A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

by John Irving

  "He wants you to give them back," Dan Needham said. I knew from the first that my mother had picked a winner when she picked Dan, but it was not until the day after my mother's death that I knew she'd picked a smart man, too. Of course, that's what Owen expected of me: he gave me his baseball cards to show me how sorry he was about the accident, and how much he was hurting, too-because Owen had loved my mother almost as much as I did, I was sure, and to give me all his cards was his way of saying that he loved me enough to trust me with his famous collection. But, naturally, he wanted all the cards back! Dan Needham said, "Let's look at a few of them. I'll bet they're all in some kind of order-even in these boxes." And, yes, they were-Dan and I couldn't figure out the exact rules under which they were ordered, but the cards were organized

  under an extreme system; they were alphabetized by the names of players, but the hitters, I mean the big hitters, were alphabetized in a group of their own; and your golden-glove-type fielders, they had a category all to themselves, too; and the pitchers were all together. There even seemed to be some subindexing related to the age of the players; but Dan and I found it difficult to look at the cards for very long-so many of the players faced the camera with their lethal bats resting confidently on their shoulders. I know many people, today, who instinctively cringe at any noise even faintly resembling a gunshot or an exploding bomb-a car backfires, the handle of a broom or a shovel whacks flat against a cement or a linoleum floor, a kid detonates a firecracker in an empty trash can, and my friends cover their heads, primed (as we all are, today) for the terrorist attack or the random assassin. But not me; and never Owen Meany. All because of one badly played baseball game, one unlucky swing-and the most unlikely contact-all because of one lousy foul ball, among millions, Owen Meany and I were permanently conditioned to flinch at the sound of a different kind of gunshot: that much-loved and most American sound of summer, the good old crack of the bat! And so, as I often would, I took Dan Needham's advice. We loaded the cartons of Owen's baseball cards into the car, and we tried to think of the least conspicuous time of day when we could drive out to the Meany Granite Quarry-when we would not necessarily need to greet Mr. Meany, or disturb Mrs. Meany's grim profile in any of several windows, or actually need to talk with Owen. Dan understood that I loved Owen, and that I wanted to talk with him-most of all-but that it was a conversation, for both Owen's sake and mine, that was best to delay. But before we finished loading the baseball cards in the car, Dan Needham asked me, "What are you giving Mm?"

  "What?" I said.

  "To show him that you love him," Dan Needham said. "That's what he was showing you. What have you got to give him?"

  Of course I knew what I had that would show Owen that I loved him; I knew what my armadillo meant to him, but it was a little awkward to "give" Owen in front of Dan Needham, who'd given it to me-and what if Owen didn't give it back? I'd needed Dan's help to understand that I was supposed to return the damn baseball cards. What if Owen decided he was supposed to keep the armadillo?

  "The main thing is, Johnny," Dan Needham said, "you have to show Owen that you love him enough to trust anything with him-to not care if you do or don't get it back. It's got to be something he knows you want back. That's what makes it special."

  "Suppose I give him the armadillo?" I said. "Suppose he keeps it?"

  Dan Needham sat down on the front bumper of the car. It was a Buick station wagon, forest green with real wooden panels on the sides and on the tailgate, and a chrome grille that looked like the gaping mouth of a voracious fish; from where Dan was sitting, the Buick appeared ready to eat him-and Dan looked tired enough to be eaten without much of a struggle. I'm sure he'd been up crying all night, like me-and, unlike me, he'd probably been up drinking, too. He looked awful. But he said very patiently and very carefully, "Johnny, I would be honored if anything I gave you could actually be used for something important-if it were to have any special purpose, I'd be very proud."

  That was when I first began to think about certain events or specific things being "important" and having "special purpose." Until then, the notion that anything had a designated, much less a special purpose would have been cuckoo to me. I was not what was commonly called a believer then, and I am a believer now; I believe in God, and I believe in the "special purpose" of certain events or specific things. I observe all holy days, which only the most old-fashioned Anglicans call red-letter days. It was a red-letter day, fairly recently, when I had reason to think of Owen Meany-it was January , , when the lessons proper for the conversion of St. Paul reminded me of Owen. The Lord says to Jeremiah, Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

  But Jeremiah says he doesn't know how to speak; he's "only a youth," Jeremiah says. Then the Lord straightens him out about that; the Lord says,

  Do not say, "I am only a youth"; for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord. Then the Lord touches Jeremiah's mouth, and says, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. It is on red-letter days, especially, that I think about Owen; sometimes I think about him too intensely, and that's usually when I skip a Sunday service, or two-and I try not to pick up my prayer book for a while. I suppose the conversion of St. Paul has a special effect on a convert like me. And how can I not think of Owen-when I read Paul's letter to the Galatians, that part where Paul says, "And I was still not known by sight to the churches of Christ in Judea; they only heard it said, 'He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.' And they glorified God because of me."

  How well I know that feeling! I trust in God because of Owen Meany. It was because I trusted Dan Needham that I gave to Owen. I put it in a brown paper bag, which I put inside another brown paper bag, and although I had no doubt that Owen would know exactly what it was, before he opened the bags, I gave brief consideration to how shocked his mother might be if she opened the bags; but it was not her business to open the bags, I figured. Owen and I were eleven; we had no other way to articulate what we felt about what had happened to my mother. He gave me his baseball cards, but he really wanted them back, and I gave him my stuffed armadillo, which I certainly hoped he'd give back to me-all because it was impossible for us to say to each other how we really felt. How did it feel to hit a ball that hard-and then realize that the ball had killed your best friend's mother? How did it feel to see my mother sprawled in the grass, and to have the moronic chief of police complain about the missing baseball-and calling that stupid ball "the instrument of death" and "the murder weapon"? Owen and I couldn't have talked about those things-at least, not then. So we gave each other our best-loved possessions, and hoped to get them back. When you think of it, that's not so silly. By my calculations, Owen was a day late returning the armadillo; he kept it overnight for two nights, which in my view was one night too many. But he did return it. Once again I heard the lowest-possible gear of the granite truck; once again, there was an early-morning drop-off at Front Street, before Mr. Meany went ahead with the rest of the day's heavy business. And there were the same brown paper bags that I had used on the step by the back door; it was a little dangerous to leave outside on the step, I thought, given the indiscriminate appetites of that certain Labrador retriever belonging to our neighbor Mr. Fish. Then I remembered that Sagamore was dead. But my greatest indignation was to follow: missing from were the little animal's front claws-the most useful and impressive parts of its curious body. Owen had returned the armadillo, but he'd kept the claws! Well-friendship being one thing, and quite another-I was so outraged by this discovery that I needed to talk to Dan Needham. As always, Dan made himself available. He sat on the edge of my bed while I sniveled; without its claws, the beast could no longer stand upright-not without pitch
ing forward and resting on its snout. There was virtually no position I could find for that did not make the creature resemble a supplicant-not to mention, a wretched amputee. I was quite upset at how my best friend could have done this to me, until Dan Needham informed me that this was precisely what Owen felt he had done to me, and to himself: that we were both maimed and mutilated by what had happened to us.

  "Your friend is most original," Dan Needham said, with the greatest respect. "Don't you see, Johnny? If he could, he would cut off his hands for you-that's how it makes him feel, to have touched that baseball bat, to have swung that bat with

  those results. It's how we all feel-you and me and Owen. We've lost a part of ourselves." And Dan picked up the wrecked armadillo and began to experiment with it on my night table, trying-as I had tried-to find a position that allowed the beast to stand, or even to lie down, with any semblance of comfort or dignity; it was quite impossible. The thing had been crippled; it was rendered an invalid. And how had Owen arranged the claws? I wondered. What sort of terrible altarpiece had he constructed? Were the claws gripping the murderous baseball? And so Dan and I became quite emotional, while we struggled to find a way to make the armadillo's appearance acceptable-but that was the point, Dan concluded: there was no way that any or all of this was acceptable. What had happened was unacceptable! Yet we still had to live with it.

  "It's brilliant, really-it's absolutely original," Dan kept muttering, until he fell asleep on the other twin bed in my room, where Owen had spent so many nights, and I covered him up and let him sleep. When my grandmother came to kiss me good night, she kissed Dan good night, too. Then, in the weak glow from the night-light, I discovered that by opening the shallow drawer under the top of the night table, I could position in such a way that it was possible for me to imagine it was something else. Half in and half out of the drawer, resembled a kind of aquatic creature-it was all head and torso; I could imagine that those were some sort of stunted flippers protruding where its claws had been. Just before I fell asleep, I realized that everything Dan had said about Owen's intentions was correct. How much it has meant to my life that Dan Needham was almost never wrong! I was not as familiar with Wall's History of Graves-end as I became when I was eighteen and read the whole thing for myself; but I was familiar with those parts of it that Owen Meany considered "important." And just before I fell asleep, I also recognized my armadillo for what it was-in addition to all those things Dan had told me. My armadillo had been amputated to resemble Watahantowet's totem, the tragic and mysterious armless man-for weren't the Indians wise enough to understand that everything had its own soul, its own spirit? It was Owen Meany who told me that only white men are vain enough to believe that human beings are unique because we have souls. According to Owen, Watahantowet knew better. Watahantowet believed that animals had souls, and that even the much-abused Squamscott River had a soul- Watahantowet knew that the land he sold to my ancestors was absolutely/M// of spirits. The rocks they had to move to plant a field-they were, forever after, restless and displaced spirits. And the trees they cut down to build their homes-they had a different spirit from the spirits that escaped those houses as the smoke from firewood. Watahantowet may have been the last resident of Gravesend, New Hampshire, who really understood what everything cost. Here, take my land! There go my arms! It would take me years to learn everything that Owen Meany was thinking, and I didn't understand him very well that night. Now I know that told me what Owen was thinking although Owen himself would not until we were both students at Gravesend Academy; it wasn't until then that I realized Owen had already conveyed his message to me-via the armadillo. Here is what Owen Meany (and the armadillo) said: "GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT."

  How could it ever have occurred to me that a fellow eleven-year-old was thinking any such thing? That Owen Meany was a Chosen One was the furthest thing from my mind; that Owen could even consider himself one of God's Appointed would have been a surprise to me. To have seen him up in the air, at Sunday school, you would not have thought he was at work on God's Assignment. And you must remember-forgetting about Owen- that at the age of eleven I did not believe there were "chosen ones," or that God "appointed" anyone, or that God gave "assignments." As for Owen's belief that he was "God's instrument," I didn't know that there was other evidence upon which Owen was basing his conviction that he'd been specially selected to carry out the work of the Lord; but Owen's idea-that God's reasoning was somehow predetermining Owen's every move-came from much more than that one unlucky swing and crack of the bat. As you shall see. Today-January , -it is snowing in Toronto; in the dog's opinion, Toronto is improved by snow. I enjoy walking the dog when it's snowing, because the dog's enthusiasm is infectious; in the snow, the dog establishes his territorial rights to the St. Clair Reservoir as if he were the first dog to relieve

  himself there-an illusion that is made possible by the fresh snow covering the legion of dog turds for which the St. Clair Reservoir is famous. In the snow, the clock tower of Upper Canada College appears to preside over a preparatory school in a small New England town; when it's not snowing, the cars and buses on the surrounding roads are more numerous, the sounds of traffic are less muted, and the presence of downtown Toronto seems closer. In the snow, the view of the clock tower of Upper Canada College-especially from the distance of Kilbarry Road, or, closer, from the end of Frybrook Road-reminds me of the clock tower of the Main Academy Building in Graves-end; fastidious, sepulchral. In the snow, there is something almost like New England about where I live on Russell Hill Road; granted, Torontonians do not favor white clapboard houses with dark-green or black shutters, but my grandmother's house, at Front Street, was brick-Torontonians prefer brick and stone. Inexplicably, Torontonians clutter their brick and stone houses with too much trim, or with window trim and shutters-and they also carve their shutters with hearts or maple leaves-but the snow conceals these frills; and on some days, like today, when the snow is especially wet and heavy, the snow turns even the brick houses white. Toronto is sober, but not austere; Graves-end is austere, but also pretty; Toronto is not pretty, but in the snow Toronto can look like Gravesend-both pretty and austere. And from my bedroom window on Russell Hill Road, I can see both Grace Church on-the-Hill and the Bishop Strachan chapel; how fitting that a boy whose childhood was divided by two churches should live out his present life in view of two more! But this suits me now; both churches are Anglican. The cold, gray stones of both Grace Church and The Bishop Strachan School are also improved by snow. My grandmother liked to say that snow was ' 'healing''-that it healed everything. A typical Yankee point of view: if it snows a lot, snow must be good for you. In Toronto, it's good for me. And the little children sledding at the St. Clair Reservoir: they remind me of Owen, too-because I have fixed Owen at a permanent size, which is the size he was when he was eleven, which was the size of an average five-year-old. But I should be careful not to give too much credit to the snow; there are so many things that remind me of Owen. I avoid American newspapers and magazines, and American television-and other Americans in Toronto. But Toronto is not far enough away. Just the day before yesterday-January , -the front page of The Globe and Mail gave us a full account of President Ronald Reagan's State of the Union Message. Will I ever learn? When I see such things, I know I should simply not read them; I should pick up The Book of Common Prayer, instead. I should not give in to anger; but, God forgive me, I read the State of the Union Message. After almost twenty years in Canada, there are certain American lunatics who still fascinate me.