A prayer for Owen Meany (81 page)

"It ain't here," Mr. Meany said; he was watching me
from the door of Owen's room. "Look all you want, but you won't find it.
It never was here-I know, I been lookin' for it for years!"

"I just assumed . . ."I said.

"Me too!" said Mr. Meany. The baseball, the so-called
"murder weapon," the so-called "instrument of death"-it
never was in Owen Meany's room! I read the passage Owen had underlined most
fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas-"Demonstration of God's
Existence from Motion." I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen
Meany's bed. Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument
of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in
motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers
and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of
movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to
unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any
principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a
box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without
any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing
above all-and this we call God. The bed moved; Mr. Meany had sat down beside
me. Without looking at me, he covered my hand with his working-man's paw; he
was not in the least squeamish about touching the stump of my amputated finger.

"You know, he wasn't . . . natural," Mr. Meany said.

"He was very special," I said; but Mr. Meany shook his
head.

"I mean he wasn't normal, he was born . . .
different," said Mr. Meany. Except for the time she'd told me she was
sorry about my poor mother, I had never heard Mrs. Meany speak; my
unfamiliarity with her voice-and the fact that she spoke from her position at
the fireplace, in the living room-made her voice quite startling to me.

"Stop!" she called out."Mr. Meany held my hand a
little tighter.

"I mean he was born unnaturally," said Mr. Meany.
"Like the Christ Child-that's what I mean," he said. "Me and his
mother, we didn't ever do it . . ."

"Stop!" Mrs. Meany called out.

"She just conceived a child-like the Christ Child," said
Mr. Meany.

"He'll never believe you! No one ever believes you!"
cried Mrs. Meany.

"You're saying that Owen was a virgin birth?" I asked
Mr. Meany; he wouldn't look at me, but he nodded vigorously.

"She was a virgin-yes!" he said.

"They never, never, never, never believe you!" called
out Mrs. Meany.

"Be quiet!" he called back to her.

"There couldn't have been . . . some accident?" I
asked.

"I told you, we didn't ever do itl" he said roughly.

"Stop!" Mrs. Meany called out; but she spoke with less
urgency now. She was completely crazy, of course. She might have been retarded.
She might not even have known how to "do it," or even if or when she
had done it. She might have been lying, all these years, or she might have been
too powerfully damaged to even remember the means by which she'd managed to get
pregnant!

"You really believe . . ."I started to say.

"It's true!" Mr. Meany said, squeezing my hand until I
winced. "Don't be like those damn priestsl" he said. "They
believe that story, but they wouldn't listen to this one! They even teach that
other story, but they tell us our story is worse than some kinda sinl Owen was
no sin!" said Mr. Meany.

"No, he wasn't," I said softly. I wanted to kill Mr.
Meany-for his ignorance! I wanted to stuff that madwoman into the fireplace!

"I went from one church to the next-those Catholics*."
he shouted. "All I knew was granite," he said. That really is all he
knows! I thought. "I worked the quarries in Concord, summers, when I was a
boy. When I met the Missus, when she ... conceived Owen . . . there wasn't no
Catholic in Concord we could even talk to! It was an outrage . . . what they
said to her!"

"Stop!" Mrs. Meany called out quietly.

"We moved to Barre-there was good granite up there. I wish
I had granite half as good here!" Mr. Meany said. "But the Catholic
Church in Barre was no different-they made us feel like we was blasphemin' the
Bible, like we was tryin' to make up our own religion, or somethin'."

Of course they had made up their own' 'religion''; they were
monsters of superstition, they were dupes of the kind of hocus-pocus that the
television evangelists call "miracles."

"When did you tell Owen?" I asked Mr. Meany. I knew
they were stupid enough to have told him what they preposterously believed.

"Stop!" Mrs. Meany called out; her voice now sounded
merely habitual-or as if she were imparting a prerecorded message.

"When we thought he was old enough," Mr. Meany said; I
shut my eyes.

"How old would he have been-when you told him?" I
asked.

' 'I guess he was ten or eleven-it was about the time he hit
that ball," Mr. Meany told me. Yes, that would do it, I thought. I
imagined that would have been a time when the story of his "virgin
birth" would have made quite an impression on Owen Meany-real son-of-God
stuff! I imagined that the story would have given Owen the shivers. It seemed
to me that Owen Meany had been used as cruelly by ignorance as he had been used
by any design. I had seen what God had used him for; now I saw how ignorance
had used him, too. It had been Owen, I remembered, who had said that Christ had
been USED-when Barb Wiggin had implied that Christ had been' 'lucky,'' when the
Rev. Dudley Wiggin had said that Christ, after all, had been "saved."
Maybe God had used Owen; but certainly Mr. and Mrs. Meany, and their colossal
ignorance, had used Owen, too!

 thought that I had everything I wanted; but Mr. Meany was
surprised I didn't take the dressmaker's dummy, too. "I figure everythin'
he kept was for somethin'!" Mr. Meany said.

        
 
I couldn't imagine what my mother's sad red
dress, her dummy, and Mary Magdalene's stolen arms, could ever possibly be
for-and I said so, a little more tersely than I meant to. But, no matter, the
Meanys were invulnerable to such subtleties as tone of voice. I said good-bye
to Mrs. Meany, who would not speak to me or even look at me; she went on
staring into the fireplace, at some imaginary point beyond the dead ashes-or
deep within them. I hated her! I thought she was a convincing agrument for
mandatory sterilization. In the rutted, dirt driveway, Mr. Meany said to me:
"I got somethin' I'd like to show you-it's at the monument shop."

He went to get the pickup truck, in which he said he'd follow me
to the shop; while I was waiting for him, I heard Mrs. Meany call out from the
sealed house: "Stop!"

I had not been to the monument shop since Owen had surgically
created my draft deferment. When Owen had been home for Christmas-it was his last
Christmas, -he had spent a lot of time in the monument shop, catching up on
orders that his father had, as usual, fallen behind with, or had botched in
other ways. Owen had several times invited me to the shop, to have a beer with
him, but I had declined the invitations; I was still adjusting to life without
a right index finger, and I assumed that the sight of the diamond wheel would
give me the shivers. It was a quiet Christmas leave for him. We practiced the
shot for three or four days in a row; of course, my part in this exercise was
extremely limited, but I still had to catch the ball and pass it back to him.
The finger gave me no trouble; Owen was very pleased about that. And I thought
it would have been ungenerous of me to complain about the difficulty I had with
other tasks-writing and eating, for example; and typing, of course. It was a
kind of sad Christmas for him; Owen didn't see much of Hester, whose
remarks-only a few months before- concerning her refusal to attend his funeral
appeared to have hurt his feelings. And then everything that happened after
Christmas hastened a further decline in his relationship with Hester, who grew
ever more radical in her opposition to the war, beginning in January, with
McCarthy announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"Who's he kidding?" Hester asked. "He's about as good a
candidate as he is a poet\" Then in February, Nixon announced his
candidacy. "Talk about going to the dogs!" Hester said. And in the
same month, there was the all-time-high weekly rate for U.S. casualties in
Vietnam- Americans were killed in one week! Hester sent Owen a nasty letter.
"You must b>e up to your asshole in bodies-even in Arizona!" Then
in March, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination;
in the same month, President Johnson said he would not seek reelection. Hester
considered Johnson's resignation a triumph of the "Peace Movement"; a
month later, when Humphrey announced that he was a candidate, Owen Meany wrote
Hester and said: "SOME TRIUMPH FOR THE SO-CALLED MOVEMENT-JUST WAIT AND
SEE!"

I think I know what he was doing; he was helping her to fall out
of love with him before he died. Hester couldn't have known that she'd seen the
last of him-but he knew that he'd never see her again. All this was in my mind
when I went to the monument shop with that moron Mr. Meany. >

The gravestone was unusually large but properly simple. LT PAUL
O. MEANY, JR. Under the name were the dates-the correct dates of his birth, and
of his death-and under the dates was the simple Latin inscription that meant
"forever."

IN AETERNUM It was such an outrage that Mr. Meany had wanted me
to see this; but I continued to look at the stone. The lettering was exactly as
Owen preferred it-it was his favorite style-and the beveled edges along the
sides and the top of the grave were exceedingly fine. From what Owen had
said-and from the crudeness of the work with the diamond wheel that I had
already seen on my mother's gravestone-I'd had no idea that Mr. Meany was capable
of such precise craftsmanship. I'd also had no idea that Mr. Meany was familiar
with Latin-Owen, naturally, had been quite a good Latin student. There was a
tingle in the stump of my right index finger when I said to Mr. Meany:
"You've done some very fine work with the diamond wheel."

He said: "That ain't my work-that's his work! He done it
when he was home on leave. He covered it up-and told me not to look at it, not
so long as he was alive, he said." I looked at the stone again.

"So you added just the date-the date of death?" I
asked him; but I already had the shivers-I already knew the answer.

"I added nothin'l" said Mr. Meany. "He knew the
date. I thought you knew that much." I knew "that much," of
course-and I'd already looked at the diary and satisfied myself that he'd
always known the exact date. But to see it so strongly carved in his gravestone
left no room for doubt- he'd last been home on leave for Christmas, ; he'd
finished his own gravestone more than half a year before he died!

"If you can believe Mister Meany," the Rev. Lewis
Merrill said to me, when I told him. "As you say, the man is a 'monster of
superstition'-and the mother may simply be 'retarded.' That they would believe
Owen was a 'virgin birth' is monstrous! But that they would tell him-when he
was so young, and so impressionable-that is a more 'unspeakable outrage,' as
Owen was always saying, than any such 'outrage' the Meanys suffered at the
hands of the Catholic Church. Speak to Father Findley about that!"

"Owen talked to you about it?" I asked.

"All the time," said Pastor Merrill, with an
irritatingly dismissive wave of his hand. "He talked to me, he talked to
Father Findley-why do you think Findley forgave him for that vandalism of his
blessed statue? Father Findley knew what a lot of rubbish that monstrous mother
and father had been feeding Owen-for years!"

"But what did you tell Owen about it?" I asked.

"Certainly not that I thought he was the second
Christ!" the Rev. Mr. Merrill said.

"Certainly not," I said. "But what did he
say?"

The Rev. Lewis Merrill frowned. He began to stutter. "Owen
M-M-M-Meany didn't exactly believe he was J-J-J-Jesus-but he said to me that if
I could believe in one v-v-v-virgin birth, why not in another one?"

"That sounds like Owen," I said.

"Owen b-b-b-believed that there was a purpose to everything
that h-h-h-happened to him-that G-G-G-God meant for the story of his life to
have some m-m-m-meaning. God had p-p-p-picked Owen," Pastor Merrill said.

"Do you believe that?" I asked him.

"My faith . . ." he started to say; then he stopped.
"I believe . . ."he started again; then he stopped again. "It is
obvious that Owen Meany was g-g-g-gifted with certain precognitive
p-p-p-powers-visions of the f-f-f-future are not unheard of, you know," he
said. I was angry with the Rev. Mr. Merrill for making of Owen Meany what Mr.
Merrill so often made of Jesus Christ, or of God-a subject for
"metaphysical speculation." He turned Owen Meany into an intellectual
problem, and I told him so.

"You want to call Owen, and everything that happened to
him, a m-m-m-miracle-don't you?" Mr. Merrill asked me.

"Well, it is 'miraculous,' isn't it?" I asked him.
"You must agree it is at least extraordinary V

"You sound positively converted," Mr. Merrill said
condescendingly. "I would be careful not to confuse your g-g-g-grief with
genuine, religious belief . . ."

"You don't sound to me as if you believe very much!" I
said angrily.

"About Owen?" he asked me.

"Not just about Owen," I said. "You don't seem to
me to believe very much in God-or in any of those so-called miracles. You're
always talking about 'doubt as the essence and not the opposite of faith'-but
it seems to me that your doubt has taken control of you. I think that's what
Owen thought about you, too."

"Yes, that's true-that's what he thought about
m-m-m-me," the Rev. Lewis Merrill said. We sat together in the vestry
office, not talking, for almost an hour, or maybe two hours; it grew dark while
we sat there, but Mr. Merrill didn't move to turn on the desk lamp.