A prayer for Owen Meany (63 page)

"I suppose you think this is funny \" the headmaster
said to the assembled school; but nobody was laughing. "Well, I'll tell
you what this is," said Randy White. "This is a crime," he said.
"This is vandalism, this is theft-and desecration! This is willful abuse
of personal, even sacred property."

One of the students yelled. "What's the hymn?" the
student yelled.

"What did you say?" Randy White said.

"Tell us the number of the hymn!" someone shouted.

"What's the hymnT' said a few more students-in unison. I
had not seen the Rev. Mr. Merrill climb-I suppose, shakily-to the stage; when I
noticed him, he was standing beside the martyred Mary Magdalene. "The hymn
is on page three-eighty-eight," Pastor Merrill said clearly. The
headmaster spoke sharply to him, but we couldn't hear what the headmaster
said-there was too much creaking of benches and bumping of hymnals as we rose
to sing. I don't know what influenced Mr. Merrill's choice of the hymn. If Owen
had told me about his dream, I might have found the hymn especially ominous;
but as it was, it was simply familiar-a frequent choice, probably because it
was victorious in tone, and squarely in that category of "pilgrimage and
conflict," which is often so inspiring to young men. The Son of God goes
forth to war, A king-ly crown to gain; His blood-red ban-ner streams a-far; Who
follows in his train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, Tri-um-phant o-ver
pain, Who pa-tient bears his cross be-low, He fol-lows in his train.

It was a hymn that Owen liked, and we belted it out; we sang
much more heartily-much more defiantly-than usual. The headmaster had nowhere
to stand; he occupied the center stage- but with nothing to stand behind, he
looked exposed and unsure of himself. As we roared out the hymn, the Rev. Lewis
Merrill appeared to gain in confidence-and even in stature. Although he didn't
look exactly comfortable beside the headless Mary Magdalene, he stood so close
to her that the podium light shone on him, too. When we finished the hymn, the
Rev. Mr. Merrill said: "Let us pray. Let us pray for Owen Meany," he
said. It was very quiet in The Great Hall, and although our heads were bowed,
our eyes were on the headmaster. We waited for Mr. Merrill to begin. Perhaps he
was trying to begin, I thought; then I realized that-awkward as ever-he had
meant for us to pray for Owen. What he'd meant was that we were to offer our
silent prayers for Owen Meany; and as the silence went on, and on, it became
clear that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had no intention of hurrying us. He was not a
brave man, I thought; but he was trying to be brave. On and on, we prayed and
prayed; and if I had known about Owen's dream, I would have prayed much harder.
Suddenly, the headmaster said, "That's enough."

"I'ms-s-s-sorry," Mr. Merrill stuttered, "but/'M
say when it's 'enough.' "

I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost; he
realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to
tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed; and we kept praying. Even as
awkward as he was, the Rev. Mr. Merrill had made it clear to us that there was
no end to praying for Owen Meany. After a while, Randy White left the stage; he
had the good sense, if not the decency, to leave quietly-we could hear his
careful footsteps on the marble staircase, and the morning ice was still so
brittle that we could even hear him crunching his way on the path outside the
Main Academy Building. When we could no longer hear his footsteps in our silent
prayers for Owen Meany, Pastor Merrill said, "Amen."

Oh God, how often I have wished that I could relive that moment;
I didn't know how to pray very well then-I didn't even believe in prayer. If I
were given the opportunity to pray for Owen Meany now, I could do a better job
of it; knowing what I know now, I might be able to pray hard enough. It would
have helped me, of course, if I could have seen his diary; but he wasn't
offering it-he was keeping his diary to himself. So often in its pages he had
written his name-hisJuU name-in the big block letters he called MONUMENT STYLE
or GRAVESEND LETTERING; so many times he had transcribed, in his diary, his
name exactly the way he had seen it on Scrooge's grave. And I mean, before all
the ROTC business- even before he was thrown out of school and knew that the
U.S. Army would be his ticket through college. I mean, before he knew he was
signing up-even then he had written his name in that way you see names
inscribed on graves. LT PAUL O. MEANY, JR. That's how he wrote it; that was
what the Ghost of the Future had seen on Scrooge's grave; that and the date-the
date was written in the diary, too. He wrote the date in the diary many, many
times, but he never told me what it was. Maybe I could have helped him, if I'd
known that date. Owen believed he knew when he was going to die; he also
believed he knew his rank-he would die a first lieutenant.

        
 
And after the dream, he believed he knew
more. The certainty of his convictions was always a little scary, and his diary
entry about the dream is no exception. YESTERDAY I WAS KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL.
LAST NIGHT I HAD A DREAM. NOW I KNOW FOUR THINGS. I KNOW THAT MY VOICE DOESN'T
CHANGE-BUT I STILL DON'T KNOW WHY. I KNOW THAT I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT. I KNOW
WHEN I'M GOING TO DIE-AND NOW A DREAM HAS SHOWN ME HOW I'M GOING TO DIE. I'M
GOING TO BE A HERO\ I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO
DO LOOKS VERY HARD.

THE FINGER

UNTIL THE SUMMER of , I felt that I couldn't wait to grow up and
be treated with the kind of respect  imagined adults were routinely
offered and adamantly thought they deserved-I couldn't wait to wallow in the
freedom and the privileges I imagined grown-ups enjoyed. Until that summer, my
long apprenticeship to maturity struck me as arduous and humiliating; Randy
White had confiscated my fake draft card, and I wasn't yet old enough to buy
beer-I wasn't independent enough to merit my own place to live, I wasn't
earning enough to afford my own car, and I wasn't something enough to persuade
a woman to bestow her sexual favors upon me. Not one woman had I ever
persuaded! Until the summer of ', thought that childhood and adolescence were a
purgatory without apparent end; I thought that youth, in a word, '' sucked.''
But Owen Meany, who believed he knew when and how he was going to die, was in
no hurry to grow up. And as to my calling the period of our youth a
"purgatory," Owen said simply, "THERE IS NO PURGATORY-THAT'S A
CATHOLIC INVENTION. THERE'S LIFE ON EARTH, THERE'S HEAVEN-AND THERE'S
HELL."

"I think life on earth is hell," I said.

"I HOPE YOU HAVE A NICE SUMMER," Owen said. It was the
first summer we spent apart. I suppose I should be

        
 
grateful for that summer, because it afforded
me my first glimpse of what my life without Owen would be like-you might say,
it prepared me. By the end of the summer of , Owen Meany had made me afraid of
what the next phase was going to be. I didn't want to grow up anymore; what I
wanted was for Owen and me to go on being kids for the rest of our
lives-sometimes Canon Mackie tells me, rather ungenerously, that I have
succeeded. Canon Campbell, God Rest His Soul, used to tell me that being a kid
for the rest of my life was a perfectly honorable aspiration. I spent that
summer of ' in Sawyer Depot, working for my Uncle Alfred. After what had
happened to Owen, I didn't want to work for the Gravesend Academy Admissions
Office and give guided tours of the school-not anymore. The Eastman Lumber
Company offered me a good job. It was tiring, outdoor work; but I got to spend
my time with Noah and Simon-and there were parties on Loveless Lake almost
every night, and swimming and waterskiing on Loveless Lake nearly every day,
after work, and every weekend. Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha welcomed me into
the family; they gave me Hester's room for the summer. Hester was keeping her
school-year apartment in Durham, working as a waitress in one of those sandy,
lobster-house restaurants ... I think it was in Kittery or Portsmouth. After
she got off work, she and Owen would cruise ' 'the strip'' at Hampton Beach in
the tomato-red pickup. Hester's school-year roommates were elsewhere for the
summer, and Hester and Owen spent every night in her Durham apartment, alone.
They were "living together as man and wife"-that was the disapproving
and frosty way Aunt Martha put it, when she discussed it at all, which was
rarely. Despite the fact that Owen and Hester were living together as man and
wife, Noah and Simon and I could never be sure if they were actually
"doing it." Simon was sure that Hester could not live without doing
it, Noah somehow felt that Owen and Hester had done it-but that, for some
special reason, they had stopped. I had the strangest feeling that anything
between them was possible: that they did it and had always done it with
abandon; that they had never done it, but that they might be doing something
even worse-or better-and that the real bond between them (whether they
"did it" or not) was even more passionate and far sadder than sex. I
felt cut off from Owen-I was working with wood and smelling a cool, northern
air that was scented with trees; he was working with granite and feeling the
sun beat down on the unshaded quarry, inhaling the rock dust and smelling the
dynamite. Chain saws were relatively new then; the Eastman Company used them
for their logging operations, but very selectively- they were heavy and
cumbersome, not nearly so light and powerful as they are today. In those days,
we brought the logs out of the woods by horse and crawler tractor, and the
timber was often cut by crosscut saws and axes. We loaded the logs onto the
trucks by hand, using peaveys or cant dogs; nowadays, Noah and Simon have shown
me, they use self-loading trucks, grapple skidders, and chippers. Even the
sawmill has changed; there's no more sawdust! But in ', we debarked the logs at
the mill and sawed them into various grades and sizes of lumber, and all that
bark and sawdust was wasted; nowadays, Noah and Simon refer to that stuff as
"wood-fired waste" or even "energy"-they use it to make
their own electricity!

"How's that for progress?" Simon is always saying. Now
we're the grown-ups we were in such a hurry to become; now we can drink all the
beer we want, with no one asking us for proof of our age. Noah and Simon have
their own houses-their own wives and children-and they do an admirable job of
looking after old Uncle Alfred and my Aunt Martha, who is still a lovely woman,
although she's quite gray; she looks much the way Grandmother looked to me in
the summer of '. Uncle Alfred's had two bypass operations, but he's doing fine.
The Eastman Company has provided him and my Aunt Martha with a good and long
life. My aunt manifests only the most occasional vestige of her old interest in
who my actual father is or was; last Christmas, in Sawyer Depot, she managed to
get me alone for a second and she said, "Do you still not know? You can
tell me. I'll bet you know! How could you not have found out something-in all
this time?"

I put my finger to my lips, as if I were going to tell her
something that I didn't want Uncle Alfred or Dan or Noah or Simon to hear. Aunt
Martha grew very attentive-her eyes sparkling, her smile widening with mischief
and conspiracy.

"Dan Needham is the best father a boy could have," I
whispered to her.

"I know-Dan is wonderful," Aunt Martha said
impatiently; this was not what she wanted to hear. And what do Noah and Simon
and I still talk about-after all these years? We talk about what Owen
"knew" or thought he

        
 
knew; and we talk about Hester. We'll talk
about Hester in our graves!

"Hester the Molested" Simon says.

"Who would have thought any of it possibleT' Noah asks. And
every Christmas, Uncle Alfred or Aunt Martha will say: "I believe that
Hester will be home for Christmas next year-that's what she says."

And Noah and Simon will say: "That's what she always
says."

I suppose that Hester is my aunt and uncle's only unhappi-ness.
Even in the summer of ', I felt this was true. They treated her differently
from the way they treated Noah and Simon, and she made them pay for it; how
angry they made her! She took her anger away from Sawyer Depot and everywhere
she went she found other things and people to fuel her colossal anger. I don't
think Owen was angry, not exactly. But they shared a sense of some unfairness;
there was an atmosphere of injustice that enveloped them both. Owen felt that
God had assigned him a role that he was powerless to change; Owen's sense of
his own destiny-his belief that he was on a mission-robbed him of his capacity
for fun. In the summer of ', he was only twenty; but from the moment he was
told that Jack Kennedy was "diddling" Marilyn Monroe, he stopped
doing anything for pleasure. Hester was just plain pissed off; she just didn't
give a shit. They were such a depressing couple! But in the summer of ', I
thought my Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred were a perfect couple; and yet they
depressed me because of how happy they were. In their happiness they reminded
me of the brief time my mother and Dan Needham had been together-and how happy
they'd been, too. Meanwhile, that summer, I couldn't manage to have a
successful date. Noah and Simon did everything they could for me. They
introduced me to every girl on Loveless Lake. It was a summer of wet bathing
suits drying from the radio aerial of Noah's car-and the closest I came to sex
was the view I had of the crotches of various girls' bathing suits, snapping in
the wind that whipped past Noah's car. It was a convertible, a black-and-white
' Chevy, the kind of car that had fins. Noah would let me take it to the
drive-in, if and when I managed to get a date.

"How was the movie?" Noah would always ask me-when I
brought the car home, always much too early.