A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
ght Owen was "in Durham." That meant he was with Hester; but when I called her, she wouldn't admit he was there.
"Have you got some good news for him?" she asked me. "Is that fucking creep school going to let him graduate?"
"No," I said. "I don't have any good news."
"Then just leave him alone," she suggested.
Later, I heard Dan on the telephone, talking to the headmaster.
"You're the worst thing that ever happened to this school," Dan told Randy White. "If you survive this disaster, I won't be staying here--and I won't leave alone. You've permitted yourself a fatal and childish indulgence, you've done something one of the boys might do, you've engaged in a kind of combat with a student--you've been competing with one of the kids. You're such a kid yourself, you let Owen Meany get to you. Because a kid took a dislike to you, you decided to pay him back--that's just the way a kid thinks! You're not grown-up enough to run a school.
"And this was a scholarship boy!" Dan Needham yelled in the telephone. "This is a boy who's going to go to college on a scholarship, too--or else he won't go. If Owen Meany doesn't get the best deal possible, from the best college around--you're responsible for that, too!"
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 rutted 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 friends. 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'Somebody," he said.
"I'll bet Pastor Merrill knows him," I said. And that was why Dan and I walked to Hurd'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. Merrill's usual chair, behind Mr. Merrill'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, Hurd'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. "I 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.
"And was that all you wanted to see me about--the prayer?" Mr. Merrill asked Owen, who appeared to consider the question very carefully--or else he was waiting for Dan and me to leave.
We were outside the vestry office, in the dark corridor where two rows of wooden pegs--for coats--extended for the entire length of two walls; off in the darkness, several lost or left-behind overcoats hung there, like old churchgoers who had loitered so long that they had fallen asleep, slumped against the walls. And there were a few pairs of galoshes in the corridor; but they were not directly beneath the abandoned overcoats, so that the churchgoers in the darkness appeared to have been separated from their feet. On the wooden peg nearest the door to the vestry office was the Rev. Mr. Merrill's double-breasted and oddly youthful Navy pea jacket--and, on the peg next to it, his seaman's watch cap. Dan and I, passing these, heard Pastor Merrill say: "Owen? Is it the dream? Have you had that dream again?"
"YES," said Owen Meany, who began to cry--he started to sob, like a child. I had not heard him sound like that since the Thanksgiving vacation when he'd peed in his pants--when he'd peed on Hester.
"Owen? Owen, listen to me," Mr. Merrill said. "Owen? It's just a dream--do you hear me? It's just a dream."
"NO!" said Owen Meany.
Then Dan and I were outside in the February cold and gray; the old footprints in the rutted slush were frozen--fossils of the many souls who had traveled to and from Hurd's Church. It was still early morning; although Dan and I had seen the sun rise, the sun had been absorbed by the low, uniformly ice-gray sky.
"What dream?" Dan Needham asked me.
"I don't know," I said.
Owen hadn't told me about the dream; not yet. He would tell me--and I would tell him what the Rev. Mr. Merrill had told him: that it was "just a dream."
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye. But not then; at that moment, Dan and I were not imagining very much beyond Randy White's reaction to the headless, armless Mary Magdalene--whose steely embrace of the podium on the stage of The Great Hall would force the headmaster to address the school from a new and more naked position.
Directly opposite the Main Academy Building, the headmaster was getting into his camelhair overcoat; his wife, Sam, was brushing the nap of that pretty coat for him, and kissing her husband good-bye for the day. It would be a bad day for the headmaster--a FATED day, Owen Meany might have called it--but I'm sure Randy White didn't have his eyes on the future that morning. He thought he was finished with Owen Meany. He didn't know that, in the end, Owen Meany would defeat him; he didn't know about the vote of "no confidence" the faculty would give him--or the decision of the Board of Trustees to not renew his appointment as headmaster. He couldn't have imagined what a travesty Owen Meany's absence would make of the commencement exercises that year--how such a timid, rather plain, and much-ignored student, who was the replacement valedictorian of our class, would find the courage to offer as a valedictory only these words: "I am not the head of this class. The head of this class is Owen Meany; he is The Voice of our class--and the only voice we want to listen to." Then that good, frightened boy would sit down--to tumultuous pandemonium: our classmates raising their voices for The Voice, bedsheets and more artful banners displaying his name in capital letters (of course), and the chanting that drowned out the headmaster's attempts to bring us to order.
"Owen Meany! Owen Meany! Owen Meany!" cried the Class of '62.
But that February morning when the headmaster was outfitting himself in his camelhair coat, he couldn't have known that Owen Meany would be his undoing. How frustrated and powerless Randy White
"Have you got some good news for him?" she asked me. "Is that fucking creep school going to let him graduate?"
"No," I said. "I don't have any good news."
"Then just leave him alone," she suggested.
Later, I heard Dan on the telephone, talking to the headmaster.
"You're the worst thing that ever happened to this school," Dan told Randy White. "If you survive this disaster, I won't be staying here--and I won't leave alone. You've permitted yourself a fatal and childish indulgence, you've done something one of the boys might do, you've engaged in a kind of combat with a student--you've been competing with one of the kids. You're such a kid yourself, you let Owen Meany get to you. Because a kid took a dislike to you, you decided to pay him back--that's just the way a kid thinks! You're not grown-up enough to run a school.
"And this was a scholarship boy!" Dan Needham yelled in the telephone. "This is a boy who's going to go to college on a scholarship, too--or else he won't go. If Owen Meany doesn't get the best deal possible, from the best college around--you're responsible for that, too!"
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 rutted 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 friends. 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'Somebody," he said.
"I'll bet Pastor Merrill knows him," I said. And that was why Dan and I walked to Hurd'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. Merrill's usual chair, behind Mr. Merrill'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, Hurd'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. "I 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.
"And was that all you wanted to see me about--the prayer?" Mr. Merrill asked Owen, who appeared to consider the question very carefully--or else he was waiting for Dan and me to leave.
We were outside the vestry office, in the dark corridor where two rows of wooden pegs--for coats--extended for the entire length of two walls; off in the darkness, several lost or left-behind overcoats hung there, like old churchgoers who had loitered so long that they had fallen asleep, slumped against the walls. And there were a few pairs of galoshes in the corridor; but they were not directly beneath the abandoned overcoats, so that the churchgoers in the darkness appeared to have been separated from their feet. On the wooden peg nearest the door to the vestry office was the Rev. Mr. Merrill's double-breasted and oddly youthful Navy pea jacket--and, on the peg next to it, his seaman's watch cap. Dan and I, passing these, heard Pastor Merrill say: "Owen? Is it the dream? Have you had that dream again?"
"YES," said Owen Meany, who began to cry--he started to sob, like a child. I had not heard him sound like that since the Thanksgiving vacation when he'd peed in his pants--when he'd peed on Hester.
"Owen? Owen, listen to me," Mr. Merrill said. "Owen? It's just a dream--do you hear me? It's just a dream."
"NO!" said Owen Meany.
Then Dan and I were outside in the February cold and gray; the old footprints in the rutted slush were frozen--fossils of the many souls who had traveled to and from Hurd's Church. It was still early morning; although Dan and I had seen the sun rise, the sun had been absorbed by the low, uniformly ice-gray sky.
"What dream?" Dan Needham asked me.
"I don't know," I said.
Owen hadn't told me about the dream; not yet. He would tell me--and I would tell him what the Rev. Mr. Merrill had told him: that it was "just a dream."
I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye. But not then; at that moment, Dan and I were not imagining very much beyond Randy White's reaction to the headless, armless Mary Magdalene--whose steely embrace of the podium on the stage of The Great Hall would force the headmaster to address the school from a new and more naked position.
Directly opposite the Main Academy Building, the headmaster was getting into his camelhair overcoat; his wife, Sam, was brushing the nap of that pretty coat for him, and kissing her husband good-bye for the day. It would be a bad day for the headmaster--a FATED day, Owen Meany might have called it--but I'm sure Randy White didn't have his eyes on the future that morning. He thought he was finished with Owen Meany. He didn't know that, in the end, Owen Meany would defeat him; he didn't know about the vote of "no confidence" the faculty would give him--or the decision of the Board of Trustees to not renew his appointment as headmaster. He couldn't have imagined what a travesty Owen Meany's absence would make of the commencement exercises that year--how such a timid, rather plain, and much-ignored student, who was the replacement valedictorian of our class, would find the courage to offer as a valedictory only these words: "I am not the head of this class. The head of this class is Owen Meany; he is The Voice of our class--and the only voice we want to listen to." Then that good, frightened boy would sit down--to tumultuous pandemonium: our classmates raising their voices for The Voice, bedsheets and more artful banners displaying his name in capital letters (of course), and the chanting that drowned out the headmaster's attempts to bring us to order.
"Owen Meany! Owen Meany! Owen Meany!" cried the Class of '62.
But that February morning when the headmaster was outfitting himself in his camelhair coat, he couldn't have known that Owen Meany would be his undoing. How frustrated and powerless Randy White