A prayer for Owen Meany (84 page)

"You can borrow the pickup, if it's easier," Mr. Meany
suggested. But that wasn't necessary; with Mr. Meany's help, I managed to fit
the dummy into the Beetle. I had to detach the former Mary Magdalene's naked
white arms from the wire-mesh sockets under the dummy's shoulders. The dummy
didn't have any feet; she rose from a rod on a thin, flat pedestal-and this I
stuck out the rolled-down window by the passenger's seat, which I tilted
forward so that the dummy's boyish hips and slender waist and full bosom and
small, squared shoulders could extend into the back seat. If she'd had a head,
she wouldn't have fit.

"Thank you," I said to Mr. Meany.

"Well, sure!" he said. I parked my Volkswagen on Tan
Lane, well away from Hurd's Church and the blinking yellow light at the
intersection with Front Street. I jammed the baseball in my pocket; I carried
the dummy under one arm, and Mary Magdalene's long, pale arms under the other.
I reassembled my mother in the flower beds that were dimly glowing in the
dark-colored light that shone through the stained-glass windows of the chancel.
The light was still on in the vestry office, but Pastor Merrill was practicing
his prayers for Owen in the chancel of the old stone church; occasionally, he
would dally with the organ. From his choirmaster days at the Congregational
Church, Mr. Merrill had retained an amateur command of the organ. I was
familiar with the hymns he was toying with-trying to get himself in the mood to
pray for Owen Meany.

        
 
He played "Crown Him with Many
Crowns"; then he tried "The Son of God Goes Forth to War." There
was a bed of portulaca where it was best to stand the dressmaker's dummy; the
fleshy-leaved, low-to-the-ground plants covered the pedestal, and the small
flowers-most of which were closed for the night-didn't clash with the
poinsettia-red dress. The dress completely covered the wire-mesh hips of the
dummy; and the thin, black stem upon which the dummy rose from its pedestal was
invisible in the semidarkness-as if my mother didn't exactly have her feet on
the ground, but chose instead to hover just above the flower beds. I walked
back and forth between the flower beds and the door to the vestry, trying to
see how the dummy appeared from that distance-angling my mother's body so that
her unforgettable figure would be instantly recognizable. It was perfect how
the dark-colored light from the chancel threw exactly the right amount of
illumination upon her-there was just enough light to accentuate the scarlet
glare of her dress, but not enough light to make her headlessness too apparent.
Her head and her feet were just missing-or else consumed by the shadows of the
night. From the door of the vestry, my mother's figure was both vividly alive
and ghostly; "The Lady in Red" looked ready to sing. The effect of
the blinking yellow light at the corner of Tan Lane and Front Street was also
enhancing; and even the headlights of an occasional passing car were far enough
away to contribute to the uncertainty of the figure in the bed of portulaca. I
squeezed the baseball; I had not held one in my hand since that last Little
League game. I worried about my grip, because the first two joints of your
index finger are important in throwing a baseball; but I didn't have far to
throw it. I waited for Mr. Merrill to stop playing the organ; the second the
music stopped, I threw the baseball-as hard as I could-through one of the tall,
stained-glass windows of the chancel. It made a small hole in the glass, and a
beam of white light-as if from a flashlight-shone upward into the leaves of a
towering elm tree, behind which I concealed myself while I waited for Pastor
Merrill. It took him a moment to discover what had been thrown through one of
the sacred chancel windows. I suppose that the baseball must have rolled past
the organ pipes, or even close to the pulpit.

"Johnny!" I heard my father calling. The door from the
church into the vestry opened and closed. "Johnny-I know you're angry, but
this is very childish!" he called. I heard his footsteps in the corridor
where all the clothes pegs were- outside the vestry office. He flung open the
vestry door, the baseball in his right hand, and he blinked into the blinking
yellow light at the corner of Tan Lane and Front Street. "Johnny!" he
called again. He stepped outside; he looked left, toward the Gravesend campus;
he looked right, along Front Street-then he glanced into the flower beds that
were glowing in the light from the stained-glass windows of the chancel. Then
the Rev. Lewis Merrill dropped to his knees and pressed the baseball hard
against his heart.

"Tabby!" he said in a whisper. He dropped the ball,
which rolled out to the Front Street sidewalk. "God-forgive me!" said
Pastor Merrill. "Tabby-/ didn't tell him! I promised you I wouldn't, and I
didn't-it wasn't me!" my father cried. His head began to sway-he couldn't
look at her-and he covered his eyes with both hands. He fell on his side, his
head touching the grass border of the vestry path, and he drew up his knees to
his chest-as if he were cold, or a baby going to sleep. He kept his eyes
covered tightly, and he moaned: "Tabby- forgive me, please!"

After that, he began to babble incoherently; his voice was just
a murmur, and he made slight jerking or twitching movements where he lay on the
ground. There was just enough noise and motion from him to assure me that he
wasn't dead. I confess: I was slightly disappointed that the shock of my mother
appearing before him hadn't killed him. I picked up the dressmaker's dummy and
put her under my arm; one of Mary Magdalene's dead-white arms fell off, and I
carried this under my other arm. I picked up the baseball from the sidewalk and
jammed it back into my pocket. I wondered if my father could hear me moving
around, because he seemed to contort himself more tightly into a fetal position
and to cover his eyes even more tightly-as if he feared my mother were coming
nearer to him. Perhaps those bone-white, elongated arms had especially
frightened him-as if Death itself had exaggerated my mother's reach, and the
Rev. Mr. Merrill was sure that she was going to touch him. I put the dummy and
Mary Magdalene's arms into my Volkswagen and drove to the breakwater at Rye
Harbor. It was midnight. I threw the baseball as far into the harbor as I
could; it made a very small splash there-not disturbing the gulls. I

        
 
flung Mary Magdalene's long, heavy arms into the
harbor, too; they made more of a splash, but the boats slapping on their
moorings and the surf striking the breakwater outside the harbor had
conditioned the gulls there to remain undisturbed by any noise of water. Then I
climbed out along the breakwater with the dummy in the red dress; the tide was
high, and going out. I waded into the harbor channel, off the tip of the
breakwater; I was quickly submerged, up to my chest, and I had to retreat to
the last slab of granite on the breakwater-so that I could throw the dummy as
far into the ocean as I could. I wanted to be sure that the dummy reached into
the channel, which I knew was very, very deep. For a moment, I hugged the body
of the dummy to my face; but whatever scent had once clung to the red dress had
long ago departed. Then I threw the dummy into the channel. For a horrible
moment, it floated. There was air trapped under the hollow wire-mesh of the
body. The dummy rolled over on its back in the water. I saw my mother's
wonderful bosom above the surface of the water-THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE
MOTHERS! as Owen Meany had said. Then the dummy rolled again; bubbles of air
escaped from the body, and "The Lady in Red" sank into the channel
off the breakwater at Rye Harbor, where Owen Meany had firmly believed he had a
right to sit and watch the sea. I saw the sun come up, like a bright marble on
the granite-gray surface of the Atlantic. I drove to the apartment I shared
with Hester in Durham and took a shower and dressed for Owen's funeral. I
didn't know where Hester was, but I didn't care; I already knew how she felt
about his funeral. I'd last seen Hester at  Front Street; with my
grandmother, Hester and I had watched Bobby Kennedy be killed in Los
Angeles-over and over again. That was when Hester had said: "Television
gives good disaster."

Owen had never said a word to me about Bobby Kennedy's
assassination. That had happened in June, , when time was running out on Owen
Meany. I'm sure that Owen was too preoccupied with his own death to have
anything to say about Bobby Kennedy's. It was early in the morning, and I kept
so few things in Hester's apartment, it was no trouble to pack up what I
wanted; mostly books. Owen had kept some books at Hester's, too, and I packed
one of them-C. S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms. Owen had circled a
favorite Sentence: "I write for the unlearned about things in which I am
unlearned myself." After I finished packing-and I'd left Hester a check
for my share of the rent for the rest of the summer-I still had time to kill, so
I read parts of Owen's diary; I looked at the more disjointed entries, which
were composed in a grocery-list style, as if he'd been making notes to himself.
I learned that huachuca-as in Fort Huachuca- means "mountain of the
winds." And there were several pages of Vietnamese vocabulary and
expressions-Owen had paid special attention to "COMMAND FORMS OF
VERBS." Two commands were written out several times- the pronunciation was
emphasized; Owen had spelled the Vietnamese phonetically.

"MAM SOON- 'LIE DOWN'! DOONG SA-'DON'T BE AFRAID'!"

I read that part over and over again, until I felt I had the
pronunciation right. There was quite a good pencil drawing of a phoenix, that
mythical bird that was supposed to burn itself on a funeral pyre and then rise
up from its own ashes. Under the drawing, Owen had written: "OFTEN A
SYMBOL OF REBORN IDEALISM, OR HOPE-OR AN EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY." And on
another page, jotted hastily in the margin-with no connection to anything else
on the page-he had scrawled: "THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE." This
marginalia was not emphasized; in no way had he indicated that this was a
message for me-but certainly, I thought, he must have remembered that time when
he'd sat at Mr. Merrill's desk, talking to Dan and me and opening and closing the
desk drawers, without appearing to notice the contents. Of course, he had seen
the baseball-he had known then who my father was-but Owen Meany's faith was
huge; he had also known that God would tell me who my father was. Owen believed
it was unnecessary to tell me himself. Besides: he knew it would only
disappoint me. Then I flipped to one of the parts of the diary where he'd
mentioned me.

"THE HARDEST THING I EVER HAD TO DO WAS TO CUT OFF MY BEST
FRIEND'S FINGER! WHEN THIS IS OVER, MY BEST FRIEND SHOULD MAKE A CLEAN BREAK
FROM THE PAST-HE SHOULD SIMPLY START OVER AGAIN. JOHN SHOULD GO TO CANADA. I'M

        
 
SURE IT'S A NICE COUNTRY TO LIVE IN-AND THIS
COUNTRY IS MORALLY EXHAUSTED."

Then I flipped to the end of the diary and reread his last
entry.

"TODAY'S THE DAY! '. . . HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE
WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL
NEVER DIE.' "

Then I closed Owen's diary and packed it with the rest of my
things. Grandmother was an early riser; there were a few photographs of her,
and of my mother, that I wanted from  Front Street-and more of my clothes.
I wanted to have breakfast in the rose garden with Grandmother; there was still
a lot of time before Owen's funeral-enough time to tell Grandmother where I was
going. Then I drove over to Waterhouse Hall and told Dan Needham what my plans
were; also, Dan had something I wanted to take with me, and I knew he wouldn't
object-he'd been bashing his toes on it for years! I wanted the granite
doorstop that Owen had made for Dan and my mother, his wedding present to them,
the lettering in his famous, gravestone style-JULY, -and neatly beveled along
the sides, and perfectly edged at the corners; it was crude, but it had been
Owen's earliest known work with the diamond wheel, and I wanted it. Dan told me
that he understood everything, and that he loved me. I told him: "You're
the best father a boy ever had-and the only father I ever needed."

Then it was time for Owen Meany's funeral. Our own Gravesend
chief of police, Ben Pike, stood at the heavy double doors of Kurd's Church-as
if he intended to frisk Owen Meany's mourners for the "murder
weapon," the long-lost "instrument of death"; I was tempted to
tell the bastard where he could find the fucking baseball. Fat Mr. Checkering
was there, still grieving that he'd decided to let Owen Meany bat for me-that
he'd told Owen to "swing away." The Thurstons-Buzzy's parents-were
there, although they were Catholics and only recently had attended their own
son's funeral. And the Catholic priest-Father Findley-he was there, as was Mrs.
Hoyt, despite how badly the town had treated her for her
"anti-American" draft-counseling activities. Rector Wiggin and Barb
Wiggin were not in attendance; they had so fervently sought to hold Owen's
service in Christ Church, no doubt they were miffed that they'd been rejected.
Captain Wiggin, that crazed ex-pilot, had claimed that nothing could please him
more than a bang-up funeral for a hero. A unit of the New Hampshire National
Guard provided a local funeral detail; they served as Owen's so-called honor
guard. Owen had once told me that they do this for money-they get one day's
pay. The casualty assistance officer-Owen's body escort-was a young,
frightened-looking first lieutenant who rendered a military salute more
frequently than I thought was required of him; it was his first tour of duty in
the Casualty Branch. The so-called survivor assistance officer was none other
than Owen's favorite professor of Military Science from the University of New Hampshire;
Colonel Eiger greeted me most solemnly at the heavy double doors.

"I guess we were wrong about your little friend,"
Colonel Eiger said to me.