A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

THE SHOT

WHENEVER I HEAR someone generalizing favorably about "the sixties," I feel like Hester, I feel like throwing up. I remember those ardent simpletons who said-and this was after the massacre of those , civilians in Hue, in '-that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were our moral superiors. I remember a contemporary of mine asking me- with a killing lack of humor-if didn't sometimes think that our whole generation took itself too seriously; and didn't sometimes wonder if it was only the marijuana that made us more aware?

"MORE AWARE OF WHAT?" Owen Meany would have asked. I remember the aggressiveness of the so-called flower children-yes, righteousness in the cause of peace, or in any other cause, is aggressive. And the mystical muddiness of so much of the thinking-I remember that, too; and talking to plants. And, with the exception of Owen Meany and the Beatles, I remember that there was precious little irony. That's why Hester failed as a singer and as a songwriter-a deadly absence of irony. Perhaps this is also why she's so successful now: with the direction her music traveled, from folk to rock, and with the visual aid of those appalling rock videos-those lazy-minded, sleazy associations of "images"

that pass for narrative on all the rock-video television channels around the world-irony is no longer necessary. Only the name that Hester took for herself reflects the irony with which she was once so familiar-in her relationship with Owen Meany. As a folksinger, she was Hester Eastman-an earnest nobody, a flop. But as an aging hard-rock star, a fading queen of the grittiest and randiest sort of rock 'n' roll, she is Hester the Molesterl

"Who would have believed it?" Simon says. " 'Hester the Molester' is a fucking household word. The bitch should pay me a commission-it was my name for her!'' That I am the first cousin of Hester the Molester distinguishes me among my Bishop Strachan students, who are otherwise inclined to view me as fussy and curmudgeonly-a cranky, short-haired type in his corduroys and tweeds, eccentric only in his political tempers and in his nasty habit of tamping the bowl of his pipe with the stump of his amputated index finger. And why not? My finger is a perfect fit; we handicapped people must learn to make the best of our mutilations and disfigurements. When Hester has a concert in Toronto, my students who number themselves among her adoring fans always approach me for tickets; they know I'm good for a dozen or so. And that I attend Hester's occasional concerts here in the company of such attractive young girls allows me to infiltrate the crowd of raving-maniac rowdies unnoticed; that I come to her concerts as the escort of these young girls also makes me almost' 'cool'' in Hester's eyes.

"There's hope for you yet," my cousin invariably says to me, while my students are crowding into her messy, backstage dressing room-naturally, speechless with awe at the sight of Hester in her typically lewd dishevelment.

"They're my students," I remind Hester.

"Don't let that stop you," Hester tells me. And to one or more of my students, Hester always says: "If you're worried about 'safe sex,' you ought to try it with him-" and she then lays her heavy paw upon my shoulder. "He's a virgin, you know," she tells my students. "There's no one safer!"

And they titter and giggle at her joke-they think it is a joke. It's precisely the outrageous sort of joke that they would expect from Hester the Molester. I can tell: they don't even consider that Hester's claim-that I'm a virgin-might be true]

Hester knows it's true. I don't know why she finds my

position offensive. After so many humiliating years of trying to lose my virginity, which no one but myself appeared even slightly interested in-hardly anyone has wanted to take it from me-I decided that, in the long run, my virginity was valuable only if I kept it. I don't think I'm a "nonpracticing homosexual," whatever that means. What has happened to me has simply neutered me. I just don't feel like "practicing."

Hester, in her own fashion, has remained a kind of virgin, too. Owen Meany was the love of her life; after him, she never allowed herself to become so seriously involved. She says: "I like a young boy, every so often. In keeping with the times, you know, I'm in favor of 'safe sex'; therefore, I prefer a virgin. And those young boys don't dare lie to me! And they're easy to say good-bye to-in fact, they're even kinda grateful. What could be better?" my cousin asks me. I have to smile back at her wicked smile. Hester the Molested I have all her albums, but I don't have a record player; I have all her tapes, too, but I don't own a tape deck-not even the kind that fits in a car. I don't even own a car. My students can be relied upon to keep me informed about Hester's new rock videos.

"Mister Wheelwright! Have you seen 'Drivin' with No Hands'?" I shudder at the idea. Eventually, I see them all-you can't escape the damn things; Hester's rock videos are notorious. The Rev. Katherine Keeling herself is addicted! She claims it's because her children watch them, and Katherine wants to keep up with whatever new atrocity is on her children's minds. Hester's videos are truly ugly. Her voice has gotten louder, if not better; her accompanying music is full of electric bass and other vibrations that lower her nasal tones to the vocal equivalent of an abused woman crying for help from the bottom of an iron barrel. And the visual accompaniment is a mystifying blend of contemporary, carnal encounters with unidentified young boys intercut with black-and-white, documentary footage from the Vietnam War. Napalm victims, mothers cradling their murdered children, helicopters landing and taking off and crashing in the midst of perilous ground fire, emergency surgeries in the field, countless GI's with their heads in their hands-and Hester herself, entering and leaving different but similar hotel rooms, wherein a sheepish young boy is always just putting on or just taking off his clothes. The age group of that young boy-especially, young girlsl- thinks that Hester the Molester is both profound and humane.

"It's not like it's just her music, or her voice, you know-it's her whole statement," one of my students told me; I felt so sick to my stomach that I couldn't speak.

"It's not even her lyrics-it's her whole, you know, like commentary," said another student. And these are smart girls-these are educated young women from sophisticated families! I don't deny that Hester was damaged by what happened to Owen Meany; I'm sure she thinks she was damaged even more than I was damaged-and I wouldn't argue the point with her. We were both damaged by what happened to Owen; who cares about morel But what an irony it is that Hester the Molester has converted her damage into millions of dollars and fame-that out of Owen's suffering, and her own, Hester has made a mindless muddle of sex and protest, which young girls who have never suffered feel they can "relate to."

What would Owen Meany have said about that? I can only imagine how Owen would have critiqued one of Hester the Molester's rock videos:

"HESTER, ONE WOULD NEVER SUSPECT-FROM THIS MINDLESS MESS-THAT YOU WERE A MUSIC MAJOR, AND A SOCIALIST. ONE WOULD TEND TO CONCLUDE-UPON THE EVIDENCE OF THIS DISJOINTED WALLOWING-THAT YOU WERE BORN TONE-DEAF, AND THAT YOU ARE DRAWING, ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY, UPON YOUR EXPERIENCES AS A WAITRESS*"

And what would Owen Meany have made of the crucifixes? Hester the Molester likes crucifixes, or else she likes to mock them-all kinds, all sizes; around her neck and in her ears. Occasionally, she even wears one in her nose; her right nostril is pierced.

"Are you Catholic?" an interviewer asked her once.

"Are you kidding?" Hester said. The English major in me must point out that Hester has an ear for titles, if not for music.

"Drivin' with No Hands" Church, No Country, No More "I Don't Believe in No Soul"

"Gone to Arizona"; "No ; "Just Another Dead Hero"; "You Won't See Me at His Funeral"; "Life After You"; "Why the Boys Want Me"; "Your Voice Convinces Me"; "There's No Forgettin' Nineteen Sixty-eight."

I've got to admit, Hester's titles are catchy; and she has as much of a right as I have to interpret the silence that Owen Meany left behind. I should be careful not to generalize "the silence"; in my case, Owen didn't leave me in absolute peace and quiet. Twice, in fact, Owen has let me hear from him-I mean, in both cases, that he let me hear from him after he was gone. Most recently-only this August-I heard from him in a manner typical of Owen; which is to say, in a manner open to interpretation and dispute. I was staying up late at Front Street, and I confess that my senses were impaired; Dan Needham and I were enjoying our usual vacation-we were drinking too much. We were recalling the measures we took, years ago, to allow Grandmother to go on living at Front Street as long as possible; we were remembering the incidents that finally led us to commit Grandmother to the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly. We hated to do it, but she left us no choice; she drove Ethel crazy-we couldn't find a maid, or a nurse, whom Grandmother couldn't drive crazy. After Owen Meany was gone, everyone was too dull-witted to keep Harriet Wheelwright company. For years, her groceries had been delivered by the Poggio brothers-Dominic Poggio, and the dead one, whose name I no longer remember. Then the Poggios stopped making all home deliveries. Out of fondness for my grandmother-who was his oldest-living customer, and his only customer who always paid her bills on time-Dominic Poggio generously offered to continue to make deliveries to Front Street. Was Grandmother appreciative of Dominic's generosity? She was not only wnappreciative; she could not remember that the Poggios didn't deliver to anyone else-that they were doing her a special favor. People had always done special favors for Harriet Wheelwright; Grandmother took such treatment for granted. And she was not only unappreciative; she was complaining. She telephoned Dominic Poggio almost daily, and she upbraided him that his delivery service was going to the dogs. In the first place, she reproached him, the delivery boys were "total strangers." They were nothing of the kind; they were Dominic Poggio's grandchildren-my grandmother simply forgot who they were, and that she had seen them delivering her groceries for years. Furthermore, my grandmother complained, these "total strangers" were guilty of startling her-she had no fondness for surprises, she reminded poor Dominic. Couldn't the Poggios telephone her before they made their frightening deliveries? Grandmother asked. That way she would at least be forewarned that the total strangers were coming. Dominic agreed. He was a sweet man who cherished my grandmother; also, probably, he had wrongly predicted that she would die any day now-and he would, he'd imagined, be rid of this nuisance. But Grandmother lived on and on. When the Poggios called her and told her that the delivery boys were on their way, my grandmother thanked them politely, hung up the telephone, and promptly forgot that anyone was coming-or that she'd been forewarned. When the boys would "startle" her, she would telephone Dominic in a rage and say: "If you're going to send total strangers to this house, you might at least have the courtesy to warn me when they're coming!"

"Yes, Missus Wheelwright!" Dominic always said. Then he would call Dan to complain; he even called me a few times-in Toronto!

"I'm getting worried about your grandmother, John," Dominic would say. By this time, Grandmother had lost all her hair. She owned a chest of drawers that was full of wigs, and she abused Ethel-and several of Ethel's replacements-by complaining that her wigs were badly treated by the chest of drawers, in addition to being inexpertly attached to her old bald head by Ethel and the others. Grandmother developed such contempt for Ethel-and for Ethel's inept replacements-that she plotted with considerable cunning to undermine what she regarded as the already woefully inadequate abilities of her serving women. They were no match for her. Grandmother hid her wigs so that these luckless ladies could not find them; then she would abuse these fools for misplacing her vital headpieces.

' 'Do you actually expect me to wander the world as if I were an addlepated bald woman escaped from the circus?" she would say.

"Missus Wheelwright-where did you put your wigs?" the women would ask her.

"Are you actually accusing me of intentionally desiring to look like the lunatic victim of a nuclear disaster?" my

grandmother would ask them. "I would rather be murdered by a maniac than be bald\"

More wigs were bought; most-but by no means all-of her old wigs were found. When Grandmother especially disliked a wig, she would retire it in the rose garden by submerging it in the birdbath. And when the Poggios continued to send total strangers to her door-intent on startling her-Harriet Wheelwright responded by startling them in return. She would dart to open the door for them-sprinting ahead of Ethel or Ethel's replacements-and she would greet the terrified delivery boys by snatching her wig off her head and shrieking at them while she was bald. Poor Dominic Poggio's grandchildren! How they fought among themselves not to be the boy who delivered the groceries to Front Street. It was shortly after the fourth or fifth such incident when Dan telephoned me-in Toronto-and said: "It's about your grandmother. You know how much I love her. But I think it's time."

Even this August, the memory of those days made Dan Needham and me laugh. It was late at night, and we'd been drinking-as usual.

"Do you know what?" Dan said. "There are still all those damn jams and jellies and some simply awful things that she had preserved-they're still on those shelves, in the secret passageway!"

"Not really!" I said.

"Yes, really! See for yourself," he said. Dan tried to get out of his chair-to investigate the mysteries of the secret passageway with me-but he lost his balance in the great effort he made to rise to his feet, and he settled back into his chair apologetically. "See for yourself!" he repeated, burping. I had some difficulty opening the concealed door; I don't think that door had been opened for years. I knocked a few books off the shelves on the door while I was fumbling with the lock and key. I was reminded that Germaine had once been no less clumsy-when Lydia had died, and Germaine had chosen the secret passageway as the place to hide from Death itself. Then the door swung open. The secret passageway was dark; yet I could discern the scurrying of spiders. The cobwebs were dense. I remembered when I'd trapped Owen in the secret passageway and he'd cried out that something wet was licking him-he didn't think it was a cobweb, he thought it was SOMETHING WITH A TONGUE. I also remembered the time we'd shut him in there during his going-away party, when Mr. Fish had recited those lines from Julius Caesar-just outside the closed door. "Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once"-and so forth. And I remembered how Owen and I had scared Ger-maine in there-and poor Lydia, before Germaine. There were a lot of old memories lurking in the cobwebs in the secret passageway; I groped for the light switch, and couldn't find it. I didn't want to touch those dark objects on the shelves without seeing what they were. Then Dan Needham shut the door on me.

"Cut it out, Dan!" I cried. I could hear him laughing. I reached out into the blackness. My hand found one of the shelves; I felt along the shelf, passing through cobwebs, in the direction of the door. I thought the light switch was near the door. That was when I put my hand on something awful. It felt springy, alive-I imagined a nest of newly born rats!-and I stepped backward and screamed. What my hand had found was one of Grandmother's hidden wigs; but I didn't know that. I stepped too far back, to the edge of the top step of the long stairs; I felt myself losing my balance and starting to fall. In less than a second, I imagined how Dan would discover my body on the dirt floor at the foot of the stairs-when a small, strong hand (or something like a small, strong hand) guided my own hand to the light switch; a small, strong hand, or something like it, pulled me forward from where I teetered on the top step of the stairs. And his voice- it was unmistakably Owen's voice-said: "DON'T BE AFRAID. NOTHING BAD IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU."

I screamed again. When Dan Needham opened the door, it was his turn to scream. "Your hairl" he cried. When I looked in a mirror, I thought it was the cobwebs-my scalp appeared to have been dusted with flour. But when I brushed my hair, I saw that the roots had turned white. That was this August; my hair has grown in all-white since then. At my age, my hair was already turning gray; even my students think that my white hair is distinguished-an improvement. The morning after Owen Meany "spoke" to me, Dan Needham said: "Of course, we were both drunk-you, especially."

"Me, 'especially'!" I said.

"That's right," Dan said. "Look: I have never mocked your belief-have I? I will never make fun of your religious faith-you know that. But you can't expect me to believe that Owen Meany's actual hand kept you from falling down those cellar stairs; you can't expect me to be convinced that Owen Meany's actual voice 'spoke' to you in the secret passageway."

"Dan," I said, "I understand you. I'm not a proselytizer, I'm no evangelist. Have I ever tried to make you a believer? If I wanted to preach, I'd be a minister, I'd have a congregation- wouldn't I?"

"Look: I understand you," Dan said; but he couldn't stop staring at the snow-white roots of my hair. A little later, Dan said: "You actually felt pulled-you felt an actual tug, as if from an actual hand?"

"I admit I was drunk," I said. And a little later, Dan said: "It was his voice-you're sure it wasn't something / said that you heard? It was his voice?"

I replied rather testily: "How many voices have you heard, Dan, that could ever be mistaken for his voice?"

"Well, we were both drunk-weren't we? That's my point," Dan Needham said. I remember the summer of , when my finger was healing-how that summer slipped away. That was the summer Owen Meany was promoted; his uniform would look a little different when Hester and I saw him again- he would be a first lieutenant. The bars on his shoulder epaulets would turn from brass to silver. He would also help me begin my Master's thesis on Thomas Hardy. I had much trouble beginning anything-and, according to Owen, even more trouble seeing something through.

"YOU MUST JUST PLUNGE IN," Owen wrote to me. "THINK OF HARDY AS A MAN WHO WAS ALMOST RELIGIOUS, AS A MAN WHO CAME SO CLOSE TO BELIEVING IN GOD THAT WHEN HE REJECTED GOD, HIS REJECTION MADE HIM FEROCIOUSLY BITTER. THE KIND OF FATE HARDY BELIEVES IN IS ALMOST LIKE BELIEVING IN GOD-AT LEAST IN THAT TERRIBLE, JUDGMENTAL GOD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. HARDY HATES INSTITUTIONS: THE CHURCH-MORE THAN FAITH OR BELIEF-AND CERTAINLY MAR- RIAGE (THE INSTITUTION OF IT), AND THE INSTITUTION OF EDUCATION. PEOPLE ARE HELPLESS TO FATE, VICTIMS OF TIME-THEIR OWN EMOTIONS UNDO THEM, AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OF ALL KINDS FAIL THEM.

''DON'T YOU SEE HOW A BELIEF IN SUCH A BITTER UNIVERSE IS NOT UNLIKE RELIGIOUS FAITH? LIKE FAITH, WHAT HARDY BELIEVED WAS NAKED, PLAIN, VULNERABLE. BELIEF IN GOD, OR A BELIEF THAT- EVENTUALLY-EVERYTHING HAS TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES . . . EITHER WAY, YOU DON'T LEAVE YOURSELF ANY ROOM FOR PHILOSOPHICAL DETACHMENT. EITHER WAY, YOU'RE NOT BEING VERY CLEVER. NEVER THINK OF HARDY AS CLEVER; NEVER CONFUSE FAITH, OR BELIEF-OF ANY KIND- WITH SOMETHING EVEN REMOTELY INTELLECTUAL.

"PLUNGE IN-JUST BEGIN. I'D BEGIN WITH HIS NOTES, HIS DIARIES-HE NEVER MINCED WORDS THERE. EVEN EARLY-WHEN HE WAS TRAVELING IN FRANCE, IN -HE WROTE: 'SINCE I DISCOVERED SEVERAL YEARS AGO, THAT I WAS LIVING IN A WORLD WHERE NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY, I HAVE TROUBLED MYSELF VERY LITTLE ABOUT THEORIES. I AM CONTENT WITH TENTATIVENESS FROM DAY TO DAY.' YOU COULD APPLY THAT OBSERVATION TO EACH OF HIS NOVELS! THAT'S WHY I SAY HE WAS 'ALMOST RELIGIOUS'-BECAUSE HE WASN'T A GREAT THINKER, HE WAS A GREAT FEELERl

"TO BEGIN, YOU SIMPLY TAKE ONE OF HIS BLUNT OBSERVATIONS AND PUT IT TOGETHER WITH ONE OF HIS MORE LITERARY OBSERVATIONS-YOU KNOW, ABOUT THE CRAFT. I LIKE THIS ONE: 'A STORY MUST BE EXCEPTIONAL ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY ITS TELLING. WE STORYTELLERS ARE ALL ANCIENT MARINERS, AND NONE OF US IS JUSTIFIED IN STOPPING WEDDING GUESTS, UNLESS HE HAS SOMETHING MORE UNUSUAL TO RELATE THAN THE ORDINARY EXPERIENCES OF EVERY AVERAGE MAN AND WOMAN.'

"YOU SEE? IT'S EASY. YOU TAKE HIS HIGH STANDARDS FOR STORIES THAT ARE 'EXCEPTIONAL' AND YOU PUT THAT TOGETHER WITH HIS BELIEF THAT

'NOTHING BEARS OUT IN PRACTICE WHAT IT PROMISES INCIPIENTLY,' AND THERE'S YOUR THESIS! ACTUALLY, THERE IS HIS THESIS-ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS FILL IN THE EXAMPLES. PERSONALLY, I'D BEGIN WITH ONE OF THE BITTEREST-TAKE ALMOST ANYTHING FROM JUDE THE OBSCURE. HOW ABOUT THAT TERRIBLE LITTLE PRAYER THAT JUDE REMEMBERS FALLING ASLEEP TO, WHEN HE WAS A CHILD?

"TEACH ME TO LIVE, THAT I MAY DREAD "THE GRAVE AS LITTLE AS MY BED. "TEACH ME TO DIE ...

"WHAT COULD BE EASIER?" wrote Owen Meany. And thus-having cut off my ringer and allowed me to finish graduate school-he started my Master's thesis for me, too. This August in Gravesend-where I try to visit every August-Dan's students in the summer school were struggling with Euripides; I told Dan that I thought he'd made an odd and merciless choice. For students the age of my Bishop Strachan girls to spend seven weeks of the summer memorizing The Medea and The Trojan Women must have been an exercise in tedium-and one that risked disabusing the youngsters of their infatuation with the stage. Dan said: "What was I going to do? I had twenty-five kids in the class and only six boys!" Indeed, those boys looked mightily overworked as it was; a particularly pallid young man had to be Creon in one play and Poseidon in the other. All the girls were shuffled in and out of the Chorus of Corinthian Women and the Chorus of Trojan Women as if Corinthian and Trojan women possessed an interchangable shrillness. I was quite taken by the dolorous girl Dan picked to play Hecuba; in addition to the sorrows of her role, she had to physically remain on the stage for the entirety of The Trojan Women. Therefore, Dan rested her in The Medea; he gave her an especially rueful but largely silent part in the Chorus of Corinthian Women-although he singled her out at the end of the play; she was clearly one of his better actresses, and Dan was wise to emphasize those end lines of the Chorus by having his girl speak solo.

" 'Many things the gods achieve beyond our judgment,' " said the sorrowful girl. " 'What we thought is not confirmed and what we thought not God contrives.' "

How true. Not even Owen Meany would dispute that. I sometimes envy Dan his ability to teach onstage; for the theater is a great emphasizer-especially to young people, who have no great experience in life by which they might judge the experiences they encounter in literature; and who have no great confidence in language, neither in using it nor in hearing it. The theater, Dan quite rightly claims, dramatizes both the experience and the confidence in language that young people- Such as our students-lack. Students of the age of Dan's, and mine, have no great feeling-for example-for wit; wit simply passes them by, or else they take it to be an elderly form of snobbery, a mere showing off with the language that they use (at best) tentatively. Wit isn't tentative; therefore, neither is it young. Wit is one of many aspects of life and literature that is far easier to recognize onstage than in a book. My students are always missing the wit in what they read, or else they do not trust it; onstage, even an amateur actor can make anyone see what wit is. August is my month to talk about teaching with Dan. When I meet DanTor Christmas, when we go together to Sawyer Depot, it is a busy time and there are always other people around. But in August we are often alone; as soon as the summer-school theater productions are over, Dan and I take a vacation together-although this usually means that we stay in Gravesend and are no more adventuresome than to indulge in day trips to the beach at Little Boar's Head. We spend our evenings at Front Street, just talking; since Dan moved in, the television has been gone. When Grandmother went to the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, she took her television set with her; when Grandmother died, she left the house at Front Street to Dan and me. It is a huge and lonely house for a man who's never even considered remarrying; but the house contains almost as much history for Dan as it holds for me. Although I enjoy my visits, not even the tempting nostalgia of the house at Front Street could entice me to return to the United States. This is a subject-my return-that Dan broaches every August, always on an evening when it is clear to him that I am enjoying the atmosphere of Front Street, and his friendship.

"There's more than enough room here for a couple of old bachelors like us," he says. "And with your years of experience at Bishop Strachan-not to mention the recommendation I'm sure your headmistress would write for you, not to mention

that you're a distinguished alumnus-of course the Gravesend Academy English Department would be happy to have you. Just say the word."

Not to be polite, but out of my affection for Dan, I let the subject pass. This August, when he started that business again, I simply said: "How hard it is-without the showplace of the stage-to teach wit to teenagers. I despair that another fall is almost upon me and once again I shall strive to make my Grade Ten girls notice something in Wuthering Heights besides every little detail about Catherine and Heathcliff-the story, the story; it is all they are interested in!"

"John, dear John," Dan Needham said. "He's been dead for twenty years. Forgive it. Forgive and forget-and come home."

"There's a passage right at the beginning-they miss it every year!" I said. "I'm referring to Lockwood's description of Joseph, I've been pointing it out to them for so many years that I know the passage by heart: 'looking ... in my face so sourly that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his dinner ..." I've even read this aloud to them, but it sails right over their heads-they don't crack a smile! And it's not just Emily Bronte's wit that whistles clean past them. They don't get it when it's contemporary. Is Mordecai Richler too witty for eleventh-grade girls? It would appear so. Oh yes, they think The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is 'funny'; but they miss half the humor! You know that description of the middle-class Jewish resort? It's always description that they miss; I swear, they think it's unimportant. They want dialogue, they want action; but there's so much writing in the description! 'There were still some pockets of Gentile resistance, it's true. Neither of the two hotels that were still in their hands admitted Jews but that, like the British raj who still lingered on the Malabar Coast, was not so discomforting as it was touchingly defiant.' Every year I watch their faces when I read to them-they don't bat an eye!"

"John," Dan said. "Let bygones be bygones-not even Owen would still be angry. Do you think Owen Meany would have blamed the whole country for what happened to him? That was madness; this is madness, too."

"How do you teach madness onstage?" I asked Dan. "Hamlet, I suppose, for starters-I give Hamlet to my Grade Thirteen girls, but they have to make do with reading it; they don't get to see it. And Crime and Punishment-even my Grade Thirteen girls struggle with the so-called 'psychological' novel. The 'concentrated wretchedness' of Raskolnikov is entirely within their grasp, but they don't see how the novel's psychology is at work in even Dostoevski's simplest descriptions; once again, it's the description they miss. Raskolnikov's landlord, for example-'his face seemed to be thickly covered with oil, like an old iron lock.' What a perfect face for his landlord to have! 'Isn't that marvekms?' I ask the class; they stare at me as if they think I'm crazier than Raskolnikov."

Dan Needham, occasionally, stares at me that way, too. How could he possibly think I could "forgive and forget"? There is too much forgetting. When we schoolteachers worry that our students have no sense of history, isn't it what people forget that worries us? For years I tried to forget who my father might be; I didn't want to find out who he was, as Owen pointed out. How many times, for example, did I call back my mother's old singing teacher, Graham McSwiney? How many times did I call him and ask him if he'd learned the whereabouts of Buster Freebody, or if he'd remembered anything about my mother that he hadn't told Owen and me? Only once; I called him only once. Graham McSwiney told me to forget about who my father was; I was willing. Mr. McSwiney said: "Buster Freebody-if he's alive, if you find him-would be so old that he wouldn't even remember your mother-not to mention who her boyfriend was!" Mr. McSwiney was much more interested in Owen Meany-in why Owen's voice hadn't changed. "He should see a doctor- there's really no good reason for a voice like his," Graham McSwiney said. But, of course, there was a reason. When I learned what the reason was, I never called Mr. McSwiney to tell him; I doubt it would have been a scientific enough explanation for Mr. McSwiney. I tried to tell Hester, but Hester said she didn't want to know. "I'd tielieve what you'd tell me," Hester said, "so please spare me the details."

As for the purpose of Owen Meany's voice, and everything that happened to him, I told only Dan and the Rev. Lewis Merrill. "I suppose it's possible," Dan said. "I suppose stranger things have happened-although I can't, off the top of my head, think of an example. The important thing is that you believe it, and I would never challenge your right to believe what you want."

"But do you believe it?" I asked him.

"Well, I believe you" Dan said.

' 'How can you not believe it?'' I asked Pastor Merrill. ' 'You of all people," I told him. "A man of faith-how can you not believe it?"

"To believe it-I mean all of it," the Rev. Lewis Merrill said, "-to believe everything . . . well, that calls upon more faith than I have."

"But you of all people!" I said to him. "Look at me-I never was a believer, not until this happened. If / can believe it, why can't you?" I asked Mr. Merrill. He began to stutter.

"It's easier for you to j-j-j-just accept it. Belief is not something you have felt, and then not felt; you haven't ---lived with belief, and with Mnbelief. It's easier f-f-f-for you," the Rev. Mr. Merrill repeated. "You haven't ever been f-f-f-full of faith, and full of d-d-d-doubt. Something j-j-j-just strikes you as a miracle, and you believe it. For me, it's not that s-s-s-simple," said Pastor Merrill.

"But it is a miracle!" I cried. "He told you that dream-I know he did! And you were there-when he saw his name, and the date of his death, on Scrooge's grave. You were there!" I cried. "How can you doubt that he knew" I asked Mr. Merrill. "He knew-he knew everything] What do you call that-if you don't call it a miracle?"

"You've witnessed what you c-c-c-call a miracle and now you believe-you believe everything," Pastor Merrill said. "But miracles don't c-c-c-cause belief-real miracles don't m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles. I believe that Owen was extraordinarily g-g-g-gifted-yes, gifted and powerfully sure of himself. No doubt he suffered some powerfully disturbing visions, too-and he was certainly emotional, he was very emotional. But as to knowing what he appeared to 'know'-there are other examples of p-p-p-precognition; not every example is necessarily ascribed to God. Look at you- you never even believed in G-G-G-God; you've said so, and here you are ascribing to the h-h-h-hand of God everything that happened to Owen M-M-M-Meany!"

This August, at Front Street, a dog woke me up. In the deepest part of my sleep, I heard the dog and thought it was Sagamore; then I thought it was my dog-I used to have a dog, in Toronto-and only when I was wide awake did I catch up to myself, in the present time, and realize that both Sagamore and my dog were dead. It used to be nice to have a dog to walk in Winston Churchill Park; perhaps I should get another. Out on Front Street, the strange dog barked and barked. I got out of bed; I took the familiar walk along the dark hall to my mother's room-where it is always lighter, where the curtains are never drawn. Dan sleeps in my grandmother's former bedroom-the official master bedroom of Front Street, I suppose. I looked out my mother's window but I couldn't see the dog. Then I went into the den-or so it had been called when my grandfather had been alive. Later, it was a kind of children's playroom, the room where my mother had played the old Victrola, where she had sung along with Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. It was on the couch in that room where Hester had spread herself out, and waited, while Noah and Simon and I searched all of Front Street, in vain, for Owen Meany. We'd never learned where she'd hidden him, or where he'd hidden himself. I lay down on that old couch and remembered all of that. I must have fallen asleep there; it was a vastly historical couch, upon which-I also remembered- my mother had first whispered into my ear: "My little fling!"

When I woke up, my right hand had drifted under one of the deep couch cushions; my wrist detected something there-it felt like a playing card, but when I extracted it from under the cushion, I saw that it was a relic from Owen Meany's long-ago collection: a very old and bent baseball card. Hank Bauer! Remember him? The card was printed in when Bauer was twenty-eight, in only his second full season as an outfielder for the Yankees. But he looked older; perhaps it was the war-he left baseball for World War Two, then he returned to the game. Not being a baseball fan, I nevertheless remembered Hank Bauer as a reliable, unfancy player-and, indeed, his slightly tired, tanned face reflected his solid work ethic. There was nothing of the hotshot in his patient smile, and he wasn't hiding his eyes under the visor of his baseball cap, which was pushed well back on his head, revealing his thoughtful, wrinkled brow. It was one of those old photographs wherein the color was optimistically added-his tan was too tan, the sky too blue, the clouds too uniformly white. The high, fluffy clouds and the brightness of the blue sky created such a strikingly unreal background for Mr. Bauer in his white, pin-striped uniform-it was as if he had died and gone to heaven.

Of course I knew then where Hester had hidden Owen Meany; he'd been under the couch cushions-and under her]-all the while we were searching. That explained why his appearance had been so rumpled, why his hair had looked slept on. The Hank Bauer card must have fallen out of his pocket. Discoveries like this-not to mention, Owen's voice "speaking" to me in the secret passageway, and his hand (or something like a hand) seeming to take hold of me- occasionally make me afraid of Front Street. I know that Grandmother was afraid of the old house, near the end. "Too many ghosts!" she would mutter. Finally, I think, she was happy not to be "murdered by a maniac"-a condition she had once found favorable to being removed from Front Street. She left the old house rather quietly when she left; she was philosophic about her departure. "Time to leave," she said to Dan and me. "Too many ghosts!"

At the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly, her decline was fairly swift and painless. At first she forgot all about Owen, then she forgot me; nothing could remind her even of my mother-nothing except my fairly expert imitation of Owen's voice. That voice would jolt her memory; that voice caused her recollections to surface, almost every time. She died in her sleep, only two weeks short of her hundredth birthday. She didn't like things that "stood out"-as in: "That hairdo stands out like a sore thumb!"

I imagine her contemplating her hundredth birthday; the family celebration that was planned to honor this event would surely have killed Grandmother-I suspect she knew this. Aunt Martha had already alerted the Today show; as you may know, the Today show routinely wishes Happy Birthday to every hundred-year-old in the United States-provided that the Today show knows about it. Aunt Martha saw to it that they knew. Harriet Wheelwright would be one hundred years old on Halloween! My grandmother hated Halloween; it was one of her few quarrels with God-that He had allowed her to be born on this day. It was a day, in her view, that had been invented to create mayhem among the lower classes, a day when they were invited to abuse people of property-and my grandmother's house was always abused on Halloween. Eighty Front Street was feathered with toilet paper, the garage windows were dutifully soaped, the driveway lampposts were spray-painted (orange), and once someone inserted the greater half of a lamprey eel in Grandmother's letter slot. Owen had always suspected Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman. Upon her arrival in the old-age home, Grandmother considered that the remote-control device for switching television channels was a true child of Satan; it was television's final triumph, she said, that it could render you brain-dead without even allowing you to leave your chair. It was Dan who discovered Grandmother to be dead, when he visited her one evening in the Gravesend Retreat for the Elderly. He visited her every evening, and he brought her a Sunday newspaper and read it aloud to her on Sunday mornings, too. The night she died, Dan found her propped up in her hospital bed; she appeared to have fallen asleep with the TV on and with the remote-control device held in her hand in such a way that the channels kept changing. But she was dead, not asleep, and her cold thumb had simply attached itself to the button that restlessly roamed the channels-looking for something good. How I wish that Owen Meany could have died as peacefully as that! Toronto: September , -rainy and cool; back-to-school weather, back-to-church weather. These familiar rituals of church and school are my greatest comfort. But Bishop Strachan has hired a new woman in the English Department; I could tell when she was interviewing, last spring, that she was someone to be endured-a woman who gives new meaning to that arresting first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, with which the fall term begins for my Grade girls: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

I don't know if I quite qualify for Jane Austen's notion of "a good fortune"; but my grandmother provided for me very generously. My new colleague's name is Eleanor Pribst, and I would love to read what Jane Austen might have written about her. I would be vastly happier to have read about Ms. Pribst than I am pleased to have met her. But I shall endure her; I will outlast her, in the end. She is alternately silly and aggressive, and in both methods of operation she is willfully insufferable- she is a Germanic bully. When she laughs, I am reminded of that wonderful sentence near the end of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing: "I laugh, and a noise comes out like something being killed: a mouse, a bird?''

In the case of the laughter of Eleanor Pribst, I could swear I hear the death rattle of a rat or a vulture. In department meeting, when I once again brought up the matter of my request to teach Giinter Grass's Cat and Mouse in Grade , Ms. Pribst went on the attack.

"Why would you want to teach that nasty book to girls?" she asked. "That is a boys' book," she said. "The masturbation scene alone is offensive to women."

Then she complained that I was ' 'using up'' both Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in the Canadian Literature course for my Grade s; there was nothing preventing Ms. Pribst from teaching either Atwood or Munro in another course-but she was out to make trouble. A man teaching those two women effectively "used them up," she said--so that women in the department could not teach them. I have her figured out. She's one of those who tells you that if you teach a Canadian author in the Canadian Literature course, you're condescending to Canadians-by not teaching them in another literature course. And if you "use them up" in another literature course, then she'll ask you what you think is "wrong" with Canadian Literature; she'll say you're being condescending to Canadians. It's all because I'm a former American, and she doesn't like Americans; this is so obvious-that and the fact that I am a bachelor, I live alone, and I have not fallen all over myself to ask her (as they say) "out." She's one of those pushy women who will readily humiliate you if you do ask her "out"; and if you don't ask her, she'll attempt to humiliate you more. I am reminded of some years ago, and of a New York woman who so reminded me of Mitzy Lish. She brought her daughter to Bishop Strachan for an interview; the mother wanted to interview someone from the English Department-to ascertain, she told the headmistress, if we were guilty of a "parochial'' approach to literature. This woman was a seething pot of sexual contradictions. First of all, she wanted her daughter in a Canadian school-in "an old-fashioned sort of school," she kept saying-because she wanted her daughter to be "saved" from the perils of growing up in New York. All the New England schools, she said, were full of New Yorkers; it was tragic that a young girl should have no opportunity to entertain the values and the virtues of a saner, safer time. On the other hand, she was one of those New Yorkers who thought she would "die" if she spent a minute outside New York-who was sure that the rest of the world was a provincial whipping post whereat people like herself, of sophisticated tastes and highly urban energies, would be lashed to the stake of old-fashioned values and virtues until she expired of boredom.

"Confidentially," she whispered to me, "what does a grown-up person do here?" I suppose she meant, in all of Toronto-in all of Canada . . . this wilderness, so to speak. Yet she keenly desired to banish her daughter, lest the daughter be exposed to the eye-opening wisdom that had rendered the mother a prisoner of New York! She was quite concerned at how many Canadian authors were on our reading lists; because she'd not read them, she suspected them of the gravest parochialism. I never met the daughter; she might have been nice-a little fearful of how homesick she would be, I'm sure, but possibly nice. The mother never enrolled her, although the girl's application was accepted. Perhaps the mother had come to Canada on a whim-I cannot claim to have come here for entirely sound reasons myself! Maybe the mother never enrolled her daughter because she (the mother) could not endure the deprivations she (the mother) would suffer while she visited her daughter in this wilderness. I have my own idea regarding why the child was never enrolled. The mother made a pass at me! It had been quite a while since anyone had done that; I was beginning to think that this danger was behind me, but suddenly the mother said: "What does one do here-for a good time? Perhaps you'd like to show me?"

The school had made some rather unusual, if not altogether extraordinary, arrangements for the daughter to spend a night in one of the dormitory rooms-she would get to know a few of the girls, a few of the other Americans . . . that sort of thing. The mother inquired if I might be available for a "night on the town"!

"I'm divorced," she added hastily-and unnecessarily; I should hope she was divorced! But even so! Well, I don't pretend to possess any skill whatsoever at wriggling myself free from such bold invitations; I haven't had much practice. I suppose I behaved as an absolute humbler; I no doubt gave the woman yet another stunning example of the "parochialism" she was doomed to encounter outside New York. Anyway, our encounter ended bitterly. The woman had been, in her view, courageous enough to present herself to me; that I hadn't the courage to accept her generous gift clearly marked me as the fiendish essence of cowardice. Having honored me with her seductive charms, she then felt justified in heaping upon me her considerable contempt. She told Kather-ine Keeling that our English reading lists were "even more parochial" than she had feared. Believe me: it was not the reading lists that she found "parochial"-it was me\ I was not savvy enough to recognize a good tryst when I saw one. And now-in my very own English Department-I must endure a woman of an apparently similar temperament, a woman whose prickly disposition is also upheaved in a sea of sexual contradictions . . . Eleanor Pribst! She even quarreled with my choice of teaching Tempest-Tost; she suggested that perhaps it was because I failed to recognize that Fifth Business was "better." Naturally, I have taught both novels, and many other works by Robertson Davies, with great-no, with the greatest-pleasure. I stated that I'd had good luck teaching Tempest-Tost in the past. "Students feel so much like amateurs themselves," I said. "I think they find all the intrigues of the local drama league both extremely funny and extremely familiar." But Ms. Pribst wanted to know if I knew Kingston; surely I at least knew that the fictional town of Salterton is easily identified as Kingston. I had heard that this was true, I said, although-personally-I had not been in Kingston.

"Not beenl" she cried. "I suppose that this is what comes of having Americans teaching Can Lit!" she said.

"I detest the term 'Can Lit,' " I told Ms. Pribst. "We do not call American Literature 'Am Lit,' I see no reason to shrivel this country's most interesting literature to a derogatory abbreviation. Furthermore," I said, "I consider Mister Davies an author of such universal importance that I choose not to teach what is 'Canadian' about his books, but what is wonderful about them."

After that, it was simple warfare. She challenged my substitution-in Grade -of Orwell's Burmese Days for Orwell's Animal Farm. In terms of "lasting importance," it was Nineteen Eighty-four or Animal Farm; Burmese Days, she said, was "a poor substitute."

"Orwell is Orwell," I said, "and Burmese Days is a good novel."

But Ms. Pribst-a graduate of Queens (hence, her vast knowledge of Kingston)-is writing her doctorate at the University of Toronto on something related to "politics in fiction." Wasn't it Hardy had written about? she asked- implying "merely" Hardy!-and wasn't it only my Master's I had written? And so I asked my old Mend Katherine Keeling: "Do you suppose that God created Eleanor Pribst just to test me?"

"You're very naughty," Katherine said. "Don't you be wicked, too."

When I want to be "wicked," I show the finger; correction-I show what's missing, I show not the finger. I shall save the missing finger for my next encounter with Ms. Pribst. I am grateful to Owen Meany for so many things; not only did he keep me out of Vietnam-he created for me a perfect teaching tool, he gave me a terrific attention-getter for whenever the class is lagging behind. I simply raise my hand; I point. It is the absence of my pointer that makes pointing an interesting and riveting thing for me to do. Instantly, I have everyone's attention. It works very well in department meetings, too.

"Don't you point that thing at me!" Hester was fond of saying. But it was not "that thing," it-was not anything that upset her; it was what was missing! The amputation was very clean-it was the cleanest cut imaginable. There's nothing grotesque, or mangled-or even raw-looking- about the stump. The only thing wrong with me is what's missing. Owen Meany is missing. It was after Owen cut off my finger-at the end of the summer of ', when he was home in Gravesend for a few days' leave-when Hester told Owen that she wouldn't attend his funeral; she absolutely refused.

"I'll marry you, I'll move to Arizona-I'll go anywhere with you, Owen," Hester said. "Can you see me as a bride on an Army base? Can you see us entertaining another couple of young marrieds-when you're not off escorting a body? Just call me Hester Huachuca!" she cried. "I'll even get pregnant-if you'd like that, Owen. Do you want babies? I'll give you babies!" Hester cried.' 'I'd do anything for you-you know that. But I won't go to your fucking funeral."

She was true to her word; Hester was not in attendance at

Owen Meany's funeral-Kurd's Church was packed, but Hester wasn't a part of the crowd. He'd never asked her to marry him; he'd never made her move to Arizona, or anywhere. "IT WOULDN'T BE FAIR-I MEAN, IT WOULDN'T BE FAIR TO HER;' Owen had told me. In the fall of ', Owen Meany made a deal with Major General LaHoad; he was not appointed LaHoad's aide-decamp-LaHoad was too proud of the commendations that Owen received as a casualty assistance officer. The major general was scheduled for a transfer in eighteen months; if Owen remained at Fort Huachuca-as the casualty branch's "best" body escort-LaHoad promised Owen "a good job in Vietnam." Eighteen months was a long wait, but First Lieutenant Meany felt the wait was worth it.

"Doesn't he know there are no 'good jobs' in Vietnam?" Hester asked me. It was October; we were in Washington with fifty thousand other antiwar demonstrators. We assembled opposite the Lincoln Memorial and marched to the Pentagon, where we were met by lines of U.S. marshals and military police; there were even marshals and police on the roof of the Pentagon. Hester carried a sign:

Support the GI's Bring Our Boys Home Now! I was carrying nothing; I was still a little self-conscious about my missing finger. The scar tissue was new enough so that any exertion caused the stump to look inflamed. But I tried to feel I was part of the demonstration; sadly, I didn't feel I was a part of it-I didn't feel I was part of anything. I had a -F deferment; I would never have to go to war, or to Canada. By the simple act of removing the first two joints of my right index finger, Owen Meany had enabled me to feel completely detached from my generation.

"If he was half as smart as he thinks he is," Hester said to me as we approached the Pentagon,' 'he would have cut off his own finger when he cut off yours-he would have cut off as many fingers as he needed to. So he saved you-lucky you\" she said. "How come he isn't smart enough to save himself?"

What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism-namely, their own. They thought -that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would t"e the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar "movement" with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say-two years later, in -so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were'' giving aid and comfort to the enemy.'' What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war-they made that war last longer. That's what / saw. I took my missing finger home to New Hampshire, and let Hester get arrested in Washington by herself; she was not exactly alone-there were mass arrests that October. By the end of ', there was trouble in California, there was trouble in New York; and there were five hundred thousand U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. More than sixteen thousand Americans had been killed there. That was when General Westmoreland said, "We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."

That was what prompted Owen Meany to ask: "WHAT END?" The end of the war would not come soon enough to save Owen. They put him in a closed casket, of course; the casket was draped with the U.S. flag, and his medal was pinned to the flag. Like any first lieutenant on active duty, he rated a full military funeral with honors, with escort officers, with taps- with the works. He could have been buried at Arlington; but the Meanys wanted him buried in Gravesend. Because of the medal, because the story of Owen's heroism was in all the New Hampshire newspapers, that oaf-the Rev. Dudley Wiggin- wanted Owen to have an Episcopal service; Rector Wiggin, who was a virulent supporter of the Vietnam War, wanted to perform Owen's funeral in Christ Church. I prevailed upon the Meanys to use Kurd's Church-and to let the Rev. Lewis Merrill perform the service. Mr. Meany was still angry at Gravesend Academy for expelling Owen, but I convinced him that Owen would be "outraged in heaven" if the Wiggins ever got their hands on him.

"Owen hated them," I told Mr. and Mrs. Meany. "And he had a rather special relationship with Pastor Merrill."

It was the summer of '; I was sick of hearing white people talk about how Soul on Ice had changed their lives-I'll bet Eldridge Cleaver was sick of hearing that, too-and Hester said that if she heard "Mrs. Robinson" one more time, she would throw up. That spring-in the same month-Martin Luther King had been assassinated and Hair had opened on Broadway; the summer of ' suffered from what would become the society's commonplace blend of the murderous and the trivial. It was stifling hot in the Meanys' sealed house-sealed tight, I was always told, because Mrs. Meany was allergic to the rock dust. She sat with her familiarly unfocused gaze, directed-as it often was-into the dead ashes in the fireplace, above which the dismembered Nativity figures surrounded the empty cradle in the creche. Mr. Meany prodded one of the andirons with the dirty toe of his boot.

"They gave us fifty thousand dollars!" said Mr. Meany; Mrs. Meany nodded her head-or she appeared to nod her head. "Where's the government get that kind of money?" he asked me; I shook my head. I knew the money came from us.

"I'm familiar with Owen's favorite hymns," I told the Meanys. "I know Pastor Merrill will say a proper prayer."

"A lot of good all Owen's prayin' done him!" said Mr. Meany; he kicked the andiron. Later, I went and sat on the bed in Owen's room. The severed arms from the vandalized statue of Mary Magdalene were oddly attached to my mother's dressmaker's dummy- formerly, as armless as she was headless. The pale, whitewashed arms were too long for the smaller proportions of my mother's figure; but I suppose that these overreaching arms had only enhanced Owen's memory of the affection my mother had felt for him. His Army duffel bag was on the bed beside me; the Meanys had not unpacked it.

"Would you like me to unpack his bag?" I asked the Meanys.

"I'd be happy if you would," his father told me. Later, he came into the room and said: "I'd be happy if there was aaythin' of his you wanted-I know he'd have liked you to have it."

In the duffel bag was his diary, and his well-worn paperback edition of Selections from the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas-I took them both; and his Bible. It was tough looking at his things. I was surprised that he had never unpackaged all the baseball cards that he had so symbolically delivered to me, and that I'd returned to him; I was surprised at how withered and grotesque were my armadillo's amputated claws-they had once seemed such treasures, and now, in addition to their ugliness, they even appeared much smaller than I'd remembered them. But most of all I was surprised that I couldn't find the baseball.

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

"I just assumed . . ."I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Stop!" Mrs. Meany called out.

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

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

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

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

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

"Be quiet!" he called back to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Stop!" Mrs. Meany called out quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That sounds like Owen," I said.

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

"Do you believe that?" I asked him.

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

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

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

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

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

"About Owen?" he asked me.

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

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

"What are you going to say about him-at his funeral?" I finally asked Pastor Merrill. In the darkness, his expression was hidden from me; but Mr. Merrill sat so stiffly at his old desk that the unnatural rigidity of his posture gave me the impression he had no confidence in his ability to do his job. "I WANT YOU TO SAY A PRAYER FOR ME,'' Owen Meany had said to him. Why had that prayer been so difficult for the Rev. Mr. Merrill? "IT'S YOUR BUSINESS, ISN'T IT?" Owen had asked. Why had Mr. Merrill appeared almost stricken to agree? For wasn't it, indeed, his BUSINESS, not only to pray for Owen Meany, then and now and forever, but here in Kurd's Church-at Owen's funeral-to bear witness to how Owen had lived his life, as if he were on divine assignment, as if he were following God's holy orders; and whether or not the Rev. Lewis Merrill believed in everything that Owen had believed, wasn't it also

the Rev. Mr. Merrill's BUSINESS to give testimony to how faithful a servant of God Owen Meany had been? I sat in the dark of the vestry office, thinking that religion was only a career for Pastor Merrill. He taught the same old stories, with the same old cast of characters; he preached the same old virtues and values; and he theologized on the same old "miracles"-yet he appeared not to believe in any of it. His mind was closed to the possibility of a new story; there was no room in his heart for a new character of God's holy choosing, or for a new "miracle." Owen Meany had believed that his death was necessary if others were to be saved from a stupidity and hatred that was destroying him. In that belief, surely he was not so unfamiliar a hero. In the darkness of the vestry office, I suddenly felt that Owen Meany was very near. The Rev. Lewis Merrill turned on the lamp; he looked as if I'd awakened him, and that he'd been dreaming-he looked as if he'd suffered a nightmare. When he tried to speak, his stutter gripped his throat so tightly that he needed to raise both his hands to his mouth-almost to pull the words out. But no words came. He looked as if he might be choking. Then his mouth opened-still he found no words. His hands grasped the top of his desk; his hands wandered to the handles of his old desk drawers. When the Rev. Mr. Merrill spoke, he spoke not with his own voice-he spoke in. the exact falsetto, the "permanent scream," of Owen Meany. It was Mr. Merrill's mouth that formed the words, but it was Owen Meany's voice that spoke to me: "LOOK IN THE THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE." Then the Rev. Mr. Merrill's right hand flew down to the third desk drawer on the right-hand side; he pulled the drawer out so far that it came free of the desk-and the baseball rolled across the cool, stone floor of the vestry office. When I looked into Pastor Merrill's face, I had no doubt about which baseball it was.

"Father?" I said.

"Forgive me, my s-s-s-"vz!" said the Rev. Lewis Merrill. That was the first time that Owen Meany let me hear from him-after he was gone. The second time was this August, when-as if to remind me that he would never allow anything bad to happen to me-he kept me from falling down the cellar stairs in the secret passageway. And I know: I will hear from him-from time to time-again. It is typical of Owen, who was always guilty of overkill; he should understand that I don't need to hear from him to know if he is there. Like his rough, gray replacement of Mary Magdalene, the statue that Owen said was like the God he knew was there-even in the dark, even though invisible-I have no doubt that Owen is there. Owen promised me that God would tell me who my father was. I always suspected that Owen would tell me-he was always so much more interested in the story than / was. It's no surprise to me that when God decided it was time to tell me who my father was, God chose to speak to me in Owen's voice.

"LOOK IN THE THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE," God said. And there Was the ball that Owen Meany hit; and there was my wretched father, asking me to forgive him, I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes-toward an infinity of unsatisfying and disagreeable endings. The wholly anticlimactic, unsatisfying, and disagreeable news that the Rev. Lewis Merrill was my father-not to mention the death of Owen Meany-is just one example of the condition of universal disappointment. In my sorry father's case, my disappointment with him was heightened by his refusal to admit that Owen Meany had managed-from beyond the grave-to reveal the Rev. Mr. Merrill's identity to me. This was another miracle that my father lacked the faith to believe in. It had been an emotional moment; I was-by my own admission-becoming an expert in imitating Owen's voice. Furthermore, Mr. Merrill himself had always desired to tell me who he was; he'd simply lacked the courage; perhaps he'd found the courage by using a voice not his own. He'd always wanted to show me the baseball, too, he admitted-"to confess."

The Rev. Lewis Merrill was so intellectually detached from his faith, he had so long removed himself from the necessary amount of winging it that is required of belief, that he could not accept a small but firm miracle when it happened not only in his presence but was even spoken by his own lips and enacted with his own hand-which had, with a force not his own, ripped the third drawer on the right-hand side completely out of his desk. Here was an ordained minister of the Congregational Church, a pastor and a spokesman for the faithful, telling me that the miracle of Owen Meany's voice speaking out in the vestry office-not to mention the forceful revelation of my

mother's "murder weapon," the "instrument of death"-was not so much a demonstration of the power of God as it was an indication of the power of the subconscious; namely, the Rev. Mr. Merrill thought that both of us had been "subconsciously motivated"-in my case, to use Owen Meany's voice, or to make Mr. Merrill use it; and in Mr. MerriU's case, to confess to me that he was my father.

"Are you a minister or a psychiatrist?" I asked him. He was so confused. I might as well have been speaking to Dr. Dolder! Like so many things in the last twenty years: it got worse. The Rev. Mr. Merrill confessed that he had no faith at all; he had lost his faith, he told me, when my mother died. God had stopped speaking to him then; and the Rev. Mr. Merrill had stopped asking to be spoken to. My father had sat in the bleacher seats at that Little League game, and when he saw my mother strolling carelessly along the third-base line-when she had spotted him in the stands and waved to him, with her back to home plate-at that moment, my father told me, he had prayed to God that my mother would drop dead! Infuriatingly, he assured me that he hadn't really meant it-it had been only a "passing thought." More often, he wished that they could be friends, and that the sight of her didn't fill him with self-disgust for his long-ago transgression. When he saw her bare shoulders at the baseball game, he hated himself-he was ashamed that he was still attracted to her. Then she spotted him, and-shamelessly, without an ounce of guilt-she waved to him. She made him feel so guilty, he wished her dead. The first pitch to Owen Meany was way outside; he let it go. My mother had left my father's church, but it never seemed to upset her when she encountered him-she was always friendly, she spoke to him, she waved. It pained him to remember every little thing about her-the pretty hollow of her bare armpit, which he could see so clearly as she waved to him. The second pitch almost hit Owen Meany in the head; he dove in the dirt to avoid it. Whatever my mother remembered, my father thought that nothing pained her. She just went on waving. Oh, just drop dead! he thought. At that precise moment, that is what he'd prayed. Then Owen Meany hit the next pitch. This is what a self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends. How could the Rev. Lewis Merrill agree with me-that Mr. and Mrs. Meany were "monsters of superstition"-if he himself believed that God had listened to his prayer at that Little League game; and that God had not "listened" to him since? Because he'd wished my mother dead, my father said, God had punished him; God had taught Pastor Merrill not to trifle with prayer. And I suppose that was why it had been so difficult for Mr. Merrill to pray for Owen Meany-and why he had invited us all to offer up our silent prayers to Owen, instead of speaking out himself. And he called Mr. and Mrs. Meany "superstitious"! Look at the world: look at how many of our peerless leaders presume to tell us that they know what God wants! It's not God who's fucked up, it's the screamers who say they believe in Him and who claim to pursue their ends in His holy name! Why the Rev. Lewis Merrill had so whimsically prayed that my mother would drop dead was such an old, tired story. My mother's little romance, I was further disappointed to learn, had been more pathetic than romantic; Mother, after all, was simply a very young woman from a very hick town. When she'd started singing at The Orange Grove, she'd wanted the honest approval of her hometown pastor-she'd needed to be assured that she was engaged in a decent and honorable endeavor; she'd asked him to come see her and hear her sing. Clearly, it was the sight of her that had impressed him; in that setting-in that unfamiliarly scarlet dress-"The Lady in Red'' did not strike the Rev. Mr. Merrill as the same choir girl he had tutored through her teens. I suppose it was a seduction accomplished with only slightly more than the usual sincerity- for my mother was sincerely innocent, and I will at least credit the Rev. Lewis Merrill with supposing that he was sincerely "in love"; after all, he'd had no great experience with love. Afterward, the reality that he had no intentions of leaving his wife and children-who were already (and always had been) unhappy!-must have shamed him. I know that my mother took it fairly well; in my memory, she never winced to call me her' 'little fling.'' In short, Tabitha Wheelwright got over Lewis Merrill rather quickly; and she bore up better than stoically to the task of bearing his illegitimate child. Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my

mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his "love" of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his "belief" was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing. But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death. And when she met and became engaged to Dan Needham, how that must have threatened to put an end to his conjecturing; and when she married Dan, how that must have threatened to put an end to the self-inflicted pain of which he had grown so fond. That for all his sourness, her disposition remained sunny-that she even cheerfully sought the bleacher seats for him, and waved to him only a split second before she died-how insubstantial that must have made her in his eyes! The closest that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had come to God was in his remorse for his "sin" with my mother. And when he was privileged to witness the miracle of Owen Meany, my bitter father could manage no better response than to whine to me about his lost faith-his ridiculously subjective and fragile belief, which he had so easily allowed to be routed by his meanspirited and self-imposed doubt. What a wimp he was, Pastor Merrill; but how proud I felt of my mother-that she'd had the good sense to shrug him off. It's no wonder it was such a tribulation for Mr. Merrill to know what he was going to say about Owen-at Owen's funeral. How could a man like him know what to say about Owen Meany? He called Owen's parents "monstrous," while he outrageously presumed that God had actually "listened" to his ardent, narrow prayer that my mother drop dead; and he arrogantly presumed further that God was now silent, and wouldn't listen to him-as if the Rev. Mr. Merrill, all by himself, possessed the power both to make God pay attention to him and to harden God's heart against him. What a hypocrite he was-to agree with me that Mr. and Mrs. Meany were "monsters of superstition"! In the vestry office, where we were supposed to be preparing ourselves for Owen Meany's funeral, I said-very sarcastically -to my father: "How I wish I could help restore your faith." Then I left him there-possibly imagining how such a restoration could ever be possible. I have never been angrier; that was when I felt' 'moved to do evil''-and when I remembered how Owen Meany had tried to prepare me for what a disappointment my father was going to be. Toronto: September , -overcast, with rain inevitable by the end of the day. Katherine says that the least Christian thing about me is my lack of forgiveness, which I know is true and is hand-in-hand with my constantly resurfacing desire for revenge. I sat in Grace Church on-the-Hill; I sat there all alone, in the dim light-as overcast as the outdoor weather. To make matters worse: the Toronto Blue Jays are involved in a pennant race; if the Blue Jays make it to the World Series, the talk of the town will be baseball. There are times when I need to read the Thirty-seventh Psalm, over and over again. Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure:

fret not thyself, else shall thou be moved to do evil. I've had a hard week at Bishop Strachan. Every fall, I start out demanding too much of my students; then I become unreasonably disappointed in them-and in myself. I have been too sarcastic with them. And my new colleague-Ms. Eleanor Pribst-truly moves me to do evil! This week I was reading my Grade girls a ghost story by Robertson Davies-"The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees." In the middle of the story, which I adore, I began to think: What do Grade girls know about graduate students or Ph.D. theses or the kind of academic posturing that Mr. Davies makes such great, good fun of? The students looked sleepy-headed to me; they were paying, at best, faltering attention. I felt cross with them, and therefore I read badly, not doing the story justice; then I felt cross with myself for choosing this particular story and not considering the age and inexperience of my audience. God, what a situation! It is in this story where Davies says that "the wit of a graduate student is like champagne-Canadian champagne ..." That's absolutely priceless, as Grandmother used to say; I think I'll try that one on Eleanor Pribst the next time she tries to be witty with me! I think I'll stick the stump of my right index finger into the right nostril of my nose-

thereby giving her the impression that I have managed to insert the first two joints of my finger so far into my nose that the tip must be lodged between my eyes; thus catching her attention, I'm sure, I will then deliver to her that priceless line about the wit of graduate students. In Grace Church on-the-Hill, I bowed my head and tried to let my anger go. There is no way to be more alone in church than to linger there, after a Sunday service. This week I was haranguing my Canadian Literature students on the subject of "bold beginnings." I said that if the books I asked them to read began half as lazily as their papers on Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words, they would never have managed to plow through a single one of them! I used Mr. Findley's novel as an example of what I meant by a bold beginning-that shocking scene when the father takes his twelve-year-old son up on the roof of the Arlington Hotel to show him the view of Boston and Cambridge and Harvard and the Charles, and then leaps fifteen stories to his death in front of his son; imagine that. That ranks right up there with the opening chapter to The Mayor ofCasterbridge, wherein Michael Hen-chard gets so drunk that he loses his wife and daughter in a bet; imagine that! Hardy knew what he was doing; he always knew. What did it mean, I asked my sloppy students, that their papers generally ' 'began" after four or five pages of wandering around in a soup of ideas for beginnings? If it took them four or five pages to find the right beginning, didn't they think they should consider revising their papers and beginning them on page four or five? Oh, young people, young people, young people-where is your taste for wit? I weep to teach Trollope to these BSS girls; I care less that they appear to weep because they're forced to read him. I especially worship the pleasures of Bar Chester Towers; but it is pearls before swine to teach Trollope to this television generation of girls! Their hips, their heads, and even their hearts are moved by those relentlessly mindless rock videos; yet the opening of Chapter IV does not extract from them even so much as a titter.

"Of the Rev. Mr. Slope's parentage I am not able to say much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from the eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy and that in early years he added an 'e' to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him."

Not even a titter! But how their hearts thump and patter, how their hips jolt this way and that, how their heads loll and nod-and their eyes roll inward, completely disappearing into their untrained little skulls-just to hear Hester the Molester; not to mention see the disjointed nonsense that accompanies the sound track of her most recent rock video! You can understand why I needed to sit by myself in Grace Church on-the-Hill. This week I was reading "The Moons of Jupiter"-that marvelous short story by Alice Munro-to my Grade Can Lit students, as the abrasive Ms. Pribst would say. I was a touch anxious about reading the story, because one of my students-Yvonne Hewlett-was in a situation all too similar to the narrator's situation in that story: her father was in the hospital, about to undergo a ticklish heart surgery. I didn't remember what was happening to Yvonne Hewlett's father until I'd already begun to read "The Moons of Jupiter" to the class; it was too late to stop, or change the story as I went along. Besides: it is by no means a brutal story-it is warm, if not exactly reassuring to the children of heart patients. Anyway, what could I do? Yvonne Hewlett had missed a week of classes just recently when her father suffered a heart attack; she looked tense and drained as I read the Munro story-she had looked tense and drained, naturally, from the opening line: "I found my father in the heart wing ..."

How could I have been so thoughtless? I was thinking. I wanted to interrupt the story and tell Yvonne Hewlett that everything was going to turn out just fine-although I had no right to make any such promise to her, especially not about her poor father. God, what a situation! Suddenly I felt like my father-I am my sorry father's sorry son, I thought. Then I regretted the evil I did to him; actually, it turned out all right in the end-it turned out that I did him a favor. But I did not intend what I did to him as any favor. When I left him alone in the vestry office, pondering what he would find to say at Owen Meany's funeral, I took the baseball with me. When I went to see Dan Needham, I left the baseball in the glove compartment of my car. I was so angry, I didn't know what I was going to do-beginning with: tell Dan, or not tell him? That was when I asked Dan Needham-since he had no apparent religious faith-why he had insisted that my mother and I change churches, that we leave the Congregational Church and become Episcopalians!

"What do you mean?" Dan asked me. "That was your idea!"

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"Your mother told me that all your friends were in the Episcopal Church-namely, Owen," Dan said. "Your mother told me that you asked her if you could change churches so that you could attend Sunday school with your friends. You didn't have any friends in the Congregational Church, she said."

"Mother said that?" I asked him. "She told me that both of us should become Episcopalians so that we'd belong to the same church as you-because you were an Episcopalian."

"I'm a Presbyterian," Dan said "-not mat it matters."

"So she lied to us," I said to Dan; after a while, he shrugged.

"How old were you at the time?" Dan asked me. "Were you eight or nine or ten? Maybe you haven't remembered all the circumstances correctly."

I thought for a while, not looking at him. Then I said: "You were engaged to her for a long time-before you got married. It was about four years-as I recall."

"Yes, about four years-that's correct," Dan said warily.

"Why did you wait so long to get married?" I asked him. "You both knew you loved each other-didn't you?"

Dan looked at the bookshelves on the concealed door leading to the secret passageway.

"Your father ..." he began; then he stopped. "Your father wanted her to wait," Dan said.

"Why?" I asked Dan.

"To be sure-to be sure about me," Dan said.

"What business was it of hisT' I cried.

"Exactly-that's exactly what I told your mother: that it wasn't any of his business . . . if your mother was'sure'about me. Of course she was sure, and so was I!"

"Why did she do what he wanted?" I asked Dan.

"Because of you," Dan told me. "She wanted him to promise never to identify himself to you. He wouldn't promise unless she waited to marry me. We both had to wait before he promised never to speak to you. It took four years," Dan said.

"I always thought that Mother would have told me herself- if she'd lived," I said. "I thought she was just waiting for me to be old enough-and then she'd tell me."

"She never intended to tell you," Dan Needham said. "She made it clear to me that neither you nor I would ever know. I accepted that; you would have accepted that from her, too. It was yaw father who didn't accept that-not for four years."

' 'But he could have spoken to me after Mother died," I said. "Who would have known that he'd broken a promise if he'd spoken to me? Only / would have known-and I would never have known that she'd made him promise anything. I never knew he was interested in identifying himself to me!" I said.

"He must be someone who can be trusted to keep a promise," Dan said. "I used to think he was jealous of me-that he wanted her to wait all that time just because he thought I would give her up or that she would get tired of me. I used to think he was trying to break us up-that he was only pretending to care about her being sure of me or wanting her permission to identify himself to you. But now I think that he must have sincerely wanted her to be right about me-and it must have been difficult for him to promise her that he would never try to contact you."

"Did you know about 'The Lady in Red'?" I asked Dan Needham. "Did you know about The Orange Grove-and all of that?"

' 'It was the only way she could see him, it was the only way they could talk," Dan said. "That's all I know about it," he said. "I won't ask you how you know about it."

"Did you ever hear of Big Black Buster Freebody?'' I asked Dan.

"He was an old black musician-your mother was very fond of him," Dan said. "I remember who he was because of the last time your mother and I took a trip together, before she was killed-we went to Buster Freebody's funeral," Dan said. And so Dan Needham believed that my father was a man of his word. How many men do we know like thaf! I wondered. It seemed pointless for me to disabuse Dan of his notion of my father's sincerity. It seemed almost pointless for me to know who my father was; I was quite sure that this knowledge would never greatly benefit Dan. How could it benefit him to know that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had sat in the bleacher seats, praying that my mother would die-not to mention that Pastor Merrill was arrogant enough to believe that his prayer had worked! I was sure that Dan didn't need to know these things. And why else would my mother have wanted us to leave the Congregational Church for the Episcopal-if not to get away from Mr. Merrill? My father was not a brave or an honorable man; but he had once tried to be brave and

honorable. He had been afraid, but he had dared-in his fashion-to pray for Owen Meany; he had done that pretty well. Whatever had he imagined might come of his identifying himself to me? What had become of his own children, sadly, was that they had not felt much from their father-not beyond his immeasurable and inexpressible remorse, which he clung to in the manner of a man who'd forgotten how to pray. / could teach him how to pray again, I thought. It was after speaking to Dan that I got an idea of how I might teach Pastor Merrill to believe again-I knew how I might encourage him to have a little faith. I thought of the sad man's shapeless middle child, who with her brutally short hair was barely identifiable as a girl; I thought of the tallish older boy, the sloucher-and cemetery vandal! And the youngest was a groveler, a scrounger under the pews-I couldn't even remember what its sex was. If Mr. Merrill failed to have faith in Owen Meany, if Mr. Merrill believed that God was punishing him with silence-I knew I could give Mr. Merrill something to believe in. If neither God nor Owen Meany could restore the Rev. Mr. MerriH's faith, I thought I knew a "miracle" that my father was susceptible to believing in. It was about ten o'clock in the evening when I left Pastor Merrill sitting at his desk in the vestry office; it was only half an hour later when I finished talking with Dan and drove again past Kurd's Church at the corner of Front Street and Tan Lane. Lewis Merrill was still there, the light still on in the vestry office; and now there was also light shining through the stained-glass windows of the chancel-that enclosed and meant-to-be-sacred space surrounding the altar of a church, where (no doubt) my father was composing his last words for Owen Meany.

"I figure every thin' he kept was for somethin'!" Mr. Meany had said-about my mother's dummy in the red dress. I'm sure the poor fool didn't know how right he was about that. The Maiden Hill Road was dark; there were still some emergency-road-repair cones and unlit flares off the side of the road by the trestle bridge, the abutment of which had been the death of Buzzy Thurston. The accident had made quite a mess of the cornerstones of the bridge, and they'd had to tar the road where Buzzy's smashed Plymouth had gouged up the surface. There was the usual light left on in the Meanys' kitchen; it was the light they'd routinely left on for Owen. Mr. Meany was a long time answering my knock on the door. I'd never seen him in pajamas before; he looked oddly childish-or like a big clown dressed in children's clothes. "Why it's Johnny Wheelwright!" he said automatically.

"I want the dummy," I told him.

"Well, sure!" he said cheerfully. "I thought you'd want it."

It was not heavy, but it was awkward-trying to fit it in my Volkswagen Beetle-because it wouldn't bend. I remembered how awkwardly, in his swaddling clothes, Owen Meany had fitted in the cab of the big granite truck, that day his mother and father had driven him home from the Christmas Pageant; how Hester and Owen and I had ridden on the flatbed of the big truck, that night Mr. Meany drove us-and the dummy-to the beach at Little Boar's Head.

"You can borrow the pickup, if it's easier," Mr. Meany suggested. But that wasn't necessary; with Mr. Meany's help, I managed to fit the dummy into the Beetle. I had to detach the former Mary Magdalene's naked white arms from the wire-mesh sockets under the dummy's shoulders. The dummy didn't have any feet; she rose from a rod on a thin, flat pedestal-and this I stuck out the rolled-down window by the passenger's seat, which I tilted forward so that the dummy's boyish hips and slender waist and full bosom and small, squared shoulders could extend into the back seat. If she'd had a head, she wouldn't have fit.

"Thank you," I said to Mr. Meany.

"Well, sure!" he said. I parked my Volkswagen on Tan Lane, well away from Hurd's Church and the blinking yellow light at the intersection with Front Street. I jammed the baseball in my pocket; I carried the dummy under one arm, and Mary Magdalene's long, pale arms under the other. I reassembled my mother in the flower beds that were dimly glowing in the dark-colored light that shone through the stained-glass windows of the chancel. The light was still on in the vestry office, but Pastor Merrill was practicing his prayers for Owen in the chancel of the old stone church; occasionally, he would dally with the organ. From his choirmaster days at the Congregational Church, Mr. Merrill had retained an amateur command of the organ. I was familiar with the hymns he was toying with-trying to get himself in the mood to pray for Owen Meany.

He played "Crown Him with Many Crowns"; then he tried "The Son of God Goes Forth to War." There was a bed of portulaca where it was best to stand the dressmaker's dummy; the fleshy-leaved, low-to-the-ground plants covered the pedestal, and the small flowers-most of which were closed for the night-didn't clash with the poinsettia-red dress. The dress completely covered the wire-mesh hips of the dummy; and the thin, black stem upon which the dummy rose from its pedestal was invisible in the semidarkness-as if my mother didn't exactly have her feet on the ground, but chose instead to hover just above the flower beds. I walked back and forth between the flower beds and the door to the vestry, trying to see how the dummy appeared from that distance-angling my mother's body so that her unforgettable figure would be instantly recognizable. It was perfect how the dark-colored light from the chancel threw exactly the right amount of illumination upon her-there was just enough light to accentuate the scarlet glare of her dress, but not enough light to make her headlessness too apparent. Her head and her feet were just missing-or else consumed by the shadows of the night. From the door of the vestry, my mother's figure was both vividly alive and ghostly; "The Lady in Red" looked ready to sing. The effect of the blinking yellow light at the corner of Tan Lane and Front Street was also enhancing; and even the headlights of an occasional passing car were far enough away to contribute to the uncertainty of the figure in the bed of portulaca. I squeezed the baseball; I had not held one in my hand since that last Little League game. I worried about my grip, because the first two joints of your index finger are important in throwing a baseball; but I didn't have far to throw it. I waited for Mr. Merrill to stop playing the organ; the second the music stopped, I threw the baseball-as hard as I could-through one of the tall, stained-glass windows of the chancel. It made a small hole in the glass, and a beam of white light-as if from a flashlight-shone upward into the leaves of a towering elm tree, behind which I concealed myself while I waited for Pastor Merrill. It took him a moment to discover what had been thrown through one of the sacred chancel windows. I suppose that the baseball must have rolled past the organ pipes, or even close to the pulpit.

"Johnny!" I heard my father calling. The door from the church into the vestry opened and closed. "Johnny-I know you're angry, but this is very childish!" he called. I heard his footsteps in the corridor where all the clothes pegs were- outside the vestry office. He flung open the vestry door, the baseball in his right hand, and he blinked into the blinking yellow light at the corner of Tan Lane and Front Street. "Johnny!" he called again. He stepped outside; he looked left, toward the Gravesend campus; he looked right, along Front Street-then he glanced into the flower beds that were glowing in the light from the stained-glass windows of the chancel. Then the Rev. Lewis Merrill dropped to his knees and pressed the baseball hard against his heart.

"Tabby!" he said in a whisper. He dropped the ball, which rolled out to the Front Street sidewalk. "God-forgive me!" said Pastor Merrill. "Tabby-/ didn't tell him! I promised you I wouldn't, and I didn't-it wasn't me!" my father cried. His head began to sway-he couldn't look at her-and he covered his eyes with both hands. He fell on his side, his head touching the grass border of the vestry path, and he drew up his knees to his chest-as if he were cold, or a baby going to sleep. He kept his eyes covered tightly, and he moaned: "Tabby- forgive me, please!"

After that, he began to babble incoherently; his voice was just a murmur, and he made slight jerking or twitching movements where he lay on the ground. There was just enough noise and motion from him to assure me that he wasn't dead. I confess: I was slightly disappointed that the shock of my mother appearing before him hadn't killed him. I picked up the dressmaker's dummy and put her under my arm; one of Mary Magdalene's dead-white arms fell off, and I carried this under my other arm. I picked up the baseball from the sidewalk and jammed it back into my pocket. I wondered if my father could hear me moving around, because he seemed to contort himself more tightly into a fetal position and to cover his eyes even more tightly-as if he feared my mother were coming nearer to him. Perhaps those bone-white, elongated arms had especially frightened him-as if Death itself had exaggerated my mother's reach, and the Rev. Mr. Merrill was sure that she was going to touch him. I put the dummy and Mary Magdalene's arms into my Volkswagen and drove to the breakwater at Rye Harbor. It was midnight. I threw the baseball as far into the harbor as I could; it made a very small splash there-not disturbing the gulls. I

flung Mary Magdalene's long, heavy arms into the harbor, too; they made more of a splash, but the boats slapping on their moorings and the surf striking the breakwater outside the harbor had conditioned the gulls there to remain undisturbed by any noise of water. Then I climbed out along the breakwater with the dummy in the red dress; the tide was high, and going out. I waded into the harbor channel, off the tip of the breakwater; I was quickly submerged, up to my chest, and I had to retreat to the last slab of granite on the breakwater-so that I could throw the dummy as far into the ocean as I could. I wanted to be sure that the dummy reached into the channel, which I knew was very, very deep. For a moment, I hugged the body of the dummy to my face; but whatever scent had once clung to the red dress had long ago departed. Then I threw the dummy into the channel. For a horrible moment, it floated. There was air trapped under the hollow wire-mesh of the body. The dummy rolled over on its back in the water. I saw my mother's wonderful bosom above the surface of the water-THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS! as Owen Meany had said. Then the dummy rolled again; bubbles of air escaped from the body, and "The Lady in Red" sank into the channel off the breakwater at Rye Harbor, where Owen Meany had firmly believed he had a right to sit and watch the sea. I saw the sun come up, like a bright marble on the granite-gray surface of the Atlantic. I drove to the apartment I shared with Hester in Durham and took a shower and dressed for Owen's funeral. I didn't know where Hester was, but I didn't care; I already knew how she felt about his funeral. I'd last seen Hester at Front Street; with my grandmother, Hester and I had watched Bobby Kennedy be killed in Los Angeles-over and over again. That was when Hester had said: "Television gives good disaster."

Owen had never said a word to me about Bobby Kennedy's assassination. That had happened in June, , when time was running out on Owen Meany. I'm sure that Owen was too preoccupied with his own death to have anything to say about Bobby Kennedy's. It was early in the morning, and I kept so few things in Hester's apartment, it was no trouble to pack up what I wanted; mostly books. Owen had kept some books at Hester's, too, and I packed one of them-C. S. Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms. Owen had circled a favorite Sentence: "I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself." After I finished packing-and I'd left Hester a check for my share of the rent for the rest of the summer-I still had time to kill, so I read parts of Owen's diary; I looked at the more disjointed entries, which were composed in a grocery-list style, as if he'd been making notes to himself. I learned that huachuca-as in Fort Huachuca- means "mountain of the winds." And there were several pages of Vietnamese vocabulary and expressions-Owen had paid special attention to "COMMAND FORMS OF VERBS." Two commands were written out several times- the pronunciation was emphasized; Owen had spelled the Vietnamese phonetically.

"MAM SOON- 'LIE DOWN'! DOONG SA-'DON'T BE AFRAID'!"

I read that part over and over again, until I felt I had the pronunciation right. There was quite a good pencil drawing of a phoenix, that mythical bird that was supposed to burn itself on a funeral pyre and then rise up from its own ashes. Under the drawing, Owen had written: "OFTEN A SYMBOL OF REBORN IDEALISM, OR HOPE-OR AN EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY." And on another page, jotted hastily in the margin-with no connection to anything else on the page-he had scrawled: "THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE." This marginalia was not emphasized; in no way had he indicated that this was a message for me-but certainly, I thought, he must have remembered that time when he'd sat at Mr. Merrill's desk, talking to Dan and me and opening and closing the desk drawers, without appearing to notice the contents. Of course, he had seen the baseball-he had known then who my father was-but Owen Meany's faith was huge; he had also known that God would tell me who my father was. Owen believed it was unnecessary to tell me himself. Besides: he knew it would only disappoint me. Then I flipped to one of the parts of the diary where he'd mentioned me.

"THE HARDEST THING I EVER HAD TO DO WAS TO CUT OFF MY BEST FRIEND'S FINGER! WHEN THIS IS OVER, MY BEST FRIEND SHOULD MAKE A CLEAN BREAK FROM THE PAST-HE SHOULD SIMPLY START OVER AGAIN. JOHN SHOULD GO TO CANADA. I'M

SURE IT'S A NICE COUNTRY TO LIVE IN-AND THIS COUNTRY IS MORALLY EXHAUSTED."

Then I flipped to the end of the diary and reread his last entry.

"TODAY'S THE DAY! '. . . HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.' "

Then I closed Owen's diary and packed it with the rest of my things. Grandmother was an early riser; there were a few photographs of her, and of my mother, that I wanted from Front Street-and more of my clothes. I wanted to have breakfast in the rose garden with Grandmother; there was still a lot of time before Owen's funeral-enough time to tell Grandmother where I was going. Then I drove over to Waterhouse Hall and told Dan Needham what my plans were; also, Dan had something I wanted to take with me, and I knew he wouldn't object-he'd been bashing his toes on it for years! I wanted the granite doorstop that Owen had made for Dan and my mother, his wedding present to them, the lettering in his famous, gravestone style-JULY, -and neatly beveled along the sides, and perfectly edged at the corners; it was crude, but it had been Owen's earliest known work with the diamond wheel, and I wanted it. Dan told me that he understood everything, and that he loved me. I told him: "You're the best father a boy ever had-and the only father I ever needed."

Then it was time for Owen Meany's funeral. Our own Gravesend chief of police, Ben Pike, stood at the heavy double doors of Kurd's Church-as if he intended to frisk Owen Meany's mourners for the "murder weapon," the long-lost "instrument of death"; I was tempted to tell the bastard where he could find the fucking baseball. Fat Mr. Checkering was there, still grieving that he'd decided to let Owen Meany bat for me-that he'd told Owen to "swing away." The Thurstons-Buzzy's parents-were there, although they were Catholics and only recently had attended their own son's funeral. And the Catholic priest-Father Findley-he was there, as was Mrs. Hoyt, despite how badly the town had treated her for her "anti-American" draft-counseling activities. Rector Wiggin and Barb Wiggin were not in attendance; they had so fervently sought to hold Owen's service in Christ Church, no doubt they were miffed that they'd been rejected. Captain Wiggin, that crazed ex-pilot, had claimed that nothing could please him more than a bang-up funeral for a hero. A unit of the New Hampshire National Guard provided a local funeral detail; they served as Owen's so-called honor guard. Owen had once told me that they do this for money-they get one day's pay. The casualty assistance officer-Owen's body escort-was a young, frightened-looking first lieutenant who rendered a military salute more frequently than I thought was required of him; it was his first tour of duty in the Casualty Branch. The so-called survivor assistance officer was none other than Owen's favorite professor of Military Science from the University of New Hampshire; Colonel Eiger greeted me most solemnly at the heavy double doors.

"I guess we were wrong about your little friend," Colonel Eiger said to me.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"He proved he was quite suitable for combat," Colonel Eiger said.

"Yes, sir," I said. The colonel put his liver-spotted hand on my shoulder; then he stepped to one side of the heavy double doors and stood at attention, as if he meant to challenge Chief Ben Pike's position of authority. The honor guard, in white spats and white gloves, strode down the aisle in bridal cadence and smartly split to each side of the flag-draped casket, where Owen's medal-pinned to the flag-brightly reflected the beam of sunlight that shone through the hole the baseball had made in the stained-glass window of the chancel. In the routine gloom of the old stone church, this unfamiliar beam of light appeared to be drawn to the bright gold of Owen's medal-as if the light itself had burned a hole in the dark stained glass; as if the light had been searching for Owen Meany. A stern, sawed-off soldier, whom Colonel Eiger had referred to as a master sergeant, whispered something to the honor guard, who stood at parade rest and glanced anxiously at Colonel Eiger and the first lieutenant who was serving his first duty as a body escort. Colonel Eiger whispered something to the first lieutenant. The congregation coughed; they creaked in the old, worn

pews. The organ cranked out one dirge after another while the stragglers found their seats. Although Mr. Early was one of the ushers, and Dan Needham was another, most of the ushers were quarrymen-I recognized the derrickman and the dynamiters; I nodded to the signalman and the sawyers, and the channel bar drillers. These men looked like granite itself-its great strength can withstand a pressure of twenty thousand pounds per square inch. Granite, like lava, was once melted rock; but it did not rise to the earth's surface-it hardened deep underground; and because it hardened slowly, it formed fairly large crystals. Mr. and Mrs. Meany occupied the front right-center pew of Kurd's Church all by themselves. They sat like upheaved slabs of granite, not moving, their eyes fixed upon the dazzling medal that winked in the beam of sunlight on top of Owen's casket. The Meanys stared intently; they viewed their son's casket with much the same strangled awe that had shone in their eyes when the little Lord Jesus had spotted them in the congregation at the Christ Church Christmas Pageant of -when Owen had basked in the "pillar of light." The alertness and anxiety in the Meanys' expressions suggested to me that they remembered how Owen had reproached them for their uninvited attendance at that Nativity.

"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING HERE?" the angry Lord Jesus had screamed at them. "YOU SHOULDN'T BE HERE!" Owen had shouted. "IT IS A SACRILEGE FOR YOU TO BE HERE!"

That is what / thought about Owen's funeral: that it was a SACRILEGE for the Meanys to be there. And their nervous fixation upon Owen's medal, pinned to the American flag, suggested that the Meanys quite possibly feared that Owen might rise up from his casket as he had risen up from the mountain of hay in the manger-and once again reproach his parents. They had actually told a ten- or eleven-year-old boy that he'd had a "virgin birth"-that he was "like the Christ Child"! At Owen's funeral in Kurd's Church, I found myself praying that Owen would rise up from his closed casket and shout at his poor parents: "YOU SHOULDN'T BE HERE!" But Owen Meany didn't move, or speak. Mr. Fish looked very frail; yet he sat beside my grandmother in the second row of right-center pews and fixed his gaze upon the shining medal on Owen Meany's casket-as if Mr. Fish also hoped that Owen would give us one more performance; as if Mr. Fish could not believe that, in this production, Owen Meany had not been given a speaking part. My Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha also sat in Grandmother's pew; none of us had mentioned Hester's absence; even Simon-who was also seated in Grandmother's pew-had restrained himself from speaking about Hester. The Eastmans more comfortably discussed how sorry they were that Noah couldn't be there-Noah was still in Africa, teaching proper forestry to the Nigerians. I'll never forget what Simon said to me when I told him I was going to Canada.

"Canada! That's gonna be one of the biggest problems facing northeastern lumber mills-you wait and see!" Simon said. "Those Canadians are gonna export their lumber at a much lower cost than we're gonna produce it here!"

Good old Simon: not a political bone in his body; I doubt it occurred to him that I wasn't going to Canada for the lumber. I recognized the Prelude, from Handel's Messiah-" know that my Redeemer liveth." I also recognized the pudgy man across the aisle from me; he was about my age, and he'd been staring at me. But it wasn't until he began to search the high, vaulted ceiling of Kurd's Church-perhaps seeking angels in the shadowy buttresses-that I realized I was in the presence of Fat Harold Crosby, the former Announcing Angel who'd flubbed his lines and needed prompting, and who'd been abandoned in the heavens of Christ Church in the Nativity of '. I nodded to Harold, who smiled tearfully at me; I'd heard that Mrs. Hoyt had successfully coached him into acquiring a -F deferment from the draft-for psychological reasons. I did not, at first, recognize our old Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Walker. She looked especially severe in black, and without her sharp criticisms of Owen Meany-to get back to his seat, to get down from up there!-I did not instantly remember her as the Sunday school tyrant who was stupid enough to think that Owen Meany had put himself up in the air. The Dowlings were there, not seizing the opportunity to use this occasion to flaunt their much-embattled, sexual role reversals; they had-and probably this was for the best- never had a child. Larry O'Day, the Chevy dealer, was also

there; he'd played Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol-in that notable year when Owen Meany had played the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He was with his racy daughter, Caroline O'Day, who sat with her lifelong friend Maureen Early, who'd twice wet her pants while watching Owen Meany show Scrooge his future-it was Caroline who had many times rejected my advances, both while wearing and not wearing her St. Michael's uniform. Even Mr. Kenmore, the A&P butcher, was there-with Mrs. Kenmore and their son Donny, such faithful fans that they had never missed a Little League game. Yes, they were all there-even Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman; even he was there! And the new headmaster of Gravesend Academy; he'd never met Owen Meany-yet he was there, perhaps acknowledging that he wouldn't have been made the new headmaster if Owen Meany hadn't lost the battle but won the war with Randy White. And if old Archie Thorndike had been alive, I know that he would have been there, too. The Brinker-Smiths were not in attendance; I'm sure they would have come, had they not moved back to England-so firm was their opposition to the war in Vietnam that they hadn't wanted their twins to be Americans. Wherever the Brinker-Smiths were, I hoped that they still loved each other as passionately as they once loved each other-on all the floors, in all the beds-in Waterhouse Hall. And our old friend the retarded janitor from the Gravesend gym-the man who'd so faithfully timed the shot, who'd been our witness the first time we sank the shot in under three seconds!-had also come to pay his respects to the little Slam-Dunk Master! Then a cloud passed over the hole the baseball had made in the stained-glass window of the chancel; Owen's gold medal glowed a little less insistently. My grandmother, who was trembling, held my hand as we rose to join in the processional hymn-not meaning to, Grandmother squeezed the stump of my amputated finger. As Colonel Eiger and the young first lieutenant approached the casket from the center aisle, the honor guard came stiffly to attention. We sang the hymn we'd sung at morning meeting, the morning Owen had bolted the headless and armless Mary Magdalene to the podium on the stage of The Great Hall. The Son of God goes forth to war, A king-ly crown to gain; His blood-red ban-ner streams a-far; Who fol-lows in his train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, Tri-um-phant o-ver pain, Who pa-tient bears his cross be-low, He fol-lows in his train.

There is a note following "An Order for Burial" in The Book of Common Prayer-according to the use of the Episcopal Church. This note is very sensible. "The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy," the note says. "It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised. The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy . . ." the note goes on. "This joy, however, does not make human grief unchristian . . ." the note concludes. And so we sang our hearts out for Owen Meany-aware that while the liturgy for the dead might be characterized by joy, our so-called "human grief did not make us "unchristian." When we managed to get through the hymn, we sat down and looked up-and there was the Rev. Lewis Merrill, already standing in the pulpit.

" 'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord . . .' " my father began. There was something newly powerful and confident in his voice, and the mourners heard it; the congregation gave him their complete attention. Of course, I knew what it was that had changed in him; he had found his lost faith-he spoke with absolute belief in every word he uttered; therefore, he never stuttered. When he would look up from The Book of Common Prayer, he would gesture with his arms, like a swimmer exercising for the breaststroke, and the fingers of his right hand extended into the shaft of sunlight that plunged through the hole the baseball had made in the stained-glass window; Mr. MerriU's fingers moving in and out of the beam of light caused Owen Meany's medal to twinkle.

" "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted Pastor Merrill read to us. "'... he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,' " cried Mr. Merrill, who had no doubt-his doubt was gone; it had vanished, forever! He scarely paused

for breath. " '. . . to comfort all who mourn,' " he proclaimed. But Mr. Merrill was not satisfied; he must have felt that we could not be comforted enough by only Isaiah. My father thought we should also be comforted by Lamentations, from which he read:'' 'The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.' " And if that morsel could not satisfy our hunger to be comforted, Pastor Merrill led us further into Lamentations: " 'For the Lord will not cast off for ever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men.' '' The fingers of my father's pale hand moved in and out of the shaft of sunlight, like minnows, and Owen's medal blinked at us as rhythmically as a beacon from a lighthouse. Then Pastor Merrill exhorted us through that familiar psalm: " "The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in, from this time forth for evermore.' "

Thus he led us into the New Testament Lesson, beginning with that little bit of bravery from Romans: " 'I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us.' " But Lewis Merrill would not rest; for we missed Owen Meany so much that we ached for him, and Pastor Merrill would not rest until he'd assured us that Owen had left us for a better world. My father flung himself full-tilt into First Corinthians.

" 'But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead . . .' " Pastor Merrill assured us. " 'For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead,' '' my father said. My grandmother would not let go of my amputated finger, and even Simon's face was wet with tears; and still Mr. Merrill would not rest-he sent us swiftly to Second Corinthians.

" 'So we do not lose heart,' " he told us. " "Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal,' " Pastor Merrill said. " 'So we are always of good courage'!" my father exhorted us. " 'We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight,' " he said. " 'We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.' "

Then he swept us into another psalm, and then he commanded the congregation to stand, which we did, while he read us the Gospel according to John: " 'I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,' " Pastor Merrill said, and we mourners lowered our heads like sheep. And when we were seated, Mr. Merrill said: " God-how we miss Owen Meany!" Then he read to us-that passage about the miracle in the Gospel according to Mark:

And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd about them, and scribes arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed, and ran up to him and greeted him. And he asked them, "What are you discussing with them?" And one of the crowd answered him, "Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit; and wherever it seizes him it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able." And he answered them, "O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me." And they brought the boy to him; and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, "How long has he had this?" And he said, "From childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us." And Jesus said to him, "If you can! All things are possible to him who believes." Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, "I believe; help my unbelief!" And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, "You dumb and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again." And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse; so that most of them said, "He is dead." But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, "Why could

we not cast it out?" And he said to them, "This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer."

When he finished reading this passage, Pastor Merrill lifted his face to us and cried out, " 'I believe; help my unbelief!' Owen Meany helped my 'unbelief,' " my father said. "Compared to Owen Meany, I am an amateur-in my faith," Mr. Merrill said. "Owen was not just a hero to the United States Army-he was my hero,'' my father said. "He was our hero- over and over again, he was our hero; he was always our hero. And we will always miss him," the Rev. Lewis Merrill said.

"As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes-that He exists-or even: that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God-I mean, critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-CoM/rf-He, Rovf-Dare-Yoa variety.

' 'For example, I would like to ask God to give us back Owen Meany," Mr. Merrill said; when he spread his arms wide, the fingers of his right hand were dancing again in the beam of light. "O God-give him back, give him back to us!" Pastor Merrill asked. It was so quiet in Hurd's Church, while we waited to see what God would do. I heard a tear fall-it was one of my grandmother's tears, and I heard it patter upon the cover of the Pilgrim Hymnal, which she held in her lap. "Please give us back Owen Meany," Mr. Merrill said. When nothing happened, my father said: "O God-I shall keep asking You!" Then he once more turned to The Book of Common Prayer; it was unusual for a Congregationalist- especially, in a nondenominational church-to be using the prayer book so scrupulously, but I was sure that my father respected that Owen had been an Episcopalian. Lewis Merrill took the prayer book with him when he left die pulpit; he approached the flag-draped casket and stood so close to Owen's medal that the shaft of sunlight that shone through the hole the baseball had made flickered on the prayer book, which Mr. Merrill raised. Then he said, "Let us pray," and he faced Owen's body.

" 'Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant Owen Meany,' " my father said. " 'Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light,' " he prayed-the light from the hole in the stained-glass window still playing tricks with the medal and The Book of Common Prayer.

"Amen," the Rev. Mr. Merrill said. Then he nodded to Colonel Eiger and the young, frightened-looking first lieutenant; they matched their steps to the casket, they removed the American flag and snapped it taut-the medal bouncing like a coin, but it was pinned fast to the flag and couldn't fall. Then the colonel and the first lieutenant walked haltingly toward each other, folding the flag- triangulating it, very exactly, so that the medal ended up on top of the package, which Colonel Eiger handed completely into the care of the frightened first lieutenant. Then Colonel Eiger saluted the folded flag, and the medal. The young man about-faced so sharply that my grandmother was startled; I felt her flinch against me. Then the first lieutenant mumbled something indistinct to Mr. and Mrs. Meany, who appeared surprised that he was speaking to them. He was saying something about the medal-"For heroism that involves the voluntary risk of life." After that, the first lieutenant cleared his throat and the congregation could hear him more distinctly. He spoke directly to Mrs. Meany; he handed her the flag, with the medal on top, and he said-too loudly: "Missus Meany, it is my privilege to present you with our country's flag in grateful appreciation for the service rendered to this nation by your son."

At first, she didn't want to take the flag; she didn't appear to understand that she was supposed to take it-Mr. Meany had to take it from her, or she might have let it fall. The whole time, they had sat like stones. Then the organ startled my grandmother, who flinched again, and the Rev. Lewis Merrill led us through the recessional hymn-the same hymn he had chosen for the recessional at my mother's funeral. Crown him with man-y crowns, The Lamb up-on his throne; Hark! how the heavenly 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-nity.

While we sang, the honor guard lifted Owen's small, gray casket and proceeded up the aisle with him; thus his body was borne from the church, about the time we were singing the third verse of the hymn-it was the verse that had meant the most to Owen Meany. 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 DEED, E-TER-NAL LIFE TO BRING, AND LIVES THAT DEATH MAY DIE. There's not much to add about the committal. The weather was hot and sticky, and from the cemetery, at the end of Linden Street, we could once again hear the kids playing baseball on the high-school athletic fields-the sounds of their fun, and their arguing, and that good old American crack of the bat drifted to us while we stood at Owen Meany's grave and listened to the Rev. Lewis Merrill say the usual.

" 'In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Owen . . .' " my father said. If I listened with special care, it was because I knew I was listening to Pastor Merrill for the last time; what more could he ever have to say to me? Now that he had found his lost faith, what need did he have of a lost son? And what need did I have of him? I stood at Owen's grave, holding Dan Needham's hand, with my grandmother leaning against the two of us.

" '. . . earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' "Pastor Merrill was saying, and I was thinking that my father was quite a fake; after all, he had met the miracle of Owen Meany, face to face, and still hadn't believed in him-and now he believed everything, not because of Owen Meany but because I had tricked him. I had fooled him with a dressmaker's dummy; Owen Meany had been the real miracle, but my father's faith was restored by an encounter with a dummy, which the poor fool had believed was my mother-reaching out to him from beyond her grave.

"GOD WORKS IN STRANGE WAYS!" Owen might have said.

" '. . . the Lord lift up his countenance upon him, and give him peace,' " Lewis Merrill said-while clods of earth fell upon the small, gray casket. Then the stem, sawed-off soldier, whom Colonel Eiger had referred to as a master sergeant, played taps for Owen Meany. I was leaving the cemetery when she came up to me. She might have been a farmer's wife, or a woman who worked outdoors; she was my age, but she looked so much older-I didn't recognize her. She had three children with her; she carried one of them-a pouting boy who was too heavy to be carried easily, or far. She had two daughters, one of whom hung on her hip and tugged at her and continued to wipe her runny nose on the woman's faded black dress. The second daughter-the eldest child, who was possibly seven or eight- lagged behind and eyed me with a gawky shyness that was painful to endure. She was a pretty girl, with straw-colored hair, but she could not keep her hands away from a raspberry-colored birthmark on her forehead, which was about the size of a passport photo and which she tried to hide with her hair. I stared into the woman's weary, red-eyed face; she was struggling not to burst into tears.

"Do you remember how we used to lift him up?" she asked me. Then I knew her: she was Mary Bern Baird, our old Sunday school colleague and the girl Owen had selected for the role of the Virgin Mary. "MARY BETH BAIRD HAS NEVER BEEN MARY," Owen had said. "THAT WAY, MARY WOULD BE MARY."

I'd heard she'd gotten pregnant and had dropped out of high school; she'd married the boy, who was from a big family of dairy farmers-and now she lived on a dairy farm in Stratham. I hadn't seen her since her staggering performance in the Nativity of -when, in addition to her efforts as the Virgin Mother to Owen's Christ Child, she had contributed those striking cow costumes, the ones with floppy antlers that made the cows resemble damaged reindeer. I suppose that she had not been an expert on dairy cows-or on cows of any kind-back then.

"He was so easy to lift up!" Mary Beth Baird said to me. "He was so light-he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?" she asked me. That was when I discovered that I couldn't speak. I had lost my voice. It occurs to me now that it wasn't my voice that I wanted to hear. If I

couldn't hear Owen's voice, I didn't want to hear anyone's. It was only Owen's voice that I wanted to hear; and when Mary Beth Baird spoke to me, that was when I knew that Owen Meany was gone. There's not much to add about coming to Canada. As Owen and I had discovered: at the New Hampshire-Quebec border, there's little to see-just forests, for miles, and a thin road so beaten by the winter that it is bruised to the color of pencil lead and pockmarked with frost heaves. The border outpost, the so-called customs house, which I remembered as just a cabin, was not exactly as I'd remembered it; and I thought there'd been a gate that was raised-like a gate guarding a railroad crossing-but that was different, too. I was sure I remembered sitting on the tailgate of the tomato-red pickup, watching the fir trees on both sides of the border-but then I wondered if everything I'd done with Owen Meany was not as exact in my memory as I imagined. Perhaps Owen had even changed my memory. Anyway, I crossed the border without incident. A Canadian customs officer asked me about the granite doorstop-JULY, . He seemed surprised when I told him it was a wedding present. The customs officer also asked me if I was a draft dodger; although I might have appeared-to him-too old to be dodging the draft, they had been drafting people over twenty-six for more than a year. I answered the question by showing the officer my missing finger.

"I'm not worried about the war," I told him, and he let me into Canada without any more questions. I might have ended up in Montreal; but too many people were pissy to me there, because I couldn't speak French. And I arrived in Ottawa on a rainy day; I just kept driving until I got to Toronto. I'd never seen a lake as large as Lake Ontario; I knew I was going to miss the view of the Atlantic Ocean from the breakwater at Rye Harbor, so the idea of a lake that looked as big as the sea was appealing to me. Not much else has happened to me. I'm a churchgoer and a schoolteacher. Those two devotions need not necessarily yield an unexciting life, but my life has been determinedly unexciting; my life is a reading list. I'm not complaining; I've had enough excitement. Owen Meany was enough excitement for a lifetime. How it must have disappointed Owen ... to discover that my father was such an insipid soup of a man. Lewis Merrill was so innocuous, how could I have remembered seeing him in those bleacher seats? Only Mr. Merrill could have escaped my attention. As many times as I searched the audience at the performances of The Gravesend Players (and the Rev. Mr. Merrill was always there), I always missed him, I never remembered him as he was in those bleacher seats, I simply overlooked him. In any gathering, not only did Mr. Merrill not stand out-he didn't even show up! How it has disappointed me ... to discover that my father was just another Joseph. I never dared tell Owen, but once I dreamed that JFK was my father; after all, my mother was just as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe! How it has disappointed me ... to discover that my father is just another man like me. As for my faith: I've become my father's son-that is, I've become the kind of believer that Pastor Merrill used to be. Doubt one minute, faith the next-sometimes inspired, sometimes in despair. Canon Campbell taught me to ask myself a question when the latter state settles upon me. Whom do I know who's alive whom I love? Good question-one that can bring you back to life. These days, I love Dan Needham and the Rev. Katherine Keeling; I know I love them because I worry about them-Dan should lose some weight, Katherine should gain some! What I feel for Hester isn't exactly love; I admire her-she's certainly been a more heroic survivor than I've been, and her kind of survival is admirable. And then there are those distant, family ties that pass for love-I'm talking about Noah and Simon, about Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred. I look forward to seeing them every Christmas. I don't hate my father, I just don't think about him very much-and I haven't seen him since that day he committed Owen Meany's body to the ground. I hear from Dan that he's a whale of a preacher, and that there's not a trace of the slight stutter that once marred his speech. At times I envy Lewis Merrill; I wish someone could trick me the way I tricked him into having such absolute and unshakable faith. For although I believe I know what the real miracles are, my belief in God disturbs and unsettles me much more than not believing ever did; unbelief seems vastly harder to me now than belief does-but belief poses so many unanswerable questions'. How could Owen Meany have known what he "knew"? It's no answer, of course, to believe in accidents, or in coincidences; but is God really a better answer? If God had a hand in

what Owen "knew," what a horrible question that poses! For how could God have let that happen to Owen Meany? Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean-make sure they know what they mean! It was more than a year after I came to Canada, when the town churches of Gravesend-and Hurd's Church, upon the urging of Lewis Merrill-organized a so-called Vietnam Moratorium. On a given day in October, all the church bells were rung at : A.M.-I'm sure that pissed some people off!-and services were held as early as :. Following the services, a parade then commenced from the town bandstand, marching up Front Street to assemble on the lawn in front of the Main Academy Building on the Gravesend campus; there followed a peaceful demonstration, so-called, and a few of the standard antiwar speeches. Typically, the town newspaper, The Gravesend News-Letter, did not editorialize on the event, except to say that a march against mayhem on the nation's highways would be a more significant use of such civilian zeal; as for the academy newspaper, The Grave reported that it was "about time" the school and the town combined forces to demonstrate against the evil war. The News-Letter estimated the crowd was less than four hundred people-"and almost as many dogs." The Grave claimed that the crowd swelled to at least six hundred "well-behaved" people. Both papers reported the only counterdemonstration. As the parade swung up Front Street--just past the old Town Hall, where The Graves-end Players had for so long been entertaining both young and old-a former American Legion commander stepped off the sidewalk and waved a North Vietnamese flag in the face of a young tuba player in the Gravesend Academy marching band. Dan told me that the former American Legion commander was none other than Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman.

"I'd like to know how that idiot got his hands on a North Vietnamese flag!" my grandmother said. Thus, with precious little to interrupt them, the years have also swung up Front Street and marched on by. Owen Meany taught me to keep a diary; but my diary reflects my unexciting life, just as Owen's diary reflected the vastly more interesting things that happened to him. Here's a typical entry from my diary.

"Toronto: November ,-the Bishop Strachan greenhouse burned down today, and the faculty and students had to evacuate the school buildings."

And let's see: I also note in my diary every day when the girls sing "Sons of God" in morning chapel. I also entered in my diary the day that a journalist from some rock-music magazine tried to stop me for an on-the-spot "interview" as I was about to take a seat in morning chapel. He was a wild, hairy young man in a purple caftan-oblivious to how the girls stared at him and seemingly held together by wires and cords that entangled him in his cumbersome recording equipment. There he was, uninvited-unannounced!-sticking a microphone in my face and asking me, as Hester the Molester's "kissing cousin," if I didn't agree that it all began to "happen" for Hester after she met someone called "Janet the Planet."

"I beg your pardon!" I said. Around me, streams of girls were staring and giggling. The interviewer was interested in asking me about Hester's "influences"; he was writing a piece about Hester's "early years," and he had some ideas about who had influenced her-he said he wanted to "bounce" his ideas off me\ I said I didn't know who the fuck "Janet the Planet" even was, but if he was interested in who had "influenced" Hester, he should begin with Owen Meany, He didn't know the name, he asked me how to spell it. He was very puzzled, he thought he'd heard of everyone!

"And would this be someone who, was an influence in her early years?" he wanted to know. I assured him that Owen's influence on Hester could be counted among the earliest. And let's see: what else? There was Mrs. Meany's death, not long after Owen's; I made note of it. And there was that spring when I was in Gravesend for Grandmother's memorial service- it was at the old Congregational Church, Grandmother's lifelong church, and Pastor Merrill did not perform the service; whoever had replaced him at the Congregational Church was the officiant. There was still a lot of snow on the ground that spring-old, dead-gray snow-and I was opening another beer for Dan and myself in the kitchen at Front Street, when I happened to look out the kitchen window at the withered rose garden, and there was Mr. Meany! Grayer than the old snow, and following some melted and refrozen footprints in the crust,

he made his way slowly toward the house. I thought he was a kind of apparition. Speechless, I pointed at him, and Dan said: "It's just poor old Mister Meany."

The Meany Granite Company was dead and gone; the quarries had been unworked--and for sale-for years. Mr. Meany had a part-time job as a meter reader for the electric company. He appeared in the rose garden once a month, Dan said; the electric meter was on the rose-garden side of the house. I didn't want to speak with him; but I watched him through the window. I'd written him my condolences when I'd heard that Mrs. Meany had died-and how she'd died- but he'd never written back; I hadn't expected him to write back. Mrs. Meany had caught fire. She'd been sitting too close to the fireplace and a spark, an ember, had ignited the American flag, which-Mr. Meany told Dan-she was accustomed to wrapping around herself, like a shawl. Although her burns had not appeared to be that severe, she died in the hospital-of undisclosed complications. When I saw Mr. Meany reading the electric meter at Front Street, I realized that Owen's medal had not been consumed with the flag in the fire. Mr. Meany wore the medal-he always wore it, Dan said. The cloth that shielded the pin above the medal was much faded-red and white stripes on a chevron of blue-and the gold of the medal itself blazed less brightly than it had blazed that day when a beam of sunlight had been reflected by it in Kurd's Church; but the raised, unfurled wings of the American eagle were no less visible. Whenever I think of Owen Meany's medal for heroism, I'm reminded of Thomas Hardy's diary entry in -Owen showed it to me, that little bit about "living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently." I remember it whenever I think of Mr. Meany wearing Owen's medal while he reads the electric meters. Let's see: there's not much else-there's almost nothing to add. Only this: that it took years for me to face my memory of how Owen Meany died-and once I forced myself to remember the details, I could never forget how he died; I will never forget it. I am doomed to remember this. I had never been a major participant in Fourth of July celebrations in Gravesend; but the town was faithfully patriotic-it did not allow Independence Day to pass unnoticed. The parade was organized at the bandstand in the center of town, and marched nearly the whole length of Front Street, achieving peak band noise and the maximum number of barking dogs, and accompanying children on bicycles, at the midpoint of the march-^precisely at Front Street, where my grandmother was in the habit of viewing the hullabaloo from her front doorstep. Grandmother suffered ambivalent feelings every Fourth of July; she was patriotic enough to stand on her doorstep waving a small American flag-the flag itself was not any larger man the palm of her hand-but at the same time, she frowned upon all the ruckus; she frequently reprimanded the children who rode their bicycles across her lawn, and she shouted at the dogs to stop their fool barking. I often watched the parade pass by, too; but after my mother died, Owen Meany and I never followed the parade on our bicycles-for the final destination of the band and the marchers was the cemetery on Linden Street. From Front Street, we could hear the guns saluting the dead heroes; it was the habit in Gravesend to conclude a Memorial Day parade and a Veterans Day parade and an Independence Day parade with manly gunfire over the graves mat knew too much quiet all the other days of the year. It was no different on My , -except that Owen Meany was in Arizona, possibly watching or even participating in a parade at Fort Huachuca; I didn't know what Owen was doing. Dan Needham and I had enjoyed a late breakfast with my grandmother, and we'd all taken our coffee out on the front doorstep to wait for the parade; by the sound of it, coming nearer, it was passing the Main Academy Building-gathering force, bicyclists, and dogs. Dan and I sat on the stone doorstep, but my grandmother chose to stand; sitting on a doorstep would not have measured up to Harriet Wheelwright's high standards for women of her age and position. If I was thinking anything-if I was thinking at all-I was considering that my life had become a kind of doorstep-sitting, watching parades pass by. I was not working that summer; I would not be working that fall. With my Master's degree in hand, I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of

Massachusetts; I didn't really know what I wanted to study, I didn't even know if I wanted to rent a room or an apartment in Amherst, but I was scheduled to be a full-time graduate student there. I never thought about it. So that I could carry the fullest possible course load, I wasn't planning to teach for at least a year-not even part-time, not even one course. Naturally, Grandmother was bankrolling my studies, and that further contributed to my sense of myself as a doorstep-sitter. I wasn't doing anything; there wasn't anything I had to do. Hester was in the same boat. That Fourth of July night, we sat on the grass border of the Swasey Parkway and watched the fireworks display over the Squamscott-Gravesend maintained a Town Fireworks Board, and every Fourth of July the members who knew their rocketry and bombs set up the fireworks on the docks of the academy boathouse. The townspeople lined the Swasey Parkway, all along the grassy riverbank, and the bombs burst in the air, and the rockets flared-they hissed when they fell into the dirty river. There had been a small, ecological protest lately; someone said that the fireworks disturbed the birds that nested in the tidal marsh on the riverbank opposite the Swasey Parkway. But in a dispute between herons and patriots, the herons are not generally favored to win; the bombardment proceeded, as planned-the night sky was brilliantly set afire, and the explosions gratified us all. An occasional white light spread like a newly invented liquid across the dark surface of the Squamscott, reflecting there so brightly that the darkened stores and offices of the town, and the huge building that housed the town's foul textile mills, sprang up in silhouette-a town created instantly by the explosions. The many empty windows of the textile mills bounced back this light-the building's vast size and emptiness suggested an industry so self-possessed that it functioned completely without a human labor force.

"If Owen won't marry me, I'll never marry anyone," Hester told me between flashes and blasts. "If he won't give me babies, no one's ever gonna give me babies."

One of the demolition experts on the dock was none other than that old dynamiter Mr. Meany. Something like an exploding star showered over the black river.

' 'That one looks like sperm,'' Hester said sullenly. I was not expert enough on sperm to challenge Hester's imagery; fireworks that looked "like sperm" seemed highly unlikely if not farfetched to me-but what did / know? Hester was so morose, I didn't want to spend the night in Durham with her. It was a not-quite-comfortable summer night, but there was a breeze. I drove to Front Street and watched the eleven o'clock news with Grandmother; she had lately taken an interest in a terrible local channel on which the news detailed the grim statistics of a few highway fatalities and made no mention of the war in Vietnam; and there was a ' 'human interest'' story about a bad child who'd blinded a poor dog with a firecracker.

"Merciful Heavens!" Grandmother said. When she went to bed, I tuned in to The Late Show-one channel was showing a so-called Creature Feature, The Beast from , Fathoms, an old favorite of Owen's; another channel featured Mother Is a Freshman, in which Loretta Young is a widow attending college with her teenage daughter; but my favorite, An American in Paris, was on a third channel. I could watch Gene Kelly dance all night; in between the songs and dances, I switched back to the channel where the prehistoric monster was mashing Manhattan, or I wandered out to the kitchen to get myself another beer. I was in the kitchen when the phone rang; it was after midnight, and Owen was so respectful of my grandmother's sleep that he never called Front Street at an hour when he might awaken her. At first I thought that the different time zone-in Arizona-had confused him; but I knew he would have called Hester in Durham and Dan in Waterhouse Hall before he found me at my grandmother's, and I was sure that Hester or Dan, or both of them, would have told him how late it was.

"I HOPE I DIDN'T WAKE UP YOUR GRANDMOTHER!" he said.

"The phone only rang once-I'm in the kitchen," I told him. "What's up?"

"YOU MUST APOLOGIZE TO HER FOR ME-IN THE MORNING," Owen said. "BE SURE TO TELL HER I'M VERY SORRY-BUT IT'S A KIND OF EMERGENCY."

"What's up?" I asked him.

"THERE'S BEEN A BODY MISPLACED IN CALIFORNIA-THEY THOUGHT FT GOT LOST IN VIETNAM, BUT IT JUST TURNED UP IN OAKLAND. IT HAPPENS EVERY TIME THERE'S A HOLIDAY-SOMEONE GOES TO SLEEP AT THE SWITCH. IT'S STANDARD ARMY- THEY GIVE ME TWO HOURS TO PACK A BAG AND

THE NEXT THING I KNOW, I'M IN CALIFORNIA. I'M SUPPOSED TO TAKE A COMMUTER PLANE TO TUC-SON, I'VE GOT A CONNECTION WITH A COMMERCIAL FLIGHT TO OAKLAND-FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING. THEY'VE GOT ME BOOKED ON A FLIGHT FROM SAN FRANCISCO BACK TO PHOENIX THE NEXT DAY. THE BODY BELONGS IN PHOENIX-THE GUY WAS A WARRANT OFFICER, A HELICOPTER PILOT. THAT USUALLY MEANS HE CRASHED AND BURNED UP-YOU HEAR 'HELICOPTER,' YOU CAN COUNT ON A CLOSED CASKET.

"CAN YOU MEET ME IN PHOENIX?" he asked me.

"Can I meet you in Phoenix? Why?" I asked him.

"WHY NOT!" Owen said. "YOU DON'T HAVE ANY PLANS, DO YOU?"

"Well, no," I admitted.

"YOU CAN AFFORD THE FLIGHT, CAN'T YOU?" he asked me.

"Well, yes," I admitted. Then he told me the flight information-he knew exactly when my plane left Boston, and when my plane arrived in Phoenix; I'd arrive a little earlier than his flight with the body from San Francisco, but I wouldn't have to wait long. I could just meet his plane, and after that, we' stick together; he'd already booked us into a motel- "WITH AIR CONDITIONING, GOOD TV, A GREAT POOL. WE'LL HAVE A BLAST!" Owen assured me; he'd already arranged everything. The proposed funeral was all fouled up because the body was already two days late. Relatives of the deceased warrant officer-family members from Modesto and Yuma-had been delayed in Phoenix for what must have seemed forever. Arrangements with the funeral parlor had been made and canceled and made again; Owen knew the mortician and the minister-"THEY'RE REAL ASSHOLES: DYING IS JUST A BUSINESS TO THEM, AND WHEN THINGS DON'T COME OFF ON SCHEDULE, THEY BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT THE MILITARY AND MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR THE POOR FAMILY."

Apparently the family had planned a kind of' 'picnic wake''; the wake was now in its third day. Owe" was pretty sure that all he'd have to do was deliver the booy to the mortuary; the survivor assistance officer-a ROTC professor at Arizona State University, a major whom Owen also knew-had warned Owen that the family was so pissed off at the Army that they probably wouldn't want a military escort at the funeral.

"BUT YOU NEVER KNOW," Owen told me. "WE'LL JUST HANG AROUND, SORT OF PLAY IT BY EAR-EITHER WAY, I CAN GET A COUPLE OF FREE DAYS OUT OF IT. WHEN THERE'S BEEN A FUCK-UP LIKE THIS, THERE'S NEVER ANY PROBLEM WITH ME GETTING A COUPLE OF DAYS AWAY FROM THE POST. I JUST NOTIFY THE ARMY THAT I'M STICKING AROUND PHOENIX-'AT THE REQUEST OF THE FAMILY,' IS HOW I PUT IT. SOMETIMES, IT'S EVEN TRUE-LOTS OF TIMES, THE FAMILY WANTS YOU TO STICK AROUND. THE POINT IS, I'LL HAVE LOTS OF FREE TIME AND WE CAN JUST HANG OUT TOGETHER. LIKE I TOLD YOU, THE MOTEL HAS A GREAT SWIMMING POOL; AND IF IT'S NOT TOO HOT, WE CAN PLAY SOME TENNIS."

"I don't play tennis," I reminded him.

"WE DON'T HAVE TO PLAY TENNIS," Owen said. It seemed to me to be a long way to go for only a couple of days. I also thought that the details of the body-escorting business-as they might pertain to this particular body-were more than a little uncertain, if not altogether vague. But there was no doubt that Owen had his heart set on my meeting him in Phoenix, and he sounded even more agitated than usual. I thought he might need the company; we hadn't seen each other since Christmas. After all, I'd never been to Arizona-and, I admit, at the time I was curious to see something of the so-called body escorting. It didn't occur to me that July was not the best season to be in Phoenix-but what did / know?

"Sure, let's do it-it sounds like fun," I told him.

"YOU'RE MY BEST FRIEND," said Owen Meany-his voice breaking a little. I assumed it was the telephone; I thought we had a bad connection. That was the day they made desecrating the U.S. flag a federal crime. Owen Meany spent the night of July , , in Oakland, California, where he was given a billet in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters; on the morning of July , Owen left quarters at the Oakland Army Depot-noting, in his diary, "THE ENLISTED MEN ON FAR EAST LEVY ARE RE-

QUIRED TO LINE UP AT A NUMBERED DOOR, WHERE THEY ARE ISSUED JUNGLE FATIGUES, AND OTHER CRAP. THE RECRUITS ARE GIVEN STEAK DINNERS BEFORE BEGINNING THEIR FLIGHT TO VIETNAM. I'VE SEEN THIS PLACE TOO MANY TIMES: THE SPARS AND CRANES AND THE TIN WAREHOUSE ROOFS, AND THE GULLS GLIDING OVER THE AIRPLANE HANGARS-AND ALL THE NEW RECRUITS, ON THEIR WAY OVER THERE, AND THE BODIES COMING HOME. SO MANY GREEN DUFFEL BAGS ON THE SIDEWALKS. DO THE RECRUITS KNOW THE CONTENTS OF THOSE GRAY PLYWOOD BOXES?"

Owen noted in his diary that he was issued, as usual, the triangular cardboard box, in which the correctly prefolded flag was packaged-"WHO THINKS UP THESE THINGS? DOES THE PERSON WHO MAKES THE CARDBOARD BOX KNOW WHAT IT'S FORT' He was issued the usual funeral forms and the usual black armband-he lied to a clerk about dropping his armband in a urinal, in order to be issued another one; he wanted me to have a black armband, too, so that I would look ACCEPTABLY OFFICIAL. About the time my plane left Boston, Owen Meany was identifying a plywood container in the baggage area of the San Francisco airport. From the air, flying over Phoenix, you notice the nothingness first of all. It resembles a tan- and cocoa-colored moon, except that there are vast splotches of green-golf courses and the other pampered land where irrigation systems have been installed. From my Geology course, I knew that everything below me had once been a shallow ocean; and at dusk, when I flew into Phoenix, the shadows on the rocks were a tropical-sea purple, and the tumbleweeds were aquamarine- so that I could actually imagine the ocean that once was there. In truth, Phoenix still resembled a shallow sea, marred by the fake greens and blues of swimming pools. Some ten or twenty miles in the distance, a jagged ridge of reddish, tea-colored mountains were here and there capped with waxy deposits of limestone-to a New Englander, they looked like dirty snow. But it was far too hot for snow. Although, at dusk, the sun had lost its intensity, the dry heat shimmered above the tarmac; despite a breeze, the heat persisted with furnacelike generation. After the heat, I noticed the palm trees-all the beautiful, towering palm trees. Owen's plane, like the body he was escorting home, was late. I waited with the men in their guayabera shirts and huara-ches, and their cowboy boots; the women, from petite to massive, appeared immodestly content in short shorts and halter tops, their rubber thongs slapping the hard floors of the Phoenix airport, which was optimistically called the Sky Harbor. Both the men and women were irrepressibly fond of the local silver-and-turquoise jewelry. There was a game room, where a young, sunburned soldier was tilting a pinball machine with a kind of steadfast resentment. The first men's room I found was locked and labeled "Temporarily Out of Order"; but the paper sign was so yellowed, it looked like an old announcement. After a search that transported me through widely varying degrees of air-conditioned coolness, I found a makeshift men's room, which was labeled "Men's Temporary Facilities."

At first, I wasn't sure I was in a men's room; it was a dark, subterranean room with a huge industrial sink-I wondered if it was a urinal for a giant. The actual urinal was hidden by a barrier of mops and pails, and a single toilet stall had been erected in the middle of the room from such fresh plywood that the carpentry odor almost effectively combated the gagging quality of the disinfectant. There was a long mirror, leaned against a wall rather than hung. It was about as "temporary" a men's room as I ever hoped to see. The room-which was in its former life, I guessed, a storage closet; but with a sink so mysteriously vast I couldn't imagine what was washed or soaked in it-was absurdly high-ceilinged for such a small space; it was like a long, thin room that an earthquake or an explosion had turned on its end. And the one small window was so high, it was almost touching the ceiling, as if the room were so deeply underground that the window had to be that high in order to reach ground-level light-scant little of which could ever penetrate to the faraway floor of the room. It was a transom-type window, but without a door under it; as to how it was hinged, it was the casement-type, with such a deep window ledge in front of it that a man could comfortably have sat there-except that his head and shoulders would be scrunched by the ceiling. The lip of the window ledge was far above the floor-maybe ten feet or more. It was that kind of unreachable window that one opened and closed by the use

of a hook attached to a long pole-if one opened and closed this window, at all; it certainly looked as if no one had ever washed it. I peed in the small, cramped urinal; I kicked a mop in a pail; I rattled the flimsy plywood of the "temporary" toilet stall. The men's room was so makeshift, I wondered if anyone had bothered to hook up the plumbing to the urinal or the toilet. The intimidating sink was so dirty I chose not to touch the faucets-so I couldn't wash my hands. Besides: there was no towel. Some "Sky Harbor," I thought-and wandered off, composing a traveler's letter of complaint in my mind. It never occurred to me that there might have been a perfectly clean and functioning men's room elsewhere in the airport; maybe there was. Maybe where I had been was one of those sad places for "Employees Only."

I wandered in the air-conditioned coolness of the airport; occasionally, I stepped outside-just to feel the amazing, stifling heat mat was so unknown in New Hampshire. The insistent breeze must have been coming off the desert, for it was not a wind I'd ever felt before, and I've never felt it since. It was a dry, hot wind that caused the men's loose-fitting guayabera shirts to flap like flags. I was standing outside the airport, in the hot wind, when I saw the family of the dead warrant officer, they were also waiting for Owen Meany's plane. Because I was a Wheelwright-and, therefore, a New England snob-I'd assumed that Phoenix was largely composed of Mormons and Baptists and Republicans; but the warrant officer's kinfolk were not what I'd expected. The first thing that I thought was wrong with this family was that they didn't appear to belong together, or even to be related to each other. About a half dozen of them were standing in the desert wind beside a silver-gray hearse; and although they were grouped fairly close together, they did not resemble a family portrait so much as they appeared to be the hastily assembled employees of a small, disorderly company. An Army officer was standing with them-he would have been the major Owen said he'd done business with before, the ROTC professor from Arizona State University. He was a compact, fit-looking man whose athletic restlessness reminded me of Randy White; and he wore sunglasses of the goggle style that pilots favor. His indeterminate age-he could have been thirty or forty-five-was, in part, the result of the muscular rigidity of his body; and his bristling skull was so closely shaved, the stubble of his hair could have been either a whitish blond or & whitish gray. I tried to identify the others. I thought I spotted the director of the funeral home-the mortician, or his delegate. He was a tall, thin, pasty presence in a starched, white shirt with long, pointed collars-and the only member of the odd group who wore a dark suit and tie. Then there was a bulky man in a chauffeur's uniform, who stood outside the group, and smoked incessantly. The family itself was inscrutable-except for the clear possession of a snared but unequal rage, which appeared to manifest itself the least in a slope-shouldered, slow-looking man in a short-sleeved shirt with a string tie. I took him for the father. His wife-the presumed mother of the deceased- twitched and trembled beside this man, who appeared to me to be both unmovable and unmoved. In contrast, the woman could not relax; her fingers picked at her clothes, and she poked at her hair-which was piled mountainously high and was as sticky-looking as a cone of cotton candy. And in the desert sunset, the woman's hair was nearly as pink as cotton candy, too. Perhaps it was the third day of the "picnic wake" that had wrecked her face and left her with only minimal consciousness and control of her hands. From time to time, she would clench her fists and utter an oath that the desert wind, and my considerable distance from the family gathering, did not permit me to hear; yet the effect of the oath was instantaneous upon the boy and girl whom I guessed were the surviving siblings. The daughter flinched at the mother's violent outbursts-as if the mother had made these utterances directly to her, which I thought was not the case; or as if in tandem with the oaths she uttered, the mother had managed to lash the daughter with a whip I couldn't see. At each oath, the daughter shook and cringed-once or twice, she even covered her ears. Because she wore a wrinkled cotton dress that was too small for her, when the wind pressed hard against her, I could see that she was pregnant-although she looked barely old enough to be pregnant, and she was not with any man I would have guessed was the father of her unborn child. I took the boy who stood beside her to be her brother-and a younger brother to both the dead warrant officer and his pregnant sister. He was a gawky-tall, bony-faced boy, who was scary-looking because of what loomed as his potential size. I thought he could not have been older than fourteen or fifteen; but

although he was thin, he carried great, broad bones upon his gangling frame-he had such strong-looking hands and such an oversized head that I thought he could have put on a hundred pounds without even slightly altering his exterior dimensions. With an additional hundred pounds, he would have been huge and frightening; in some way, I thought, he looked like a man who had recently lost a hundred pounds-and, at the same time, he appeared to have within him the capacity to gain it all back overnight. The overgrown boy towered over everyone else-he sawed hi the wind like the vastly tall palms that lined the entrance to the Phoenix Sky Harbor terminal-and his rage was the most manifest, his anger (like his body) appeared to be a monster that had lots of room to grow. When his mother spoke, the boy tipped his head back and spat-a sizable and mud-colored trajectory. It shocked me that, at his age, his parents allowed him to chew tobacco! Then he turned and stared at the mother, head-on, until she turned away from him, still fidgeting with her hands. The boy wore a greasy pair of what looked to me (from my distant perspective) to be workmen's overalls, and some serious tools hung in loops from something like a carpenter's belt-only the tools more closely resembled the hardware of a car mechanic or a telephone repairman; perhaps the boy had an after-school job, and he'd come directly from this job to meet his brother's body at the airport. If this was the most intimate welcoming party from the warrant officer's family, it gave me the shivers to think of the even less presentable members of kin who might still be making merry at the three-day-long "picnic wake." When I looked at this tribe, I thought that I wouldn't have wanted Owen Meany's job-not for a million dollars. No one seemed to know in which direction to look for the plane. I trusted the major and the mortician; they were the only two people who stared off in the same direction, and I knew that this wasn't the first body they had been on hand to welcome home. And so I looked in the direction they looked. Although the sun had set, vivid streaks of vermilion-colored light traced the enormous sky, and through one of these streaks of light I saw Owen's plane descending-as if, wherever Owen Meany went, some kind of light always attended him. All the way from San Francisco to Phoenix, Owen was writing in his diary; he wrote pages and pages-he knew he didn't have much time.

"THERE'S SO MUCH I KNOW," he wrote, "BUT I DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING. ONLY GOD KNOWS EVERYTHING. THERE ISN'T TIME FOR ME TO GET TO VIETNAM. I THOUGHT I KNEW I WAS GOING THERE. I THOUGHT I KNEW THE DATE, TOO. BUT IF I'M RIGHT ABOUT THE DATE, THEN I'M WRONG ABOUT FT HAPPENING IN VIETNAM. AND IF I'M RIGHT ABOUT VIETNAM, THEN I'M WRONG ABOUT THE DATE. IT'S POSSIBLE THAT IT REALLY IS 'JUST A DREAM'-BUT IT SEEMS SO REALl THE DATE LOOKED THE MOST REAL, BUT I DON'T KNOW-I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE.

"I'M NOT AFRAID, BUT I'M VERY NERVOUS. AT FIRST, I DIDN'T LIKE KNOWING-NOW I DON'T LIKE NOT KNOWING! GOD IS TESTING ME," wrote Owen Meany. There was much more; he was confused. He'd cut off my finger to keep me out of Vietnam; in his view, he'd attempted to physically remove me from his dream. But although he'd kept me out of the war, it was apparent-from his diary-that I'd remained in the dream. He could keep me out of Vietnam, he could cut off my finger; but he couldn't get me out of his dream, and that worried him. If he was going to die, he knew I had to be there-he didn't know why. But if he'd cut off my finger to save my life, it was a contradiction that he'd invited me to Arizona. God had promised him that nothing bad would happen to me; Owen Meany clung to that belief.

"MAYBE IT REALLY IS 'JUST A DREAM'!" he repeated. "MAYBE THE DATE IS JUST A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION! BUT IT WAS WRITTEN IN STONE-IT IS 'WRITTEN IN STONE'!" he added; he meant, of course, that he'd already carved the date of his death on his own gravestone. But now he was confused; now he wasn't so sure.

"HOW COULD THERE BE VIETNAMESE CHILDREN IN ARIZONA!" Owen asked himself; he even asked God a question. "MY GOD-IF I DON'T SAVE ALL THOSE CHILDREN, HOW COULD YOU HAVE PUT ME THROUGH ALL THIS?" Later, he added: "I MUST TRUST IN THE LORD."

And just before the plane touched down in Phoenix, he made this hasty observation from the air: "HERE I AM AGAIN- I'M ABOVE EVERYTHING. THE PALM TREES ARE VERY STRAIGHT AND TALL-I'M HIGH ABOVE THE PALM TREES. THE SKY AND THE PALM TREES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL."

He was the first off the plane, his uniform a startlingly crisp challenge to the heat, his black armband identifying his mission, his green duffel bag in one hand-the triangular cardboard box in the other. He walked straight to the baggage compartment of the plane; although I couldn't hear his voice, I could see he was giving orders to the baggage handlers and the forklift operator-I'm sure he was telling them to keep the head of the body higher than the feet, so that fluid would not escape through the orifices. Owen rendered a salute as the body in the plywood box was lowered from the plane. When the forklift driver had the crate secured, Owen hopped on one of the tines of the fork-he rode thus, the short distance across the runway to the waiting hearse, like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. I walked across the tarmac toward the family, who had not moved-only their eyes followed Owen Meany and the body in the box. They stood paralyzed by their anger; but the major stepped smartly forward to greet Owen; the chauffeur opened the tailgate of the long, silver-gray hearse; and the mortician became the unctuous delegate of death-the busybody it was his nature to be. Owen hopped lightly off the forklift; he dropped his duffel bag to the tarmac and cracked open the triangular cardboard box. With the major's help, Owen unfolded the flag-it was difficult to manage in the strong wind. Suddenly, more runway lights were turned on, and the flag swelled and snapped brightly against the dark sky; rather clumsily, Owen and the major finally covered the crate with the flag. Once the body was slid into the hearse, the flag on top of the container lay still, and the family-like a large, ungainly animal- approached the hearse and Owen Meany. That was when I noticed that the hugely tall boy was not wearing a pair of workmen's overalls-he was wearing jungle fatigues-and what I had mistaken for splotches of grease or oil were in fact the camouflage markings. The fatigues looked authentic, but the boy was clearly not old enough to "serve"

and he was hardly in a proper uniform-on his big feet, he wore a scuffed and filthy pair of basketball shoes, "high tops"; and his matted, shoulder-length hair certainly wasn't Army regulation. It was not a carpenter's belt he wore; it was a kind of cartridge belt, with what appeared to be live ammo, actual loaded shells-at least, some of the cartridge sleeves in the belt were stuffed with bullets-and from various loops and hooks and straps, attached to this belt, certain things were hanging ... neither a mechanic's tools, nor the equipment that is standard for a telephone repairman. The towering boy carried some authentic-looking Army equipment: an entrenching tool, a machete, a bayonet-although the sheath for the bayonet did not look like Army issue, not to me; it was made of a shiny material in a Day-Glo-green color, and embossed upon it was the traditional skull and crossbones in Day-Glo orange. The pregnant girl, whom I took to be the tall monster's sister, could not have been older than sixteen or seventeen; she began to sob-then she made a fist and bit into the big knuckle at the base of her index finger, to stop herself from crying.

"Fuck!" the mother cried out. The slow-moving man who appeared to be her husband folded and unfolded his beefy arms, and-spontaneously, upon the mother's utterance-the specter in jungle fatigues tipped his head back and spat another sizable, mud-colored trajectory.

"Would you stop doing that?" the pregnant girl asked him.

"Fuck you," he said. The slow-moving man was not as slow as I thought. He lashed out at the boy-it was a solidly thrown right jab that caught the kid flush on his cheek and dropped him, like Owen's duffel bag, to the tarmac.

"Don't you speak to your sister that way," the man said. The boy, not moving, said: "Fuck you-she's not my sister, she's just my half sister!"

The mother said: "Don't speak to your father that way."

"He's not my father-you asshole," the boy said.

"Don't you call your mother an 'asshole'!" the man said; but when he stepped closer to the boy on the tarmac-as if he were positioning himself near enough to kick the boy-the boy rose unsteadily to his feet. He held the machete in one hand, the bayonet in the other.

"You're both assholes," the boy told the man and woman- and when his half sister commenced to cry again, he once more

tipped back his head and spat the tobacco juice; he did not spit on her, but he spat in her general direction. It was Owen Meany who spoke to him. "I LIKE THAT SHEATH-FOR THE BAYONET," Owen said. "DID YOU MAKE IT YOURSELF?"

As I had seen it happen before-with strangers-the whole, terrible family was frozen by Owen Meany's voice. The pregnant girl stopped crying; the father-who was not the tall boy's father-backed away from Owen, as if he were more afraid of than of either a bayonet or a machete, or both; the mother nervously patted her sticky hair, as if Owen had caused her to worry about her appearance. The top of Owen Meany's cap reached only as high as the tall boy's chest. The boy said to him: "Who are you! You little twit."

"This is the casualty assistance officer," the major said. "This is Lieutenant Meany."

"I want to hear him say it," the boy said, not taking his eyes off Owen.

"I'M LIEUTENANT MEANY," Owen said; he offered to shake hands with the boy. "WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" But in order to shake hands with Owen, the boy would have had to sheathe at least one of his weapons; he appeared unwilling. He also didn't bother to tell Owen his name.

"What's the matter with your voice!" he asked Owen.

"NOTHING-WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU!" Owen asked him. "YOU WANT TO DRESS UP AND PLAY SOLDIER-DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO SPEAK TO AN OFFICER!"

As a natural bully, the boy respected being bullied. "Yes, sir," he said snidely to Owen.

"PUT THOSE WEAPONS AWAY," Owen told him. "IS THAT YOUR BROTHER I JUST BROUGHT HOME?" Owen asked him.

"Yes, sir," the boy said.

"I'M SORRY YOUR BROTHER'S DEAD," said Owen Meany. "DON'T YOU WANT TO PAY SOME ATTENTION TO MM?" Owen asked.

"Yes, sir," the boy said quietly; he looked at a loss about how to PAY SOME ATTENTION to his dead brother, and so he stared forlornly at the corner of the flag that was near enough to the open tailgate of the hearse to be occasionally moved by the wind. Then Owen Meany circulated through the family, shaking hands, saying he was sorry; such a range of feelings flashed across the mother's face-she appeared contradictively stimulated to flirt with him and to kill him. The impassive father seemed to me to be the most disagreeably affected by Owen's unnatural size; the man's doughy countenance wavered between brute stupidity and contempt. The pregnant girl was stricken with shyness when Owen spoke to her.

"I'M SORRY ABOUT YOUR BROTHER," he said to her, he came up to her chin.

"My half brother," she mumbled. "But I still loved him!" she added. Her other half brother-the one who was alive- needed to ferociously restrain himself from spitting again. So they were a family torn in halves, or worse, I thought. In the major's car-where Owen and I were first able to acknowledge each other, to hug each other, and to pat each other on our backs-the major explained the family to us.

"They're a mess, of course-they may all be criminally retarded," the major said. His name was Rawls-Hollywood would have loved him. In close-up, he looked fifty, a gruff old type; but he was only thirty-seven. He'd earned a battlefield commission during the final days of the Korean War; he'd completed a tour of duty in Vietnam as an infantry battalion executive officer. Major Rawls had enlisted in the Army in , when he'd been eighteen. He'd served the Army for nineteen years; he'd fought in two wars; he'd been passed over for promotion to lieutenant colonel, and-at a time when all the good "field grade" officers were in Washington or Vietnam-he'd ended up as a ROTC professor for his twilight tour of duty. If Major Rawls had earned a battlefield commission, he had earned his measure of cynicism, too; the major spoke in sustained, explosive bursts-like rounds of fire from an automatic weapon.

"They may all be fucking each other-I wouldn't be surprised about a family like this," Major Rawls said. "The brother is the chief wacko-he hangs around the airport all day, watching the planes, talking to the soldiers. He can't wait to be old enough to go to 'Nam. The only one in the family who might have been wackier than him is the one who's dead-this was his third fucking tour 'in country'! You should've seen him between tours-the whole fucking tribe lives in a trailer park, and the warrant officer just spent all his time looking in his neighbors' windows through a telescopic

sight. You know what I mean-lining up everyone in the cross hairs! If he hadn't gone back to 'Nam, he'd have gone to jail.

"Both brothers have a different father-a dead one, not this clown," Major Rawls informed us. "This clown's the father of that unfortunate girl-I can't tell you who knocked her up, but I've got a feeling it was a family affair. My odds are on the warrant officer-I think he had sighted her in his cross hairs, too. You know what I mean? Maybe both brothers were banging her," Major Rawls said. "But I think the younger one is too crazy to get it up-he just can't wait to be old enough to kill people," the major said.

"Now the mother-she's not just in space, she's in fucking orbit" Major Rawls said. "And wait till you get to the wake-wait till you meet the rest of the family! I tell you-they shouldn't've sent the brother home from 'Nam, not even in a box. What they should've done is send his whole fucking family over there] Might be the only way to win the fucking war-if you know what I mean," Major Rawls said. We were following the silver-gray hearse, which the chauffeur drove ploddingly along a highway called Black Canyon. Then we turned onto something called Camelback Road. In the wind, the palm trees sawed over us; on the Bermuda grass, in one neighborhood, some old people sat in metal lawn chairs- as hot as it was, even at night, the old people wore sweaters, and they waved to us. They must have been crazy. Owen Meany had introduced me to Major Rawls as his BEST FRIEND.

"MAJOR RAWLS-THIS IS MY BEST FRIEND, JOHN WHEELWRIGHT. HE'S COME ALL THE WAY FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE!" Owen had said.

"That's better than coming from Vietnam. It's nice to meet you, John," Major Rawls had said; he had a crushing handshake and he drove his car as if every other driver on the road had already done something to offend him.

"Wait till you see the fucking funeral parlor!" the major said to me.

"IT'S A KIND OF SHOPPING-MALL MORTUARY," Owen said, and Major Rawls liked that-he laughed.

"It's a fucking 'shopping-mall' mortician}" Rawls said.

"THEY HAVE REMOVABLE CROSSES IN THE CHAPEL," Owen informed me. "THEY CAN SWITCH CROSSES, DEPENDING ON THE DENOMINATION OF THE SERVICE-THEY'VE GOT A CRUCIFIX WITH AN ESPECIALLY LIFELIKE CHRIST HANGING ON IT, FOR THE CATHOLICS. THEY'VE GOT A PLAIN WOODEN CROSS FOR THE PLAIN, PROTESTANT TYPES. THEY'VE EVEN GOT A FANCY CROSS WITH JEWELS IN IT, FOR THE IN-BETWEENS," Owen said.

"What are 'in-betweens'?" I asked Owen Meany.

"That's what we've got on our hands here," Major Rawls said. "We've got fucking Baptists-they're fucking 'in-betweens,' all right," he said. "You remember that asshole minister, Meany?" Major Rawls asked Owen.

"YOU MEAN THE BAPTIST THE MORTUARY USES? OF COURSE I DO!" Owen said.

"Just wait till you meet Aim!" Major Rawls said to me.

"I can't wait," I said. Owen made me put on the extra black armband. "DON'T WORRY," he told me. "WE'LL HAVE A LOT OF FREE TIME."

"Do you guys want datesT' Major Rawls asked us. "I know some hot coeds," he said.

"I KNOW YOU DO," Owen said. "BUT NO THANKS- WE'RE JUST GOING TO HANG OUT."

"I'll show you where the pom shop is," Major Rawls offered.

"NO THANKS," Owen said. "WE JUST WANT TO RELAX."

"What are you-a couple of fags?" the major asked-he laughed at his joke.

' 'MAYBE WE ARE,'' said Owen Meany, and Major Rawls laughed again.

"Your friend's the funniest little fucker in the Army," the major said. It actually was a kind of shopping-mall mortuary, surrounded by an unfathomable inappropriateness for a funeral home. In the style of a Mexican hacienda, the mortuary-and its chapel with die changeable crosses-formed one of several L-joints in a long, interconnected series of pink- and white-stuccoed buildings. Immediately adjacent to the mortuary itself was an ice-cream shop; adjoined to the chapel was a pet shop-die windowfront displayed an arrangement of snakes, which were on sale.

"It's no fucking wonder the warrant officer wanted to go back to 'Nam," Major Rawls said. Before the oily mortician could inquire who / was-or ask on whose authority / was permitted to view the contents of the plywood container-Owen Meany introduced me.

"THIS IS MISTER WHEELWRIGHT-OUR BODY EXPERT," Owen said. "THIS IS INTELLIGENCE BUSINESS," Owen told the mortician. "I MUST ASK YOU NOT TO DISCUSS THIS."

"Oh no-never!" the mortician said; clearly, he didn't know what there was-or might be-to DISCUSS. Major Rawls rolled his eyes and concealed a dry laughter by pretending to cough. A carpeted hall led to a room that smelled like a chemistry lab, where two inappropriately cheerful attendants were loosening the screws on the transfer case- another man stacked the plywood against a far wall. He was finishing an ice-cream cone, so he clumsily stacked the wood with his free hand. It took four people to lift the heavy coffin-perhaps twenty-gauge steel-onto the mortuary's chrome dolly. Major Rawls spun three catches that looked like those fancy wheel locks on certain sports cars. Owen Meany opened the lid and peered inside. After a while, he turned to Rawls. "IS IT HIM?" he asked the major. Major Rawls looked into the coffin for a long time. The mortician knew enough to wait his turn. Finally, Major Rawls turned away. "I think it's him," Rawls said. "It's close enough," he added. The mortician started for the coffin, but Owen stopped him.

"PLEASE LET MISTER WHEELWRIGHT LOOK FIRST," he said.

"Oh yes-of course!" the mortician said, backing away. To his attendants, the mortician whispered: "This is intelligence business-there will be no discussion of this." The two attendants, and even the mild-looking fellow who was handling the plywood and eating ice cream, glanced nervously at one another.

"What was the cause of death?" the mortician asked Major Rawls.

"THAT'S PRECISELY WHAT'S UNDER INVESTIGATION," Owen snapped at him. "THAT'S WHAT WE'RE NOT DISCUSSING!"

"Oh yes-of course!" the idiot mortician said. Major Rawls again tried not to laugh; he coughed. I avoided looking too closely at the body of the warrant officer. I was so prepared for something not even recognizably human that, at first, I felt enormously relieved; almost nothing appeared to be wrong with the man-he was a whole soldier in his greens and aviator wings and warrant officer brass. He had a makeup tan, and the skin on his face appeared to be stretched too tightly over his bones, which were prominent. There was an unreal element to his hair, which resembled a kind of wig-in-progress. Then certain, specific things began to go a little wrong with my perception of the warrant officer's face-his ears were as dark and shriveled as prunes, as if a set of headphones had caught fire when he'd been listening to something; and there were perfectly goggle-shaped circles burned into the skin around his eyes, as if he were part raccoon. I realized that his sunglasses had melted against his face, and that the tautness of his skin was, in fact, the result of his whole face being swollen-his whole face was a tight, smooth blister, which gave me the impression that the terrific heat he'd been exposed to had been generated from inside his head. I felt a little ill, but more ashamed than sick-I felt I was being indecent, invading the warrant officer's privacy ... to the degree that a thrill-seeker who's pressed too close to the wreckage of an automobile accident might feel guilty for catching a glimpse of the bloody hair protruding through the fractured windshield. Owen Meany knew that I couldn't speak.

"IT'S WHAT YOU EXPECTED-ISN'T IT?" Owen asked me; I nodded, and moved away. Quickly the mortician darted to the coffin. "Oh, really- you'd think they'd make a better effort than thisl" he said. Fussily, he took a tissue and wiped some leakage-some fluid-from the corner of the warrant officer's mouth. ' 'I don't believe in open caskets, anyway," the mortician said. "That last look can be the heartbreaker."

"I don't think this guy had a gift for breaking hearts," Major Rawls said. But I could think of one heart that the warrant officer had broken; his tall younger brother was heartbroken-he was much worse than heartbroken, I thought. Owen and I had an ice-cream cone, next door, while Major Rawls and the mortician argued about the "asshole minister."

It was a Saturday. Because tomorrow was a Sunday, the service couldn't be held in the Baptist Church-it would conflict with the Sunday services. There was a Baptist minister who "traveled" to the mortuary and performed die service in the mortuary's flexible chapel.

"You mean he travels because he's such an asshole that he doesn't have a church of his own!" said Major Rawls; he accused the mortician and the minister of frequently working together-"for the money."

"It costs money in a church, too-wherever you die and have a service, it costs money," the mortician said.

"MAJOR RAWLS IS JUST TIRED OF LISTENING TO THIS PARTICULAR BAPTIST," Owen explained to me. Back in the car, Rawls said: "I don't believe anyone in this family ever went to church-not ever! That fucking funeral director-I know he talked the family into being Baptists. He probably told them they had to say they were something-then he told them to be Baptists. He and that fucking minister- they're a match made in hell!"

"THE CATHOLICS REALLY DO THIS SORT OF THING BETTER THAN ANYBODY," said Owen Meany.

"The fucking Catholics!" said Major Rawls.

"NO, THEY REALLY DO THIS SORT OF THING THE BEST-THEY HAVE THE PROPER SOLEMNITY, THE PROPER SORT OF RITUALS, AND PROPER PACING," Owen said. I was amazed to find that Owen Meany had praised the Catholics; but he was absolutely serious. Even Major Rawls didn't wish to argue with him.

"No one does 'this sort of thing' well-that's all I know," the major said.

"I DIDN'T SAY ANYONE DID IT 'WELL,' SIR-I SAID THE CATHOLICS DID IT 'BETTER'; THEY DO IT BEST," said Owen Meany. I asked Owen what had been the stuff I'd seen leaking from the warrant officer's mouth.

"That's just phenol," said Major Rawls.

"IT'S ALSO CALLED CARBOLIC ACID," Owen said.

"I call it 'phenol,' " Rawls said. Then I asked them how the warrant officer had died.

"He was such a dumb asshole," Major Rawls said. "He was refueling a helicopter-he just made some stupid-asshole mistake."

"YOU AGGRAVATE HIGH OCTANE-THAT'LL DO IT," said Owen Meany.

"I can't wait to show you guys this rucking 'picnic wake,' " Major Rawls said. Apparently, that was where we were driving next-to the "picnic wake" that was now in its third, merrymaking day. Major Rawls blew his horn at someone who he thought was possibly inching out of a driveway into the path of our car; actually, it was my impression that the person was waiting in the driveway for us to pass. "Look at that asshole!" Major Rawls said. On we drove through nighttime Phoenix. Owen Meany patted the back of my hand. "DON'T WORRY," he said to me. "WE JUST HAVE TO MAKE AN APPEARANCE AT THE WAKE-WE DON'T HAVE TO STAY LONG."

"You won't be able to tear yourselves away!" the major said excitedly. "I'm telling you, these people are on the verge of killing each other-it's the kind of scene where mass-murderers get all their ideasl"

Major Rawls had been exaggerating. The "tribe," as he'd called the family, did not live (as he'd said) in a trailer park, but in a one-story tract house with turquoise aluminum siding; but for the daring choice of turquoise, the house was identical to all the others in what I suppose is still called a low-income housing development. The neighborhood was distinguished by a large population of dismantled automobiles-indeed, there were more cars on cinder blocks, with their wheels off or then-engines ripped out from under their hoods, than there were live cars parked at the curbs or in driveways. And since the houses were nearly all constructed of cheap, uninsulated materials- and the residents could not afford or did not choose to trouble themselves with air conditioning-the neighborhood (even in the evening) teemed with outdoor activities of the kind that are usually conducted indoors. Televisions had been dragged outside, folding card tables and folding chairs gave the crowded suburb the atmosphere of a shabby sidewalk cafe- and block after block of outdoor barbecue pits and charcoal grills, which darkly smoked and sizzled with grease, gave the newcomer the impression that this part of Phoenix was recovering from an air raid that had set the ground on fire and driven the residents from their homes with only their most cherished and salvageable belongings. Some of the older people swayed in hammocks.