE THE LAW, I GOT
CAUGHT, I'M GOING TO PAY-THAT'S HOW IT IS," he said.

"You got screwed!" I said.

"A LITTLE BIT," he nodded-then he shrugged. "IT'S
NOT AS IF I'M ENTIRELY INNOCENT," he added.

"The important thing for you to think about is getting into
college," Dan told him. "The important thing is that you get in, and
that you get a scholarship."

"THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS," said Owen Meany. He
opened, in rapid succession, the three drawers on the right-hand side of the
Rev. Mr. Merrill's desk; then he closed them, just as rapidly. That was when
Pastor Merrill walked into the vestry office.

"What are you doing?" Mr. Merrill asked Owen.

"NOTHING," said Owen Meany. "WAITING FOR
YOU."

"I mean, at my desk-you're sitting at my desk," Mr.
Merrill said. Owen looked surprised.

"I GOT HERE EARLY," he explained. "I WAS JUST
SITTING IN YOUR CHAIR-I WASN'T DOING ANYTHING ." He got up and walked to
the front of Pastor Merrill's desk, where he sat down in his usual chair-at
least, I guess it was his "usual" chair; it reminded me of "the
singer's seat" in Graham McSwiney's funny studio. I was disappointed that
I hadn't heard from Mr. McSwiney; I guessed that he had no news about Big Black
Buster Freebody.

"I'm sorry if I snapped at you, Owen," Pastor Merrill
said. "I know how upset you must be."

"I'M FINE," Owen said.

"I was glad you called me," Mr. Merrill told Owen.
Owen shrugged. I had not seen him sneer before, but it seemed to me that he
almost sneered at the Rev. Mr. Merrill.

"Oh, well!" Mr. Merrill said, sitting down in his
creaky desk chair. "Well, I'm very sorry, Owen-for everything," he
said. He had a way of entering a room-a classroom, The Great Hall, Kurd's
Church, or even his own vestry office-as if he were offering an apology to
everyone. At the same time, he was struggling so sincerely that you didn't want
to stop or interrupt him. You liked him and just wished that he could relax;
yet he made you feel guilty for being irritated with him, because of how hard
and unsuccessfully he was trying to put you at ease.

        
 
Dan said: "I came here to ask you if you
knew the name of the head guy at Saint Michael's-it's the same guy, for the
church and for the school, isn't it?"

"That's right," Pastor Merrill said. "It's Father
Findley."

"I guess I don't know him," Dan said. " thought
it was a Father O'Somebody."

"No, it's not an O'Anybody," said Mr. Merrill.
"It's Father Findley." The Rev. Mr. Merrill did not yet know why Dan
wanted to know who the Catholic "head guy" was. Owen, of course, knew
what Dan was up to.

"YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING FOR ME, DAN," Owen
said.

"I can try to keep you out of jail," Dan said. "I
want you to get into college-and to have a scholarship. But, at the very least,
I can try to keep you from getting charged with theft and vandalism," Dan
said.

"What did you do, Owen?" the Rev. Mr. Merrill asked
him. Owen bowed his head; for a moment, I thought he was going to cry-but then
he shrugged off this moment, too. He looked directly into the Rev. Lewis
Merrill's eyes.

"I WANT YOU TO SAY A PRAYER FOR ME," said Owen Meany.

"A p-p-p-prayer-for you?" the Rev. Mr. Merrill
stuttered.

"JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING-IF IT'S NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK,"
Owen said. "IT'S YOUR BUSINESS, ISN'T IT?"

The Rev. Mr. Merrill considered this. "Yes," he said
cautiously. "At morning meeting?" he asked.

"TODAY-IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY," said Owen Meany.

"Yes, all right," the Rev. Lewis Merrill said; but he
looked as if he might panic. Dan took my arm and steered me toward the door of
the vestry office.

"We'll leave you alone, if you want to talk," Dan said
to Mr. Merrill and Owen.

"Was there anything else you wanted?" Mr. Merrill
asked Dan.

"No, just Father Findley-his name," Dan said.