A prayer for Owen Meany (87 page)

"I'd like to know how that idiot got his hands on a North
Vietnamese flag!" my grandmother said. Thus, with precious little to
interrupt them, the years have also swung up Front Street and marched on by.
Owen Meany taught me to keep a diary; but my diary reflects my unexciting life,
just as Owen's diary reflected the vastly more interesting things that happened
to him. Here's a typical entry from my diary.

"Toronto: November ,-the Bishop Strachan greenhouse burned
down today, and the faculty and students had to evacuate the school
buildings."

And let's see: I also note in my diary every day when the girls
sing "Sons of God" in morning chapel. I also entered in my diary the
day that a journalist from some rock-music magazine tried to stop me for an
on-the-spot "interview" as I was about to take a seat in morning
chapel. He was a wild, hairy young man in a purple caftan-oblivious to how the
girls stared at him and seemingly held together by wires and cords that
entangled him in his cumbersome recording equipment. There he was,
uninvited-unannounced!-sticking a microphone in my face and asking me, as
Hester the Molester's "kissing cousin," if I didn't agree that it all
began to "happen" for Hester after she met someone called "Janet
the Planet."

"I beg your pardon!" I said. Around me, streams of
girls were staring and giggling. The interviewer was interested in asking me
about Hester's "influences"; he was writing a piece about Hester's
"early years," and he had some ideas about who had influenced her-he
said he wanted to "bounce" his ideas off me\ I said I didn't know who
the fuck "Janet the Planet" even was, but if he was interested in who
had "influenced" Hester, he should begin with Owen Meany, He didn't
know the name, he asked me how to spell it. He was very puzzled, he thought
he'd heard of everyone!

"And would this be someone who, was an influence in her
early years?" he wanted to know. I assured him that Owen's influence on
Hester could be counted among the earliest. And let's see: what else? There was
Mrs. Meany's death, not long after Owen's; I made note of it. And there was
that spring when I was in Gravesend for Grandmother's memorial service- it was
at the old Congregational Church, Grandmother's lifelong church, and Pastor
Merrill did not perform the service; whoever had replaced him at the Congregational
Church was the officiant. There was still a lot of snow on the ground that
spring-old, dead-gray snow-and I was opening another beer for Dan and myself in
the kitchen at  Front Street, when I happened to look out the kitchen
window at the withered rose garden, and there was Mr. Meany! Grayer than the
old snow, and following some melted and refrozen footprints in the crust,

        
 
he made his way slowly toward the house. I
thought he was a kind of apparition. Speechless, I pointed at him, and Dan
said: "It's just poor old Mister Meany."

The Meany Granite Company was dead and gone; the quarries had
been unworked--and for sale-for years. Mr. Meany had a part-time job as a meter
reader for the electric company. He appeared in the rose garden once a month,
Dan said; the electric meter was on the rose-garden side of the house. I didn't
want to speak with him; but I watched him through the window. I'd written him
my condolences when I'd heard that Mrs. Meany had died-and how she'd died- but
he'd never written back; I hadn't expected him to write back. Mrs. Meany had
caught fire. She'd been sitting too close to the fireplace and a spark, an
ember, had ignited the American flag, which-Mr. Meany told Dan-she was
accustomed to wrapping around herself, like a shawl. Although her burns had not
appeared to be that severe, she died in the hospital-of undisclosed
complications. When I saw Mr. Meany reading the electric meter at  Front
Street, I realized that Owen's medal had not been consumed with the flag in the
fire. Mr. Meany wore the medal-he always wore it, Dan said. The cloth that
shielded the pin above the medal was much faded-red and white stripes on a
chevron of blue-and the gold of the medal itself blazed less brightly than it
had blazed that day when a beam of sunlight had been reflected by it in Kurd's
Church; but the raised, unfurled wings of the American eagle were no less
visible. Whenever I think of Owen Meany's medal for heroism, I'm reminded of
Thomas Hardy's diary entry in -Owen showed it to me, that little bit about
"living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises
incipiently." I remember it whenever I think of Mr. Meany wearing Owen's
medal while he reads the electric meters. Let's see: there's not much else-there's
almost nothing to add. Only this: that it took years for me to face my memory
of how Owen Meany died-and once I forced myself to remember the details, I
could never forget how he died; I will never forget it. I am doomed to remember
this. I had never been a major participant in Fourth of July celebrations in
Gravesend; but the town was faithfully patriotic-it did not allow Independence
Day to pass unnoticed. The parade was organized at the bandstand in the center
of town, and marched nearly the whole length of Front Street, achieving peak
band noise and the maximum number of barking dogs, and accompanying children on
bicycles, at the midpoint of the march-^precisely at  Front Street, where
my grandmother was in the habit of viewing the hullabaloo from her front doorstep.
Grandmother suffered ambivalent feelings every Fourth of July; she was
patriotic enough to stand on her doorstep waving a small American flag-the flag
itself was not any larger man the palm of her hand-but at the same time, she
frowned upon all the ruckus; she frequently reprimanded the children who rode
their bicycles across her lawn, and she shouted at the dogs to stop their fool
barking. I often watched the parade pass by, too; but after my mother died,
Owen Meany and I never followed the parade on our bicycles-for the final
destination of the band and the marchers was the cemetery on Linden Street.
From  Front Street, we could hear the guns saluting the dead heroes; it
was the habit in Gravesend to conclude a Memorial Day parade and a Veterans Day
parade and an Independence Day parade with manly gunfire over the graves mat
knew too much quiet all the other days of the year. It was no different on My ,
-except that Owen Meany was in Arizona, possibly watching or even participating
in a parade at Fort Huachuca; I didn't know what Owen was doing. Dan Needham
and I had enjoyed a late breakfast with my grandmother, and we'd all taken our
coffee out on the front doorstep to wait for the parade; by the sound of it,
coming nearer, it was passing the Main Academy Building-gathering force,
bicyclists, and dogs. Dan and I sat on the stone doorstep, but my grandmother
chose to stand; sitting on a doorstep would not have measured up to Harriet
Wheelwright's high standards for women of her age and position. If I was
thinking anything-if I was thinking at all-I was considering that my life had
become a kind of doorstep-sitting, watching parades pass by. I was not working
that summer; I would not be working that fall. With my Master's degree in hand,
I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of

        
 
Massachusetts; I didn't really know what I
wanted to study, I didn't even know if I wanted to rent a room or an apartment
in Amherst, but I was scheduled to be a full-time graduate student there. I
never thought about it. So that I could carry the fullest possible course load,
I wasn't planning to teach for at least a year-not even part-time, not even one
course. Naturally, Grandmother was bankrolling my studies, and that further
contributed to my sense of myself as a doorstep-sitter. I wasn't doing
anything; there wasn't anything I had to do. Hester was in the same boat. That
Fourth of July night, we sat on the grass border of the Swasey Parkway and
watched the fireworks display over the Squamscott-Gravesend maintained a Town
Fireworks Board, and every Fourth of July the members who knew their rocketry
and bombs set up the fireworks on the docks of the academy boathouse. The
townspeople lined the Swasey Parkway, all along the grassy riverbank, and the
bombs burst in the air, and the rockets flared-they hissed when they fell into
the dirty river. There had been a small, ecological protest lately; someone
said that the fireworks disturbed the birds that nested in the tidal marsh on
the riverbank opposite the Swasey Parkway. But in a dispute between herons and
patriots, the herons are not generally favored to win; the bombardment
proceeded, as planned-the night sky was brilliantly set afire, and the
explosions gratified us all. An occasional white light spread like a newly
invented liquid across the dark surface of the Squamscott, reflecting there so
brightly that the darkened stores and offices of the town, and the huge
building that housed the town's foul textile mills, sprang up in silhouette-a
town created instantly by the explosions. The many empty windows of the textile
mills bounced back this light-the building's vast size and emptiness suggested
an industry so self-possessed that it functioned completely without a human
labor force.

"If Owen won't marry me, I'll never marry anyone,"
Hester told me between flashes and blasts. "If he won't give me babies, no
one's ever gonna give me babies."

One of the demolition experts on the dock was none other than
that old dynamiter Mr. Meany. Something like an exploding star showered over
the black river.

' 'That one looks like sperm,'' Hester said sullenly. I was not
expert enough on sperm to challenge Hester's imagery; fireworks that looked
"like sperm" seemed highly unlikely if not farfetched to me-but what
did / know? Hester was so morose, I didn't want to spend the night in Durham
with her. It was a not-quite-comfortable summer night, but there was a breeze.
I drove to  Front Street and watched the eleven o'clock news with
Grandmother; she had lately taken an interest in a terrible local channel on
which the news detailed the grim statistics of a few highway fatalities and
made no mention of the war in Vietnam; and there was a ' 'human interest''
story about a bad child who'd blinded a poor dog with a firecracker.

"Merciful Heavens!" Grandmother said. When she went to
bed, I tuned in to The Late Show-one channel was showing a so-called Creature
Feature, The Beast from , Fathoms, an old favorite of Owen's; another channel
featured Mother Is a Freshman, in which Loretta Young is a widow attending
college with her teenage daughter; but my favorite, An American in Paris, was
on a third channel. I could watch Gene Kelly dance all night; in between the
songs and dances, I switched back to the channel where the prehistoric monster
was mashing Manhattan, or I wandered out to the kitchen to get myself another
beer. I was in the kitchen when the phone rang; it was after midnight, and Owen
was so respectful of my grandmother's sleep that he never called  Front
Street at an hour when he might awaken her. At first I thought that the
different time zone-in Arizona-had confused him; but I knew he would have
called Hester in Durham and Dan in Waterhouse Hall before he found me at my
grandmother's, and I was sure that Hester or Dan, or both of them, would have
told him how late it was.

"I HOPE I DIDN'T WAKE UP YOUR GRANDMOTHER!" he said.

"The phone only rang once-I'm in the kitchen," I told
him. "What's up?"

"YOU MUST APOLOGIZE TO HER FOR ME-IN THE MORNING,"
Owen said. "BE SURE TO TELL HER I'M VERY SORRY-BUT IT'S A KIND OF
EMERGENCY."

"What's up?" I asked him.

"THERE'S BEEN A BODY MISPLACED IN CALIFORNIA-THEY THOUGHT
FT GOT LOST IN VIETNAM, BUT IT JUST TURNED UP IN OAKLAND. IT HAPPENS EVERY TIME
THERE'S A HOLIDAY-SOMEONE GOES TO SLEEP AT THE SWITCH. IT'S STANDARD ARMY- THEY
GIVE ME TWO HOURS TO PACK A BAG AND

        
 
THE NEXT THING I KNOW, I'M IN CALIFORNIA. I'M
SUPPOSED TO TAKE A COMMUTER PLANE TO TUC-SON, I'VE GOT A CONNECTION WITH A
COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO OAKLAND-FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING. THEY'VE GOT ME
BOOKED ON A FLIGHT FROM SAN FRANCISCO BACK TO PHOENIX THE NEXT DAY. THE BODY
BELONGS IN PHOENIX-THE GUY WAS A WARRANT OFFICER, A HELICOPTER PILOT. THAT
USUALLY MEANS HE CRASHED AND BURNED UP-YOU HEAR 'HELICOPTER,' YOU CAN COUNT ON
A CLOSED CASKET.

"CAN YOU MEET ME IN PHOENIX?" he asked me.

"Can I meet you in Phoenix? Why?" I asked him.

"WHY NOT!" Owen said. "YOU DON'T HAVE ANY PLANS,
DO YOU?"

"Well, no," I admitted.

"YOU CAN AFFORD THE FLIGHT, CAN'T YOU?" he asked me.

"Well, yes," I admitted. Then he told me the flight
information-he knew exactly when my plane left Boston, and when my plane
arrived in Phoenix; I'd arrive a little earlier than his flight with the body
from San Francisco, but I wouldn't have to wait long. I could just meet his
plane, and after that, we' stick together; he'd already booked us into a motel-
"WITH AIR CONDITIONING, GOOD TV, A GREAT POOL. WE'LL HAVE A BLAST!"
Owen assured me; he'd already arranged everything. The proposed funeral was all
fouled up because the body was already two days late. Relatives of the deceased
warrant officer-family members from Modesto and Yuma-had been delayed in
Phoenix for what must have seemed forever. Arrangements with the funeral parlor
had been made and canceled and made again; Owen knew the mortician and the
minister-"THEY'RE REAL ASSHOLES: DYING IS JUST A BUSINESS TO THEM, AND
WHEN THINGS DON'T COME OFF ON SCHEDULE, THEY BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT THE MILITARY
AND MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR THE POOR FAMILY."

Apparently the family had planned a kind of' 'picnic wake''; the
wake was now in its third day. Owe" was pretty sure that all he'd have to
do was deliver the booy to the mortuary; the survivor assistance officer-a ROTC
professor at Arizona State University, a major whom Owen also knew-had warned
Owen that the family was so pissed off at the Army that they probably wouldn't
want a military escort at the funeral.