A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

  “Hey! You little creep!” Hester called. But the hail was turning back to rain; Hester was instantly soaked as she stood there in the driveway—and her yellow dress clung to her so tenaciously that it was easy to see what she was missing. She bolted for the house.

  “Young lady,” my Aunt Martha said to her, “where on earth are your…”

  “Merciful Heavens, Hester!” my grandmother said.

  But the heavens did not look merciful, not at the moment. And my grandmother’s crones, observing Hester, must have been thinking: That may be Martha’s girl but she’s got more of Tabby’s kind of trouble in her.

  Simon and Noah were gathering hailstones before they could melt in the returning rain. I ran outside to join them. They let fly at me with a few of the bigger ones; I gathered my own supply and fired back. I was surprised by the hailstones’ coldness—as if they had traveled to earth from another, much icier universe. Squeezing a hailstone the size of a marble in my hand, feeling it melt in my palm, I was also surprised by its hardness; it was as hard as a baseball.

  Mr. Chickering, our fat and friendly Little League coach and manager—the man who decided, that day, to have Owen bat for me, the man who instructed Owen to “Swing away!”—Mr. Chickering is spending his last days in the Soldiers’ Home on Court Street. The wrecked images that his bout with Alzheimer’s hurl at him from time to time have left him jumpy and dazed, but curiously alert. Like a man sitting under a tree full of children pelting him with acorns, he seems to expect he’ll be hit at any moment, he even appears to be looking forward to it, but he has no notion where the acorns come from (despite what must be the firm feeling of the trunk of the tree against his back). When I visit him—when the acorns fly at him, and hit him just the right way—he perks up instantly. “You’re on deck, Johnny!” he says cheerfully. And once he said, “Owen’s batting for you, Johnny!” But, at other times, he is far away; perhaps he is turning my mother’s face to the ground, but taking care to close her eyes first—or else he is pulling down the skirt of her dress, for decency’s sake, and pinching her splayed knees together. Once, when he appeared to fail to recognize me—when I could establish no coherent communication with him—he spoke up as I was leaving; it was a sad, reflective voice that said, “You don’t want to see her, Johnny.”

  At my mother’s funeral, in Hurd’s Church, Mr. Chickering was visibly moved. I’m certain that his rearranging of my mother’s body in its repose had been the only time he had ever touched her; both the memory of that, and of Police Chief Pike’s inquiries regarding the “instrument of death,” the “murder weapon,” had clearly rattled Mr. Chickering, who wept openly at the funeral, as if he were mourning the death of baseball itself. Indeed, not only had Owen and I quit the team—and that infernal game—forever; other members of our Little League team had used the upsetting incident as a means to get out of a tedious obligation that had been much more their parents’ notion of something that was “good for them” than it had ever been their sport of choice. Mr. Chickering, who was completely good-hearted, had always told us that when we won, we won as a team, and when we lost, we lost as a team. Now—in his view—we had killed as a team; but he wept in his pew as if he bore more than his share of team responsibility.

  He had encouraged some of my other teammates and their families to sit with him—among them, the hapless Harry Hoyt, who’d received a base on balls with two outs, who’d made his own, small contribution to Owen Meany coming to the plate. After all, Harry could have been the last out—in which case, my mother would have taken Owen and me home from the game, as usual. But Harry had walked. He sat in Hurd’s, quite riveted by Mr. Chickering’s tears. Harry was almost innocent. We had been so many runs behind, and there were already two outs in our last inning; it made no sense for Harry Hoyt to walk. What possible good could a base on balls have done us? Harry should have been swinging away.

  He was an otherwise harmless creature, although he would cause his mother no little grief. His father was dead, his mother was—for years—the receptionist at the Gas Works; she got all the calls about the billing errors, and the leaks. Harry would never be Gravesend Academy material. He dutifully finished Gravesend High School and enlisted in the Navy—the Navy was popular around Gravesend. His mother tried to get Harry out of the service, claiming she was a widow who needed his support; but—in the first place—she had a job, and in the second place, Harry wanted to go in the Navy. He was embarrassed by his mother’s lack of patriotic zeal; it may have been the only time he argued with anyone, but he won the argument—he got to go to Vietnam, where he was killed by one of the poisonous snakes of that region. It was a Russell’s viper and it bit him while he was peeing under a tree; a later revelation was that the tree stood outside a whorehouse, where Harry had been waiting his turn. He was like that; he was a walker—when there was no good reason to walk.

  His death made his mother quite political—or at least “quite political” for Gravesend. She called herself a war resister and she advertised that in her home she would give free counsel on how to evade the draft; it was never very accurately demonstrated that her evening draft-counseling sessions so exhausted her that she became an inadequate receptionist at the Gas Works—yet the Gas Works let her go. Several patriots from the town were apprehended in the act of vandalizing her car and garage; she didn’t press charges, but she was gossiped about as a corrupter of the morals of youth. Although she was a plain, even dowdy woman, she was accused of seducing several of her young draft counselees, and she eventually moved away from Gravesend—I think she moved to Portsmouth; that was far enough away. I remember her at my mother’s funeral; she didn’t sit with her son Harry, where Mr. Chickering had gathered the team in adjacent pews. She was never a team player, Mrs. Hoyt; but Harry was.

  Mrs. Hoyt was the first person I remember who said that to criticize a specific American president was not anti-American; that to criticize a specific American policy was not antipatriotic; and that to disapprove of our involvement in a particular war against the communists was not the same as taking the communists’ side. But these distinctions were lost on most of the citizens of Gravesend; they are lost on many of my former fellow Americans today.

  I don’t remember seeing Buzzy Thurston at my mother’s funeral. He should have been there. After Harry Hoyt walked, Buzzy Thurston should have been the last out. He hit such an easy grounder—it was as sure an out as I’ve ever seen—but somehow the shortstop bobbled the ball. Buzzy Thurston reached base on an error. Who was that shortstop? He should have been in Hurd’s Church, too.

  Possibly Buzzy wasn’t there because he was Catholic; Owen suggested this, but there were other Catholics in attendance—Owen was simply expressing his particular prejudice. And I may be doing Buzzy an injustice; maybe he was there—after all, Hurd’s was packed; it was as full as it had been for my mother’s wedding. All those same crones of my grandmother were there. I know what they came to see. How does royalty react to this? How will Harriet Wheelwright respond to Fate with a capital F—to a Freak Accident (with a capital F, too), or to an Act of God (if that’s what you believe it was)? All those same crones, as black and hunchbacked as crows gathered around some roadkill—they came to the service as if to say: We acknowledge, O God, that Tabby Wheelwright was not allowed to get off scot-free.

  Getting off “scot-free” was a cardinal crime in New Hampshire. And by the birdy alertness visible in the darting eyes of my grandmother’s crones, I could tell that—in their view—my mother had not escaped her just reward.

  Buzzy Thurston, there or not there, would not get off scot-free, either. I really didn’t dislike Buzzy—especially after he spoke up for Owen, when Owen and I got ourselves in hot water with some of Buzzy’s Catholic classmates because of a little incident at St. Michael’s, the parochial school. But Buzzy was judged harshly for his role in reaching base and bringing Owen Meany up to bat (if judgment is what you believe it was). He was not Gravesend Academy material, either; yet he
did a postgraduate year at the academy, because he was a fair athlete—your standard outdoor New England variety: a football, hockey, and baseball man. He did not always need to reach base on an error.

  He was not outstanding, not at anything, but he was good enough to go to the state university, and he lettered in three sports there. He missed a year of competition with a knee injury, and managed to finagle a fifth year of college—retaining his student draft deferment for the extra year. After that, he was “draft material,” but he rather desperately strove to miss the trip to Vietnam by poisoning himself for his physical. He drank a fifth of bourbon a day for two weeks; he smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano; he started a fire in his parents’ oven, baking peyote; he was hospitalized with a colon disorder, following an LSD experience wherein he became convinced that his own Hawaiian sports shirt was edible, and he consumed some of it—including the buttons and the contents of the pocket: a book of matches, a package of cigarette papers, and a paper clip.

  Given the provincialism of the Gravesend draft board, Buzzy was declared psychologically unfit to serve, which had been his crafty intention. Unfortunately, he had grown to like the bourbon, the marijuana, the peyote, and the LSD; in fact, he so worshiped their excesses that he was killed one night on the Maiden Hill Road by the steering column of his Plymouth, when he drove head-on into the abutment of the railroad bridge that was only a few hundred yards downhill from the Meany Granite Quarry. It was Mr. Meany who called the police. Owen and I knew that bridge well; it followed an especially sharp turn at the bottom of a steep downhill run—it called for caution, even on our bicycles.

  It was the ill-treated Mrs. Hoyt who observed that Buzzy Thurston was simply another victim of the Vietnam War; although no one listened to her, she maintained that the war was the cause of the many abuses Buzzy had practiced upon himself—just as surely as the war had axed her Harry. To Mrs. Hoyt, these things were symptomatic of the Vietnam years: the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the suicidally fast driving, and the whorehouses in Southeast Asia, where many American virgins were treated to their first and last sexual experiences—not to mention the Russell’s vipers, waiting under the trees!

  Mr. Chickering should have wept—not only for the whimsy with which he’d instructed Owen Meany to “Swing away!” Had he known everything that would follow, he would have bathed his chubby face in even more tears than he produced that day in Hurd’s when he was grieving for and as a team.

  Naturally, Police Chief Pike sat apart; policemen like to sit by the door. And Chief Pike wasn’t weeping. To him, my mother was still a “case”; for him, the service was an opportunity to look over the suspects—because we were all suspects in Chief Pike’s eyes. Among the mourners, Chief Pike suspected the ball-thief lurked.

  He was always “by the door,” Chief Pike. When I dated his daughter, I always thought he would be bursting through a door—or a window—at any moment. It was doubtless a result of my anxiety concerning his sudden entrance that I once tangled my lower lip in his daughter’s braces, retreating too quickly from her kiss—certain I had heard the chief’s boots creaking in my near vicinity.

  That day at Hurd’s, you could almost hear those boots creaking by the door, as if he expected the stolen baseball to loose itself from the culprit’s pocket and roll across the dark crimson carpeting with incriminating authority. For Chief Pike, the theft of the ball that killed my mother was an offense of a far graver character than a mere misdemeanor; at the very least, it was the work of a felon. That my poor mother had been killed by the ball seemed not to concern Chief Pike; that poor Owen Meany had hit the ball was of slightly more interest to our chief of police—but only because it established a motive for Owen to possess the baseball in question. Therefore, it was not upon my mother’s closed coffin that our chief of police fixed his stare; nor did Chief Pike pay particular attention to the formerly airborne Captain Wiggin—nor did he show much interest in the slight stutter of the shaken Pastor Merrill. Rather, the intent gaze of our chief of police bore into the back of the head of Owen Meany, who sat precariously upon six or seven copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal; Owen tottered on the stack of hymnals, as if the police chief’s gaze unbalanced him. He sat as near to our family pews as possible; he sat where he’d sat for my mother’s wedding—behind the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular. This time there would be no jokes from Simon about the inappropriateness of Owen’s navy-blue Sunday school suit—such a little clone of the suit his father wore. The granitic Mr. Meany sat heavily beside Owen.

  “‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,’” said the Rev. Dudley Wiggin. “‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.’”

  “‘O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered,’” said the Rev. Lewis Merrill. “‘Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Tabby, and grant her an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints.’”

  In the dull light of Hurd’s Church, only Lydia’s wheelchair gleamed—in the aisle beside my grandmother’s pew, where Harriet Wheelwright sat alone. Dan and I sat in the pew behind her. The Eastmans sat behind us.

  The Rev. Captain Wiggin called upon Corinthians—“God shall wipe away all tears”—whereupon, Dan began to cry.

  The rector, eager as ever to represent belief as a battle, brought up Isaiah—“He will swallow up death in victory.” Now I heard my Aunt Martha join Dan; but the two of them were no match for Mr. Chickering, who had started weeping even before the ministers began their readings of the Old and the New Testament.

  Pastor Merrill stuttered his way into Lamentations—“The Lord is good unto them that wait for him.”

  Then we were led through the Twenty-third Psalm, as if there were a soul in Gravesend who didn’t know it by heart: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”—and so forth. When we got to the part that goes, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” that was when I began to hear Owen’s voice above all the others.

  When the rector said, “‘Give courage to those who are bereaved,’” I was already dreading how loud Owen’s voice would be during the final hymn; I knew it was one he liked.

  When the pastor said, “‘Help us, we pray, in the midst of things we cannot understand,’” I was already humming the hymn, trying to drown out Owen’s voice—in advance.

  And when Mr. Wiggin and Mr. Merrill struggled to say, in unison, “‘Grant us to entrust Tabitha to thy never-failing love,’” I knew it was time; I almost covered my ears.

  What else do we sing at an untimely death, what else but that catchy number that is categorized in The Pilgrim Hymnal as a favorite hymn of “ascension and reign”—the popular “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” a real organ-breaker?

  For when else, if not at the death of a loved one, do we most need to hear about the resurrection, about eternal life—about him who has risen?

  Crown him with man-y crowns, The Lamb up-on his throne;

  Hark! how the heaven-ly an-them drowns All mu-sic but its own;

  A-wake, my soul, and sing Of him who died for thee,

  And hail him as thy match-less king Through all e-ter-ni-ty.

  Crown him the Lord of love; Be-hold his hands and side,

  Rich wounds, yet vis-i-ble above, In beau-ty glo-ri-fied;

  No an-gel in the sky Can ful-ly bear that sight,

  But down-ward bends his burn-ing eye At mys-ter-ies so bright.

  But it was the third verse that especially inspired Owen.

  CROWN HIM THE LORD OF LIFE, WHO TRI-UMPHED O’ER THE GRAVE,

  AND ROSE VIC-TO-RIOUS IN THE STRIFE FOR THOSE HE CAME TO SAVE;

  HIS GLO-RIES NOW WE SING WHO DIED AND ROSE ON HIGH,

  WHO DIED, E-TER-NAL LIFE TO BRING, AND LIVES THAT DEATH MAY DIE.

  Even later, at the committal, I could hear Owen’s awful voice ringing, when Mr. Wiggin said, “‘In the midst of life we are in death.’” But it wa
s as if Owen were still humming the tune to “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” because I seemed to hear nothing else; I think now that is the nature of hymns—they make us want to repeat them, and repeat them; they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable. Certainly, the burial is unacceptable; doubly so, in my mother’s case, because—after the reassuring numbness of Hurd’s Church—we were standing exposed, outside, on a typical Gravesend summer day, muggy and hot, with the inappropriate sounds of children’s voices coming from the nearby high-school athletic fields.

  The cemetery, at the end of Linden Street, was within sight of the high school and the junior high school. I would attend the latter for only two years, but that was long enough to hear—many times—the remarks most frequently made by those students who were trapped in the study hall and seated nearest the windows that faced the cemetery: something to the effect that they would be less bored out there, in the graveyard.

  “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our sister Tabitha, and we commit her body to the ground,” Pastor Merrill said. That was when I noticed that Mr. Merrill’s wife was holding her ears. She was terribly pale, except for the plump backs of her upper arms, which were painful to look at because her sunburn there was so intense; she wore a loose, sleeveless dress, more gray than black—but maybe she didn’t have a proper black dress that was sleeveless, and she could not have been expected to force such a sunburn into sleeves. She swayed slightly, squinting her eyes. At first I thought that she held her ears due to some near-blinding pain inside her head; her dry blond hair looked ready to burst into flames, and one of her feet had strayed out of the straps of her sandals. One of her sickly children leaned against her hip. “‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’” said her husband, but Mrs. Merrill couldn’t have heard him; she not only held her ears, she appeared to be pressing them into her skull.