by John Irving
“The poor little guy!” Simon said.
“I didn’t mean to,” Hester said.
My mother called to me and I had to go tell her what had happened to Owen, whereupon she made me put on my outdoor clothes while she started the car. I thought I knew the route Owen would take home, but he must have been pedaling very hard because we did not overtake him by the Gas Works on Water Street, and when we passed Dewey Street without sighting him—and there was no sign of him at Salem Street, either—I began to think he had taken the Swasey Parkway out of town. And so we doubled back, along the Squamscott, but he wasn’t there.
We finally found him, already out of town, laboring up Maiden Hill; we slowed down when we saw his red-and-black wool hunter’s jacket and the matching checkered cap with the earflaps protruding, and by the time we pulled alongside him, he had run out of steam and had gotten off to walk his bicycle. He knew it was us without looking at us but he wouldn’t stop walking—so my mother drove slowly beside him, and I rolled down the window.
“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT, I JUST GOT TOO EXCITED, I HAD TOO MUCH ORANGE JUICE FOR BREAKFAST—AND YOU KNOW I CAN’T STAND BEING TICKLED,” Owen said. “NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT TICKLING.”
“Please don’t go home, Owen,” my mother said.
“Everything’s all right,” I told him. “My cousins are very sorry.”
“I PEED ON HESTER!” Owen said. “AND I’M GOING TO GET IN TROUBLE AT HOME,” he said—still walking his bike at a good pace. “MY FATHER GETS MAD ABOUT PEEING. HE SAYS I’M NOT A BABY ANYMORE, BUT SOMETIMES I GET EXCITED.”
“Owen, I’ll wash and dry your clothes at our house,” my mother told him. “You can wear something of Johnny’s while yours are drying.”
“NOTHING OF JOHNNY’S WILL FIT ME,” Owen said. “AND I HAVE TO TAKE A BATH.”
“You can take a bath at our house, Owen,” I told him. “Please come back.”
“I have some outgrown things of Johnny’s that will fit you, Owen,” my mother said.
“BABY CLOTHES, I SUPPOSE,” Owen said, but he stopped walking; he leaned his head on his bike’s handlebars.
“Please get in the car, Owen,” my mother said. I got out and helped him put his bicycle in the back, and then he slid into the front seat, between my mother and me.
“I WANTED TO MAKE A GOOD IMPRESSION BECAUSE I WANTED TO GO TO SAWYER DEPOT,” he said. “NOW YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME.”
I found it incredible that he still wanted to go, but my mother said, “Owen, you can come with us to Sawyer Depot, anytime.”
“JOHNNY DOESN’T WANT ME TO COME,” he told Mother—as if I weren’t there in the car with them.
“It’s not that, Owen,” I said. “It’s that I thought my cousins would be too much for you.” And on the evidence of him wetting his pants, I did not say, it struck me that my cousins were too much for him. “That was a very mild game for my cousins, Owen,” I added.
“DO YOU THINK I CARE WHAT THEY DO TO ME?” he shouted; he stamped his little foot on the drive-shaft hump.
“DO YOU THINK I CARE IF THEY START AN AVALANCHE WITH ME?” he screamed. “WHEN DO I GET TO GO ANYWHERE? IF I DIDN’T GO TO SCHOOL OR TO CHURCH OR TO EIGHTY FRONT STREET, I’D NEVER GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” he cried. “IF YOUR MOTHER DIDN’T TAKE ME TO THE BEACH, I’D NEVER GET OUT OF TOWN. AND I’VE NEVER BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINS,” he said. “I’VE NEVER EVEN BEEN ON A TRAIN! DON’T YOU THINK I MIGHT LIKE GOING ON A TRAIN—TO THE MOUNTAINS?” he yelled.
My mother stopped the car and hugged him, and kissed him, and told him he was always welcome to come with us, anywhere we went; and I rather awkwardly put my arm around him, and we just sat that way in the car, until he had composed himself sufficiently for his return to 80 Front Street, where he marched in the back door, past Lydia’s room and the maids fussing in the kitchen, up the back stairs past the maids’ rooms, to my room and my bathroom, where he closed himself in and drew a deep bath. He handed me his sodden clothes, and I brought the clothes to the maids, who began their work on them. My mother knocked on the bathroom door, and, looking the other way, she extended her arm into the room, where Owen took a stack of my outgrown clothes from her—they were not baby clothes, as he had feared; they were just extremely small clothes.
“What shall we do with him?” Hester asked while we were waiting for Owen to join us in the upstairs den—or so it had been called, “the den,” when my grandfather was alive; it was a children’s room whenever my cousins visited.
“We’ll do whatever he wants,” Noah said.
“That’s what we did the last time!” Simon said.
“Not quite,” Hester said.
“WELL, I’VE BEEN THINKING,” Owen said when he walked into the den—even pinker than usual; he was spanking clean, as they say, with his hair slicked back. In his stocking feet, he was slipping a little on the hardwood floor; and when he reached the old Oriental, he stood with one foot balanced on top of the other, twisting his hips back and forth as he talked—his hands, like butterflies, flitting up and down between his waist and his shoulders. “I APOLOGIZE FOR BECOMING OVEREXCITED. I THINK I KNOW A GAME THAT WOULD NOT BE QUITE AS EXCITING FOR ME, BUT AT THE SAME TIME I THINK IT WOULD NOT BE BORING FOR YOU,” he said. “YOU SEE, ONE OF YOU GETS TO HIDE ME—SOMEWHERE, IT COULD BE ANYWHERE—AND THE OTHERS HAVE TO FIND ME. AND WHOEVER CAN FIND A PLACE TO HIDE ME THAT TAKES THE LONGEST TIME FOR THE OTHERS TO FIND ME—WHOEVER THAT IS WINS. YOU SEE, IT’S PRETTY EASY TO FIND PLACES IN THIS HOUSE TO HIDE ME—BECAUSE THIS HOUSE IS HUGE AND I’M SMALL,” Owen added.
“I go first,” Hester said. “I get to hide him first.” No one argued; wherever she hid him, we never found him. Noah and Simon and I—we thought it would be easy to find him. I knew every inch of my grandmother’s house, and Noah and Simon knew almost everything about Hester’s diabolical mind; but we couldn’t find him. Hester stretched out on the couch in the den, looking at old issues of Life magazine, growing more and more content as we searched and searched, and darkness fell; I even expressed to Hester my concern that she had put Owen somewhere where he might have run out of air, or—as the hours dragged on—where he would suffer severe cramps from having to maintain an uncomfortable position. But Hester dismissed these concerns with a wave of her hand, and when it was suppertime, we had to give up; Hester made us wait in the downstairs front hall, and she went and got Owen, who was very happy and walking without a limp, and breathing without difficulty—although his hair looked slept on. He stayed for supper, and he told me after we’d eaten that he wouldn’t mind staying overnight, too—my mother invited him to stay, because (she said) his clothes hadn’t completely dried.
And although I asked him—“Where’d she hide you? Just give me a clue! Tell me what part of the house, just tell me which floor!”—he wouldn’t disclose his triumph. He was wide awake, and in no mood to sleep, and he was irritatingly philosophic regarding the true character of my cousins, whom he said I had failed to present fairly to him.
“YOU HAVE REALLY MISJUDGED THEM,” he lectured me. “PERHAPS WHAT YOU CALL THEIR WILDNESS IS JUST A MATTER OF LACK OF DIRECTION. SOMEONE HAS TO GIVE ANY GROUP OF PEOPLE DIRECTION, YOU KNOW.” I lay there thinking I couldn’t wait until he came to Sawyer Depot, and my cousins got him on skis and simply pointed him downhill; that might shut him up about providing adequate “direction.” But there was no turning him off; he just babbled on and on.
I got drowsy, and turned my back to him, and therefore I was confused when I heard him say, “IT’S HARD TO GO TO SLEEP WITHOUT IT, ONCE YOU GET USED TO IT—ISN’T IT?”
“Without what?” I asked him. “Used to what, Owen?”
“THE ARMADILLO,” he said.
And so that day after Thanksgiving, when Owen Meany met my cousins, provided me with two very powerful images of Owen—especially on the night I tried to get to sleep after the foul ball had killed my mother. I lay in bed knowing that Owen would be thinking about my mother, too, and that he would be thinking about my mother, too, and that he
would be thinking not only of me but also of Dan Needham—of how much we both would miss her—and if Owen was thinking of Dan, I knew that he would be thinking about the armadillo, too.
It was also important: that day when my mother and I chased after Owen in the car—and I saw the posture of his body jerking on his bicycle, trying to pedal up Maiden Hill; and I saw how he faltered, and had to get off the bike and walk it the rest of the way. That day provided me with a cold-weather picture of how Owen must have looked on that warm, summer evening when he was struggling home after the Little League game—with his baseball uniform plastered to his back. What was he going to tell his parents about the game?
It would take years for me to remember the decision regarding whether I should spend the night after that fatal game with Dan Needham, in the apartment that he and my mother had moved into, with me, after they’d married—it was a faculty apartment in one of the academy dormitories—or whether I would be more comfortable spending that terrible night back in my old room in my grandmother’s house at 80 Front Street. So many of the details surrounding that game would take years to remember!
Anyway, Dan Needham and my grandmother agreed that it would be better for me to spend the night at 80 Front Street, and so—in addition to the disorientation of waking up the next morning, after very little sleep, and gradually realizing that the dream of my mother being killed by a baseball that Owen Meany hit was not a dream—I faced the further disorientation of not immediately knowing where I was. It was very much like waking up as a kind of traveler in science fiction, someone who had traveled “back in time”—because I had grown used to waking up in my room in Dan Needham’s apartment.
And as if all this weren’t sufficiently bewildering, there was a noise I had never before associated with 80 Front Street; it was a noise in the driveway, and my bedroom windows didn’t face the driveway, so I had to get out of bed and leave my room to see what the noise was. I was pretty sure I knew. I had heard that noise many times at the Meany Granite Quarry; it was the unmistakable, very lowest gear of the huge, flatbed hauler—the truck Mr. Meany used to carry the granite slabs, the curbstones and cornerstones, and the monuments. And sure enough, the Meany Granite Company truck was in my grandmother’s driveway—taking up the whole driveway—and it was loaded with granite and gravestones.
I could easily imagine my grandmother’s indignation—if she was up, and saw the truck there. I could just hear her saying, “How incredibly tasteless of that man! My daughter not dead a day and what is he doing—giving us a tombstone? I suppose he’s already carved the letters!” That is actually what I thought.
But Mr. Meany did not get out of the cab of his truck. It was Owen who got out on the passenger side, and he walked around to the rear of the flatbed and removed several large cartons from the rest of the load; the cartons were clearly not full of granite or Owen would not have been able to lift them off by himself. But he managed this, and brought all the cartons to the step by the back door, where I was sure he was going to ring the bell. I could still hear his voice saying “I’M SORRY!”—while my head was hidden under Mr. Chickering’s warm-up jacket—and as much as I wanted to see Owen, I knew I would burst into tears as soon as he spoke, or as soon as I had to speak to him. And therefore I was relieved when he didn’t ring the bell; he left the cartons at the back door and ran quickly to the cab, and Mr. Meany drove the granite truck out of the driveway, still in the very lowest gear.
In the cartons were all of Owen’s baseball cards, his entire collection. My grandmother was appalled, but for several years she didn’t understand Owen or appreciate him; to her, he was “that boy,” or “that little guy,” or “that voice.” I knew the baseball cards were Owen’s favorite things, they were what amounted to his treasure—I could instantly identify with how everything connected to the game of baseball had changed for him, as it had changed for me (although I’d never loved the game as Owen had loved it). I knew without speaking to Owen that neither of us would ever play Little League ball again, and that there was some necessary ritual ahead of us both—wherein we would need to throw away our bats and gloves and uniforms, and every stray baseball there was to be found around our houses and yards (except for that baseball, which I suspected Owen had relegated to a museum-piece status).
But I needed to talk to Dan Needham about the baseball cards, because they were Owen’s most prized possessions—indeed, his only prized possessions—and since my mother’s accident had made baseball a game of death, what did Owen want me to do with his baseball cards? Did they merely represent how he was washing his hands of the great American pastime, or did he want me to assuage my grief by indulging in the pleasure I would derive from burning all those baseball cards? On that day, it would have been a pleasure to burn them.
“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 him?”
“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 the armadillo 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 s
how 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 25, 1987, 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”;