A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

THE ARMADILLO

MY MOTHER'S NAME was Tabitha, although no one but my grandmother actually called her that. Grandmother hated nicknames-with the exception that she never called me John; I was always Johnny to her, even long after I'd become just plain John to everyone else. To everyone else, my mother was Tabby. I recall one occasion when the Rev. Lewis Merrill said "Tabitha," but that was spoken in front of my mother and grandmother-and the occasion was an argument, or at least a plea. The issue was my mother's decision to leave the Congregational Church for the Episcopal, and the Rev. Mr. Merrill-speaking to my grandmother, as if my mother weren't in the room-said, "Tabitha Wheelwright is the one truly angelic voice in our choir, and we shall be a choir without a soul if she leaves us." I must add, in Pastor MerrilFs defense, that he didn't always speak with such Byzantine muddiness, but he was sufficiently worked up about my mother's and my own departure from his church to offer his opinions as if he were speaking from the pulpit. In New Hampshire, when I was a boy, Tabby was a common name for house cats, and there was undeniably a feline quality to my mother-never in the sly or stealthy sense of that word, but in the word's other catlike qualities: a clean, sleek, self-possessed, strokable quality. In quite a different way from

Owen Meany, my mother looked touchable; I was always aware of how much people wanted, or needed, to touch her. I'm not talking only about men, although-even at my age-I was aware of how restlessly men moved their hands in her company. I mean that everyone liked to touch her-and depending on her attitude toward her toucher, my mother's responses to being touched were feline, too. She could be so chillingly indifferent that the touching would instantly stop; she was well coordinated and surprisingly quick and, like a cat, she could retreat from being touched-she could duck under or dart away from someone's hand as instinctively as the rest of us can shiver. And she could respond in that other way that cats can respond, too; she could luxuriate in being touched-she could contort her body quite shamelessly, putting more and more pressure against the toucher's hand, until (I used to imagine) anyone near enough to her could hear her purr. Owen Meany, who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water . . . remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain, untouchable . . . Owen said to me once, "YOUR MOTHER IS SO SEXY, I KEEP FORGETTING SHE'S ANYBODY'S MOTHER."

As for my Aunt Martha's insinuations, leaked to my cousins, who dribbled the suggestion, more than ten years late, to me-that my mother was "a little simple''-I believe this is the result of a jealous elder sister's misunderstanding. My Aunt Martha failed to understand the most basic thing about my mother: that she was born into the entirely wrong body. Tabby Wheelwright looked like a starlet-lush, whimsical, easy to talk into anything; she looked eager to please, or "a little simple," as my Aunt Martha observed; she looked touchable. But I firmly believe that my mother was of an entirely different character man her appearance would suggest; as her son, I know, she was almost perfect as a mother-her sole imperfection being that she died before she could tell me who my father was. And in addition to being an almost perfect mother, I also know that she was a happy woman-and a truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy. If her body looked restless, she wasn't. She was content-she was feline in that respect, too. She appeared to want nothing from life but a child and a loving husband; it is important to note these singulars-she did not want children, she wanted me, just me, and she got me; she did not want men in her life, she wanted a man, the right man, and shortly before she died, she found him. I have said that my Aunt Martha is a "lovely woman," and I mean it: she is warm, she is attractive, she is decent and kind and honorably intentioned-and she has always been loving to me. She loved my mother, too; she just never understood her-and when however small a measure of jealousy is mixed with misunderstanding, there is going to be trouble. I have said that my mother was a sweater girl, and that is a contradiction to the general modesty with which she dressed; she did show off her bosom-but never her flesh, except for her athletic, almost-innocent shoulders. She did like to bare her shoulders. And her dress was never slatternly, never wanton, never garish; she was so conservative in her choice of colors that I remember little in her wardrobe that wasn't black or white, except for some accessories-she had a fondness for red (in scarves, in hats, in shoes, in mittens and gloves). She wore nothing that was tight around her hips, but she did like her small waist and her good bosom to show-she did have THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS, as Owen observed. I do not think that she flirted; she did not "come on" to men-but how much of that would I have seen, up to the age of eleven? So maybe she did flirt-a little. I used to imagine that her flirting was reserved for the Boston & Maine, that she was absolutely and properly my mother in every location upon this earth-even in Boston, the dreaded city-but that on the train she might have looked for men. What else could explain her having met the man who fathered me there? And some six years later-on the same train-she met the man who would marry her! Did the rhythm of the train on the tracks somehow unravel her and make^her behave out of character? Was she altered in transit, when her feet were^not upon the ground? I expressed this absurd fear only once, and only to Owen. He was shocked.

"HOW COULD YOU THINK SUCH A THING ABOUT YOUR OWN MOTHER?" he asked me.

"But yew say she's sexy, you're the one who raves about her breasts," I told him.

"I DON'T RAVE," Owen told me.

"Well, okay-I mean, you like her," I said. "Men, and boys-they like her."

"FORGET THAT ABOUT THE TRAIN," Owen said

"YOUR MOTHER IS A PERFECT WOMAN. NOTHING HAPPENS TO HER ON THE TRAIN."

Well, although she said she "met" my father on the Boston & Maine, I never imagined that my conception occurred there; it is a fact, however, that she met the man she would marry on that train. That story was neither a lie nor a secret. How many times I asked her to tell me that story! And she never hesitated, she never lacked enthusiasm for telling that story-which she told the same way, every time. And after she was dead, how many times I asked him to tell me the story-and he would tell it, with enthusiasm, and the same way, every time. His name was Dan Needham. How many times I have prayed to God that he was my real father! My mother and my grandmother and I-and Lydia, minus one of her legs-were eating dinner on a Thursday evening in the spring of . Thursdays were the days my mother returned from Boston, and we always had a better-than-average dinner those nights. I remember that it was shortly after Lydia's leg had been amputated, because it was still a little strange to have her eating with us at the table (in her wheelchair), and to have the two new maids doing the serving and the clearing that only recently Lydia had done. And the wheelchair was still new enough to Lydia so that she wouldn't allow me to push her around in it; only my grandmother and my mother-and one of the two new maids-were allowed to. I don't remember all the trivial intricacies of Lydia's wheel-chair rules-just that the four of us were finishing our dinner, and Lydia's presence at the dinner table was as new and noticeable as fresh paint. And my mother said, "I've met another man on the good old Boston and Maine."

It was not intended, I think, as an entirely mischievous remark, but the remark took instant and astonishing hold of Lydia and my grandmother and me. Lydia's wheelchair surged in reverse away from the table, dragging the tablecloth after her, so that all the dishes and glasses and silverware jumped-and the candlesticks wobbled. My grandmother seized the large brooch at the throat of her dress-she appeared to have suddenly choked on it-and I snapped so substantial a piece of my lower lip between my teeth that I could taste my blood. We all thought that my mother was speaking euphemisti- cally. I wasn't present when she'd announced the particulars of the case of the first man she claimed she'd met on the train. Maybe she'd said, "I met a man on the good old Boston and Maine-and now I'm pregnant!" Maybe she said, "I'm going to have a baby as a result of a fling I had with a total stranger I met on the good old Boston and Maine-someone I never expect to see again!"

Well, anyway, if I can't re-create the first announcement, the second announcement was spectacular enough. We all thought that she was telling us that she was pregnant again-by a different man! And as an example of how wrong my Aunt Martha was, concerning her point of view that my mother was "a little simple," my mother instantly saw what we were thinking, and laughed at us, very quickly, and said, "No, no! I'm not going to have a baby. I'm never going to have another baby-I have my baby. I'm just telling you that I've met a man. Someone I like."

"A different man, Tabitha?" my grandmother asked, still holding her brooch.

"Oh, not that man! Don't be silly," my mother said, and she laughed again-her laughter drawing Lydia's wheelchair, ever so cautiously, back toward the table.

"A man you like, you mean, Tabitha?" my grandmother asked.

"I wouldn't mention him if I didn't like him," my mother said. "I want you to meet him," she said to us all.

"You've dated him?" my grandmother asked.

"No! I just met him-just today, on today's train!" my mother said.

"And already you like him?" Lydia asked, in a tone of voice so perfectly copied from my grandmother that I had to look to see which one of them was speaking.

"Well, yes," my mother said seriously. "You know such things. You don't need that much time."

"How many times have you known such things-before?" my grandmother asked.

"This is the first time, really," my mother said. "That's why I know."

Lydia and my grandmother instinctively looked at me, perhaps to ascertain if I'd understood my mother correctly: that the time "before," when she'd had her "fling," which had led to me, was not a time when my mother had enjoyed any special

feelings toward whoever my father was. But I had another idea. I was thinking that maybe this was my father, that maybe this was the first man she'd met on the train, and he'd heard about me, and he was curious about me and wanted to see me-and something very important had kept him away for the last six years. There had, after all, been a war back when I'd been born, in . But as another example of how wrong my Aunt Martha was, my mother seemed to see what I was imagining, immediately, because she said, "Please understand, Johnny, that this man has no relationship whatsoever to the man who is your father-this is a man I saw for the first time today, and I like him. That's all: I just like him, and I think you'll like him, too."

"Okay," I said, but I couldn't look at her. I remember keeping my eyes on Lydia's hands, gripping her wheel-chair-and on my grandmother's hands, toying with her brooch.

"What does he do, Tabitha?" my grandmother asked. That was a Wheelwright thing to ask. In my grandmother's opinion, what one "did" was related to where one's family "came from"-she always hoped it was from England, and in the seventeenth century. And the short list of things that my grandmother approved of "doing" was no less specific than seventeenth-century England.

"Dramatics," my mother said. "He's a sort of actor-but not really."

"An unemployed actor?" my grandmother asked. (I think now that an employed actor would have been unsuitable enough.)

"No, he's not looking for employment as an actor-he's strictly an amateur actor," my mother said. And I thought of those people in the train stations who handled puppets-I meant street performers, although at six years old I hadn't the vocabulary to suggest this. "He teaches acting, and putting on plays," my mother said.

"A director?" my grandmother asked, more hopefully.

"Not exactly," my mother said, and she frowned. "He was on his way to Gravesend for an interview."

"I can't imagine there's much opportunity for theater here!" my grandmother said.

"He had an interview at the academy," my mother said. "It's a teaching job-the history of drama, or something. And the boys have their own theatrical productions-you know, Martha and I used to go to them. It was so funny how they had to dress up as girls!"

That was the funniest part of those productions, in my memory; I'd had no idea that directing such performances was anyone's job.

"So he's a teacher?" my grandmother asked. This was borderline acceptable to Harriet Wheelwright-although my grandmother was a shrewd enough businesswoman to know that the dollars and cents of teaching (even at as prestigious a prep school as Gravesend Academy) were not exactly in her league.

"Yes!" my mother said in an exhausted voice. "He's a teacher. He's been teaching dramatics in a private school in Boston. Before that, he went to Harvard-Class of Forty-five."

"Goodness gracious!" my grandmother said. "Why didn't you begin with Harvard?"

"It's not important to him," my mother said. But Harvard ' was important enough to my grandmother to calm her troubled hands; they left her brooch alone, and returned to rest in her lap. After a polite pause, Lydia inched her wheelchair forward and picked up the little silver bell and shook it for the maids to come clear-the very bell that had summoned Lydia so often (only yesterday, it seemed). And the bell had the effect of releasing us all from the paralyzing tension we had just survived-but for only an instant. My grandmother had forgotten to ask: What is the man's name? For in her view, we Wheelwrights were not out of the woods without knowing the name of the potential new member of the family. God forbid, he was a Cohen, or a Calamari, or a Meany! Up went my grandmother's hands to her brooch again.

"His name is Daniel Needham," my mother said. Whew! With what relief-down came my grandmother's hands! Need-ham was a fine old name, a founding fathers sort of name, a name you could trace back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony-if not exactly to Gravesend itself. And Daniel was as Daniel as Daniel Webster, which was as good a name as a Wheelwright could wish for.

"But he's called Dan," my mother added, bringing a slight frown to my grandmother's countenance. She had never gone along with making Tabitha a Tabby, and if she'd had a Daniel she wouldn't have made him a Dan. But Harriet Wheelwright

was fair-minded enough, and smart enough, to yield in the case of a small difference of opinion.

"So, have you made a date?" my grandmother asked.

"Not exactly," my mother said. "But I know I'll see him again.''

"But you haven't made any plans?" my grandmother asked. Vagueness annoyed her. "If he doesn't get the job at the academy," my grandmother said, "you may never see him again!"

"But I know I'll see him again!" my mother repeated.

"You can be such a know-it-all, Tabitha Wheelwright," my grandmother said crossly. "I don't know why young people find it such a burden to plan ahead." And to this notion, as to almost everything my grandmother said, Lydia wisely nodded her head-the explanation for her silence was that my grandmother was expressing exactly what Lydia would have expressed, only seconds before Lydia could have done so. Then the doorbell rang. Both Lydia and my grandmother stared at me, as if only my Mends would be uncouth enough to make a call after dinner, uninvited.

"Heavens, who is that?" Grandmother asked, and she and Lydia both took a pointed and overly long look at their wristwatches-although it was not even eight o'clock on a balmy spring evening; there was still some light in the sky.

"I'll bet that's ton!" my mother said, getting up from the table to go to the door. She gave herself a quick and approving look in the mirror over the sideboard where the roast sat, growing cold, and she hurried into the hall.

"Then you did make a date?" my grandmother asked. "Did you invite him?"

"Not exactly!" my mother called. "But I told him where I lived!"

"Nothing is exactly with young people, I've noticed," my grandmother said, more to Lydia than to me.

"It certainly isn't," said Lydia. But I'd heard enough of them; I had heard them for years. I followed my mother to the door; my grandmother, pushing Lydia in her wheelchair in front of her, followed me. Curiosity, which-in New Hampshire, in those days-was often said to be responsible for the death of cats, had got the better of us all. We knew that my mother had no immediate plans to reveal to us a single clue regarding the first man she'd supposedly met on the Boston & Maine; but the second man-we could see him for ourselves. Dan Needham was on the doorstep of Front Street, Gravesend. Of course, my mother had had "dates" before, but she'd never said of one of them that she wanted us to meet him, or that she even liked him, or that she knew she'd see him again. And so we were aware that Dan Needham was special, from the start. I suppose Aunt Martha would have said that one aspect of my mother being "a little simple" was her attraction to younger men; but in this habit my mother was simply ahead of her time-because it's true, the men she dated were often a little younger than she was. She even went out with a few seniors from Gravesend Academy when-if she'd gone to college-she would have been a college senior herself; but she just "went out" with them. While they were only prep-school boys and she was in her twenties-with an illegitimate child-all she did with those boys was dance with them, or go to movies or plays with them, or to the sporting events. I was used to seeing a few goons come calling, I will admit; and they never knew how to respond to me. They had no idea, for example, what a six-year-old was. They either brought me rubber ducks for the bath, or other toys for virtual infants-or else they brought me Fowler's Modern English Usage: something every six-year-old should plunge into. And when they saw me-when they were confronted with my short, sturdy presence, and the fact that I was too old for bathtub toys and too young far Modern English Usage-they would become insanely restless to impress me with their sensitivity to a waist-high person like myself. They would suggest a game of catch in the backyard, and then rifle an uncatchable football into my small face, or they would palaver to me in baby talk about showing them my favorite toy-so that they might know what kind of thing was more appropriate to bring me, next time. There was rarely a next time. Once one of them asked my mother if I was toilet-trained-I guess he found this a suitable question, prior to his inviting me to sit on his knees and play bucking bronco.

"YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID YES," Owen Meany told me, "AND THEN PISSED IN HIS LAP."

One thing about my mother's "beaus": they were all good-looking. So on that superficial level I was unprepared for Dan Needham, who was tall and gawky, with curly carrot-

colored hair, and who wore eyeglasses that were too small for his egg-shaped face-the perfectly round lenses giving him the apprehensive, hunting expression of a large, mutant owl. My grandmother said, after he'd gone, that it must have been the first time in the history of Gravesend Academy that they had hired "someone who looks younger than the students." Furthermore, his clothes didn't fit him; the jacket was too tight-the sleeves too short-and the trousers were so baggy that the crotch napped nearer his knees than his hips, which were womanly and the only padded pans of his peculiar body. But I was too young and cynical to spot his kindness. Even before he was introduced to my grandmother or to Lydia or to me, he looked straight at me and said, "You must be Johnny. I heard as much about you as anyone can hear in an hour and a half on the Boston and Maine, and I know you can be trusted with an important package." It was a brown shopping bag with another brown paper bag stuffed inside it. Oh boy, here it comes, I thought: an inflatable camel-it floats and spits. But Dan Needham said, "It's not for you, it's not for anyone your age. But I'm trusting you to put it somewhere where it can't be stepped on-and out of the way of any pets, if you have pets. You mustn't let a pet near it. And whatever you do, don't open it. Just tell me if it moves."

Then he handed it to me; it didn't weigh enough to be Fowler's Modern English Usage, and if I was to keep it away from pets-and tell him if it moved-cleatly it was alive. I put it quickly under the hall table-the telephone table, we called it-and I stood halfway in the hall and halfway in the living room, where I could watch Dan Needham taking a seat. Taking a seat in my grandmother's living room was never easy, because many of the available seats were not for sitting in-they were antiques, which my grandmother was preserving, for historical reasons; sitting in them was not good for them. Therefore, although the living room was quite sumptuously arranged with upholstered chairs and couches, very little of this furniture was usable-and so a guest, his or her knees already bending in the act of sitting down, would suddenly snap to attention as my grandmother shouted, "Oh, for goodness sake, not there! You can't sit therel" And the startled person would attempt to try the next chair or couch, which in my grandmother's opinion would also collapse or burst into flames at the strain. And I suppose my grandmother noticed that Dan Needham was tall, and that he had a sizable bottom, and this no doubt meant to her that an even fewer-than-usual number of seats were available to him-while Lydia, not yet deft with her wheelchair, blocked the way here, and the way there, and neither my mother nor my grandmother had yet developed that necessary reflex to simply wheel her out of the way. And so the living room was a scene of idiocy and confusion, with Dan Needham spiraling toward one vulnerable antique after another, and my mother and grandmother colliding with Lydia's wheelchair while Grandmother barked this and that command regarding who should sit where. I hung back on the threshold of this awkwardness, keeping an eye on the ominous shopping bag, imagining that it had moved, a little-or that a mystery pet would suddenly materialize beside it and either eat, or be eaten by, the contents of the bag. We had never had a pet-my grandmother thought that people who kept pets were engaged in the basest form of self-mockery, intentionally putting themselves on a level with animals. Nevertheless, it made me extremely jumpy to observe the bag, awaiting its slightest twitch, and it made me even jumpier to observe the foolish nervousness of the adult ritual taking place in the living room. Gradually, I gave my whole attention to the bag; I slipped away from the threshold of the living room and retreated into the hall, sitting cross-legged on the scatter rug in front of the telephone table. The sides of the bag were almost breathing, and I thought I could detect an odor foreign to human experience. It was the suspicion of this odor that drew me nearer to the bag, until I crawled under the telephone table and put my ear to the bag and listened, and peered over the top of the bag-but the bag inside the bag blocked my view. In the living room, they were talking about history-that was Dan Needham's actual appointment: in the History Department. He had studied enough history at Harvard to be qualified to teach the conventional courses in that field at Gravesend. "Oh, you got the job!" my mother said. What was special in his approach was his use of the history of drama-and here he said something about the public entertainment of any period distinguishing the period as clearly as its so-called politics, but I drifted in and out of the sense of his remarks, so intent was I on the contents of the shopping bag in the hall. I picked up the bag and held it in my lap and waited for it to move. In addition to his interview with the History Department

members, and with the headmaster, Dan Needham was saying, he had requested some time to address those students interested in theater-and any faculty members who were interested, too-and in this session he had attempted to demonstrate how the development of certain techniques of the theatrical arts, how certain dramatic skills, can enhance our understanding of not only the characters on a stage but of a specific time and place as well. And for this session with the drama students, Dan Needham was saying, he always brought along a certain "prop"-something interesting, either to hold or focus the students' attention, or to distract them from what he would, finally, make them see. He was rather long-winded, I thought.

"What props?" my grandmother asked.

"Yes, what props ?" Lydia said. And Dan Needham said that a "prop" could be anything; once he'd used a tennis ball-and once a live bird in a cage. That was it! I thought, feeling that whatever it was in the bag was hard and lifeless and unmoving-and a birdcage would be all that. The bird, of course, I couldn't touch. Still, I wanted to see it, and with trepidation-and as silently as possible, so that the bores in the living room would not hear the paper crinkling of the two bags-I opened just a little bit of the bag within the bag. The face that stared intently into mine was not a bird's face, and no cage prevented this creature from leaping out at me-and the creature appeared not only poised to leap out at me, but eager to do so. Its expression was fierce; its snout, as narrow as the nose of a fox, was pointed at my face like a gun; its wild, bright eyes winked with hatred and fearlessness, and the claws of its forepaws, which were reaching toward me, were long and prehistoric. It looked like a weasel in a shell-like a ferret with scales. I screamed. I also forgot I was sitting under the telephone table, because I leaped up, knocking over the table and tangling my feet in the phone cord. I couldn't get away; and when I lunged out of the hall and into the living room, the telephone, and the phone table, and the beast in the bag were all dragged-with considerable clamor-after me. And so I screamed again.

"Goodness gracious!" my grandmother cried. But Dan Needham said cheerfully to my mother: "I told you he'd open the bag."

At first I had thought Dan Needham was a fool like all the others, and that he didn't know the first thing about six-year-olds-that to tell a six-year-old not to open a bag was an invitation to open it. But he knew very well what a six-year-old was like; to his credit, Dan Needham was always a little bit of a six-year-old himself.

"What in heaven's name is in the bag?" my grandmother asked, as I finally freed myself from the phone cord and went crawling to my mother.

"My prop!" Dan Needham said. It was some "prop," all right, for in the bag was a stuffed armadillo. To a boy from New Hampshire, an armadillo resembled a small dinosaur-for who in New Hampshire ever heard of a two-foot-long rat with a shell on its back, and claws as distinguished as an anteater's? Armadillos eat insects and earthworms and spiders and land snails, but I had no way of knowing that. It looked at least willing, if not able, to eat me. Dan Needham gave it to me. It was the first present any of my mother's "beaus" gave me that I kept. For years-long after its claws were gone, and its tail fell off, and its stuffing came out, and its sides collapsed, and its nose broke in half, and its glass eyes were lost-I kept the bony plates from the sheD of its back. I loved the armadillo, of course, and Owen Meany also loved it. We would be playing in the attic, abusing my grandmother's ancient sewing machine, or dressing up in my dead grandfather's clothes, and Owen would say, out of nowhere, "LET'S GO GET THE ARMADILLO. LET'S BRING IT UP HERE AND HIDE IT IN THE CLOSET."

The closet that housed my dead grandfather's clothes was vast and mysterious, full of angles and overhead shelves, and rows upon rows of shoes. We would hide in the armpit of an old tuxedo; we would hide it in the leg of an old pair of waders, or under a derby hat; we would hang it from a pair of suspenders. One of us would hide it and the other one would have to find it in the dark closet with the aid of only a flashlight. No matter how many times we had seen the armadillo, to come upon it in the black closet-to suddenly light up its insane, violent face-was always frightening. Every time the finder found it, he would yell. Owen's yelling would occasionally produce my grandmother, who would not willingly mount the rickety staircase to the attic and struggle with the attic's trapdoor. She would stand at the foot of the staircase and say, "Not so loud, you boys!"

And she would sometimes add that we were to be careful with the ancient sewing machine, and with Grandfather's clothes-because she might want to sell them, someday. "That sewing machine is an antique, you know!" Well, almost everything at Front Street was an antique, and almost none of it-Owen and I knew perfectly well-would ever be sold; not, at least, while my grandmother was alive. She liked her antiques, as was evidenced by the growing number of chairs and couches in the living room that no one was allowed to sit on. As for the discards in the attic, Owen and I knew they were safe forever. And searching among those relics for the terrifying armadillo . . . which itself looked like some relic of the animal world, some throwback to an age when men were taking a risk every time they left the cave . . . hunting for that stuffed beast among the artifacts of my grandmother's culture was one of Owen Meany's favorite games.

"I CAN'T FIND IT," he would call out from the closet. "I HOPE YOU DIDN'T PUT IT IN THE SHOES, BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO STEP ON IT BEFORE I SEE IT. AND I HOPE YOU DIDN'T PUT IT ON THE TOP SHELF BECAUSE I DON'T LIKE TO HAVE IT ABOVE ME-I HATE TO SEE IT LOOKING DOWN AT ME. AND IT'S NO FAIR PUTTING IT WHERE IT WILL FALL DOWN IF I JUST TOUCH SOMETHING, BECAUSE THAT'S TOO SCARY. AND WHEN IT'S INSIDE THE SLEEVES, I CAN'T FIND FT WITHOUT REACHING INSIDE FOR IT-THAT'S NO FAIR, EITHER."

"Just shut up and find it, Owen," I would say.

"NO FAIR PUTTING IT IN THE HATBOXES," Owen would say, while I listened to him stumbling over the shoes inside the closet. "AND NO FAIR WHEN IT SPRINGS OUT AT ME BECAUSE YOU STRETCH THE SUSPENDERS IN THAT WAY . . . AAAAAAHHHHHH! THAT'S NO FAIR!"

Before Dan Needham brought anything as exotic as that armadillo or himself into my life, my expectations regarding anything unusual were reserved for Owen Meany, and for school holidays and portions of my summer vacation when my mother and I would travel "up north" to visit Aunt Martha and her family. To anyone in coastal New Hampshire, "up north" could mean almost anywhere else in the state, but Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred lived in the White Mountains, in what everyone called "the north country," and when they or my cousins said they were going "up north," they meant a relatively short drive to any of several towns that were a little north of them-to Bartlett or to Jackson, up where the real skiing was. And in the summers, Loveless Lake, where we went to swim, was also "up north" from where the Eastmans lived-in Sawyer Depot. It was the last train station on the Boston & Maine before North Conway, where most of the skiers got off. Every Christmas vacation and Easter, my mother and I, and our skis, departed the train in Sawyer Depot; from the depot itself, we could walk to the Eastmans' house. In the summer, when we visited at least once, it was an even easier walk-without our skis. Those train rides-at least two hours from Gravesend-were the most concrete occasions I was given in which to imagine my mother riding the Boston & Maine in the other direction -south, to Boston, where I almost never went. But the passengers traveling north, I always believed, were very different types from the citybound travelers-skiers, hikers, mountain-lake swimmers: these were not men and women seeking trysts, or keeping assignations. The ritual of those train rides north is unforgettable to me, although I remember nothing of the equal number of rides back to Gravesend; return trips, to this day-from anywhere-are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber. But every time we rode the train to Sawyer Depot, my mother and I weighed the advantages of sitting on the left-hand side of the train, so that we could see Mt. Chocorua-or on the right-hand side, so that we could see Ossipee Lake. Chocorua was our first indication of how much snow there would be where we were going, but there's more visible activity around a lake than there is on a mountain-and so we would sometimes "opt for Ossipee," as Mother and I described our decision. We also played a game that involved guessing where everyone was going to get off, and I always ate too many of those little tea sandwiches that they served on board, the kind with the crusts cut off; this overeating served to justify my inevitable trip to that lurching pit with the railroad ties going by underneath me, in a blur, and the whoosh of rank air that blew upward on my bare bottom.

My mother would always say, "We're almost at Sawyer Depot, Johnny. Wouldn't you be more comfortable if you waited until we got to your Aunt Martha's?"

Yes; and no. I could almost always have waited; yet it was not only necessary to empty my bladder and bowels before encountering my cousins-it was a needed test of courage to sit naked over that dangerous hole, imagining lumps of coal and loosened railroad spikes hurtling up at me at bruising speed. I needed the empty bladder and bowels because there was immediate, rough treatment ahead; my cousins always greeted me with instant acrobatics, if not actual violence, and I needed to brace myself for them, to frighten myself a little in order to be ready for all the future terrors that the vacation held in store for me. I would never describe my cousins as bullies; they were good-natured, rambunctious roughnecks and daredevils who genuinely wanted me to have fun-but fun in the north country was not what I was used to in my life with the women at Front Street, Gravesend. I did not wrestle with my grandmother or box with Lydia, not even when she had both her legs. I did play croquet with my mother, but croquet is not a contact sport. And given that my best friend was Owen Meany, I was not inclined to much in the way of athletic roughhousing. My mother loved her sister and brother-in-law; they always made her feel special and welcome-they certainly made me feel that way-and my mother doubtless appreciated a little time away from my grandmother's imperious wisdom. Grandmother would come to Sawyer Depot for a few days at Christmas, and she would make a grand appearance for one weekend every summer, but the north country was not to Grandmother's liking. And although Grandmother was perfectly tolerant of my solitary disruption of the adult life at Front Street-and even moderately tolerant of the games I would play in that old house with Owen-she had scant patience for the disruption caused in any house by all her grandchildren. For Thanksgiving, the Eastmans came to Front Street, a disturbance that my grandmother referred to in terms of "the casualties" for several months after their visit. My cousins were active, combative athletes-my grandmother called them "the warriors"-and I lived a different life whenever I was with them. I was both crazy about them and terrified of them; I couldn't contain my excitement as the time to see them drew near, but after several days, I couldn't wait to get away from them-I missed the peace of my private games, and I missed Owen Meany; I even missed Grandmother's constant but consistent criticism. My cousins-Noah, Simon, and Hester (in order of their ages)-were all older than I: Hester was older by less than a year, although she would always be bigger; Simon was older by two years; Noah, by three. Those are not great differences in age, to be sure, but they were great enough in all those years before I was a teenager-when each of my cousins was better than I was, at everything. Since they grew up in the north country, they were fabulous skiers. I was, at best, a cautious skier, modeling my slow, wide turns on my mother's graceful but undaring stem Christie-she was a pretty skier of intermediate ability who was consistently in control; she did not think that the essence of the sport was speed, nor did she fight the mountain. My cousins raced each other down the slopes, cutting each other off, knocking each other down-and rarely restraining their routes of descent to the marked trails. They would lead me into the deep, unmanageable powder snow in the woods, and in my efforts to keep up with them, I would abandon the controlled conservative skiing that my mother had taught me and end up straddling trees, embracing snow fences, losing my goggles in icy streams. My cousins were sincere in their efforts to teach me to keep my skis parallel-and to hop on my skis-but a school-vacation skier is never the equal to a north-country native. They set such standards for recklessness that, eventually, I could no longer have fun skiing with my mother. I felt guilty that I made her ski alone; but my mother was rarely left alone for long. By the end of the day, some man-a would-be ski instructor, if not an actual ski instructor-would be coaching her at her side. What I remember of skiing with my cousins is long, humiliating, and hurtling falls, followed by my cousins retrieving my ski poles, my mittens, and my hat-from which I became inevitably separated.

"Are you all right?" my eldest cousin, Noah, would ask me. "That looked rather harsh."

"That looked neat I" my cousin Simon would say; Simon loved to fall-he skied to crash.

"You keep doing that, you'll make yourself sterile,' * said my cousin Hester, to whom every event of our shared childhood was either sexually exhilarating or sexually damaging. In the summers, we went waterskiing on Loveless Lake, where the Eastmans kept a boathouse, the second floor of which was remodeled to resemble an English pub-Uncle Alfred was admiring of the English. My mother and Aunt Martha would go sailing, but Uncle Alfred drove the powerboat wildly and fast, a beer in his free hand. Because he did not water-ski himself, Uncle Alfred thought that the responsibility of the boat's driver was to make the skier's ride as harrowing as possible. He would double back in the middle of a turn so that the rope would go slack, or you could even catch up to the rope and ski over it. He drove a murderous figure ; he appeared to relish surprising you, by putting you directly in the path of an oncoming boat or of another surprised water-skier on the busy lake. Regardless of the cause of your fall, Uncle Alfred took credit for it. When anyone racing behind the boat would send up a fabulous spray, skimming lengthwise across the water, skis ripped off, head under one second, up the next, and then under again-Uncle Alfred would shout, "Bingo!"

I am living proof that the waters of Loveless Lake are potable because I swallowed half the lake every summer while waterskiing with my cousins. Once I struck the surface of the lake with such force that my right eyelid was rolled up into my head in a funny way. My cousin Simon told me I had lost my eyelid-and my cousin Hester added that the lost eyelid would lead to blindness. But Uncle Alfred managed to locate the missing eyelid, after a few anxious minutes. Indoor life with my cousins was no less vigorous. The savagery of pillow-fighting would leave me breathless, and there was a game that involved Noah and Simon tying me up and stuffing me in Hester's laundry hamper, where Hester would always discover me; before she'd untie me, she'd accuse me of sniffing her underwear. I know that Hester especially looked forward to my visits because she suffered from being the constant inferior to her brothers-not that they abused her, or even teased her. Considering that they were boys, and older, and she was a girl, and younger, I thought they treated her splendidly, but every activity my cousins engaged in was competitive, and it clearly irked Hester to lose. Naturally, her brothers could "best" her at everything. How she must have enjoyed having me around, for she could "best" me at anything-even, when we went to the Eastman lumberyard and the sawmill, at log-rolling. There was also a game that involved taking possession of a sawdust pile-those piles were often twenty or thirty feet high, and the sawdust nearer the bottom, in contact with the ground, was often frozen or at least hardened to a crusty consistency. The object was to be king of the mountain, to hurl all comers off the top of the pile-or to bury one's attackers in the sawdust. The worst part about being buried in the pile-up to your chin -was that the lumberyard dog, the Eastmans' slobbering boxer, a mindlessly friendly beast with halitosis vile enough to give you visions of corpses uprooted from their graves . . . this dog with the mouth of death was then summoned to lick your face. And with the sawdust packed all around you-as armless as Wata-hantowet's totem-you were powerless to fend the dog off. But I loved being with my cousins; they were so vastly stimulating that I could rarely sleep in their house and would lie awake all night, waiting for them to pounce on me, or for them to let Firewater, the boxer, into my room, where he would lick me to death; or I would just lie awake imagining what exhausting contests I would encounter the next day. For my mother, our trips to Sawyer Depot were serene occasions-fresh air and girl-talk with Aunt Martha, and some doubtless needed relief from what must have been the claustrophobia of her life with Grandmother and Lydia and the maids at Front Street. Mother must have been dying to leave home. Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to. But, for me, Sawyer Depot was a training camp; yet the athleticism was not-all by itself -what was most thrilling to me about the time spent with my cousins. What made these contests thrilling was the presexual tension that I always associated with the competition-that I always associated with Hester in particular. To this day, I still engage in debate with Noah and Simon regarding whether Hester was "created" by her environment, which was almost entirely created by Noah and Simon-which is my opinion-or whether she was born with an overdose of sexual aggression and family animosity-which is what Noah and Simon say. We all agree that my Aunt Martha, as a model of womanhood, was no match for the superior impression my Uncle Alfred made-as a man. Felling trees, clearing the land,

milling lumber-what a male business was the Eastman Lumber Company! The house in Sawyer Depot was spacious and pretty; for my Aunt Martha had acquired my grandmother's good taste, and she'd brought money of her own to the marriage. But Uncle Alfred made more money than we Wheelwrights were simply sitting on. Uncle Alfred was a paragon of maleness, too, in that he was rich and he dressed like a lumberjack; that he spent most of the day behind a desk did not influence his appearance. Even if he only briefly visited the sawmill-and not more than twice a week did he actually venture into the forests where they were logging-he looked the part. Although he was fiercely strong, I never saw him do an ounce of physical labor. He radiated a burly good health, and despite how little time he spent "in the field," there was always sawdust in his bushy hair, wood chips wedged between the laces of his boots, and a few fragrant pine needles ground into the knees of his blue jeans. Possibly he kept the pine needles, the wood chips, and the sawdust in his office desk drawer. What does it matter? While wrestling with my cousins and me, Uncle Alfred was an ever-friendly bruiser; and the cologne of his rough-and-ready business, the veritable scent of the woods, was always upon him. I don't know how my Aunt Martha tolerated it, but Firewater often slept in the king-size bed in my uncle and aunt's room-and that was an even further manifestation of Uncle Alfred's manliness: that when he wasn't snuggling up to my lovely Aunt Martha, he was lolling in bed with a big dog. I thought Uncle Alfred was terrific-a wonderful father; and, for boys, he was what today's idiots would call a superior "role model." He must have been a difficult "role model" for Hester, however, because I think her worshipful love of him-in addition to her constant losses in the daily competitions with her older brothers-simply overwhelmed her, and gave her an unwarranted contempt of my Aunt Martha. But I know what Noah would say to that; he would say "bullshit," that his mother was a model of sweetness and caring-and she was I I don't argue with that!-and that Hester was born to her antagonism toward her mother, that she was born to challenge her parents' love with hostility toward both of them, and that the only way she could repay her brothers for outskiing her (on water and on snow), and for hurting her off sawdust piles, and for cramming her cousin into a basket with her old underwear, was to intimidate every girlfriend either of them ever had and to fuck the brains out of every boy they ever knew. Which she appeared to do. It's a no-win argument-that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth. Privately, I continue to be more forgiving of Hester than her own family is. I think she was up against a stacked deck from the start, and that everything she would become began for her when Noah and Simon made me kiss her-because they made it clear that kissing Hester was punishment, the penalty part of the game; to have to kiss Hester meant you had lost. I don't remember exactly how old we were when we were first forced to kiss, Hester and I, but it was sometime after my mother had met Dan Needham-because Dan was spending Christmas vacation with us at the Eastmans' in Sawyer Depot-and it was sometime before my mother and Dan Needham were married, because Mother and I were still living at Front Street. Whenever it was, Hester and I were still in our preadolescent years-our presexual years, if that's safe to say; perhaps that is never safe to say in regard to Hester, but I promise it is safe to say of me. Anyway, there'd been a thaw in the north country, and some rain, and then an ice storm, which froze the slush in deep-grooved rats. The snow was the texture of jagged glass, which made skiing all the more exciting for Noah and Simon but made it entirely out of the question for me. So Noah and Simon went up north to brave the elements, and I stayed in the Eastmans' extremely comfortable house; I don't remember why Hester stayed home, too. Perhaps she was in a cranky temper, or else she just wanted to sleep in. For whatever reason, we were there together, and by the end of the day, when Noah and Simon returned, Hester and I were in her room, playing Monopoly. I hate Monopoly, but even a capitalist board game was welcome relief from the more strenuous activities my cousins subjected me to-and Hester was either in a rare mood to be calm, or else I rarely saw her without the company of Noah and Simon, around whom it was impossible to remain calm. We were lounging on the thick, soft rug in Hester's room, with some of her old stuffed animals for pillows, when the boys-then- hands and faces bitter cold from skiing-attacked

us. They trod across the Monopoly game so effectively that there was no hope of re-creating where our houses and hotels and tokens might have been.

' 'Whoa!'' Noah yelled. ' 'Look at this hanky-panky going on here!"

"There's no hanky-panky going on!" Hester said angrily.

"Whoa!" Simon yelled. "Watch out for Hester the Mo/ester!"

"Get out of my room!" Hester shouted.

"Last one through the house has to kiss Hester the Mo-lester!" Noah said, and he and Simon were off running. In a panic, I looked at Hester and took off after them.' 'Through the house'' was a racing game that meant we had to travel through the back bedrooms-Noah and Simon's room and the back guest room, which was mine-down the back stairs, around the landing by the maid's room, where May the maid was likely to shout at us, and into the kitchen by May's usual entrance (she was also the cook). Then we chased each other through the kitchen and dining room, through the living room and the sun room, and through Uncle Alfred's study-provided he wasn't in his study-and up the front stairs, past the front guest rooms, which were off the main hall, and through my aunt and uncle's bedroom-provided they weren't in their bedroom-and then into the back hall, the first room off of which was Hester's bathroom. The next room that we came to was the finish line: Hester's room itself. Of course, May emerged from her room to shout at Noah and Simon for running on the stairs, but only I was there on the landing to be shouted at-and only I had to slow down and say ' 'Excuse me'' to May. And they closed the swinging door from the kitchen to the dining room after they ran through the doorway, so that only I had to pause long enough to open it. Uncle Alfred was not in his study, but Dan Needham was reading in there, and only I paused long enough to say "Hello" to Dan. At the top of the front stairs, Firewater blocked my way; he'd doubtless been asleep when Noah and Simon had raced by him, but now he was alert enough to play. He managed to get the heel of my sock in his mouth as I attempted to run around him, and I could not travel far down the main hall-dragging him after me-before I had to stop to give him my sock. So I was the last one through the house-I was always the last one through the house-and therefore I was expected to pay the loser's price, which was to kiss Hester. In order to bring this forced intercourse about, it had been necessary for Noah and Simon to prevent Hester from locking herself in her bathroom-which she attempted-and then it was necessary for them to tie her to her bed, which they managed to do after a violent struggle that included the decapitation of one of Hester's more fragile stuffed animals, which she had futilely ruined by beating her brothers with it. At last she was strapped prone to her bed, where she threatened to bite the lips off anyone who dared to kiss her-the thought of which filled me with such dread that Noah and Simon needed to use more mountain-climbing rope to tie me on top of Hester. We were bound uncomfortably face-to-face-and chest-to-chest, hips-to-hips, to make our humiliation more complete-and we were told that we would not be untied until we did it.

"Kiss her!" Noah cried to me.

"Let him kiss you, Hester!" Simon said. It occurs to me now that this suggestion was even less compelling to Hester than it was to me, and I could think only that Hester's snarling mouth was about as inviting as Firewater's; yet I think we both realized that the potential embarrassment of being mated to this conjugal position for any duration of time, while Noah and Simon observed our breathing and minor movements, would perhaps lead to even greater suffering than indulging in a single kiss. What fools we were to think that Noah and Simon were dull enough fellows to be satisfied with one kiss! We tried a tiny one, but Noah said, "That wasn't on the lips!" We tried a small, close-lipped one, on the lips-so brief that it was unnecessary to breathe-but this failed to satisfy Simon, who said, "Open your mouths!" We opened our mouths. There was the problem of arranging the noses before we could enjoy the nervous exchange of saliva-the slithery contact of tongues, the surprising click of teeth. We were joined so long we had to breathe, and I was astonished at how sweet my cousin's breath was; to this day, I hope mine wasn't too bad. As abruptly as they had conceived of this game, my cousins announced that the game was over. They never marshaled as much enthusiasm for the many repeats of the game called "Last One Through the House Has to Kiss Hester"; maybe they realized, later, that I began to intentionally lose the game. And what did they make of the time they untied us and Hester said to me, "I felt your hard-on"?

"You did not!" I said.

"I did. It wasn't much of a hard-on," she said. "It was no big deal. Bull felt it."

"You didn't!" I said.

"I did," she said. And it's true-it was no big deal, to be sure; it wasn't much of a hard-on, maybe; but I had one. Did Noah and Simon ever consider the danger of the game? The way they skied, on water and on snow-and, later, the way they drove their cars-suggested to me that they thought nothing was dangerous. But Hester and I were dangerous. And they started it: Noah and Simon started it. Owen Meany rescued me. As you shall see, Owen was always rescuing me; but he began the lifelong process of rescuing me by rescuing me from Hester. Owen was extremely irritable regarding the time I spent with my cousins. He would be grouchy for several days before I left for Sawyer Depot, and he would be peevish and aloof for several days after I got back. Although I made a point of describing how physically damaging and psychologically upsetting the time spent with my cousins was, Owen was crabby; I thought he was jealous.

"YOU KNOW, I WAS THINKING," he said to me. "YOU KNOW HOW WHEN YOU ASK ME TO SPEND THE NIGHT, I ALMOST ALWAYS DO FT-AND WE HAVE A GOOD TIME, DON'T WE?"

"Sure we do, Owen," I said.

"WELL, IF YOU ASKED ME TO COME WITH YOU AND YOUR MOTHER TO SAWYER DEPOT, I PROBABLY WOULD COME-YOU KNOW," he said. "OR DO YOU THINK YOUR COUSINS WOULDN'T LIKE ME?"

"Of course they'd like you," I said, "but I don't know if you'd like them." I didn't know how to tell him that I thought he'd have a terrible time with my cousins-that if we picked him up and passed him over our heads in Sunday school, it was frightening to imagine what games my cousins might devise to play with Owen Meany. "You don't know how to ski," I told him. "Or water-ski," I added. "And I don't think you'd like the log-rolling-or the sawdust piles." I could have added, "Or kissing Hester," but I couldn't imagine Owen doing that. My God, I thought: my cousins would kill him!

"WELL, MAYBE YOUR MOTHER COULD TEACH ME HOW TO SKI. AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THE LOG-ROLLING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO, DO YOU?" he asked.

"Well, my cousins kind of make everything happen so fast," I said. "You don't always have time to say 'Yes' or 'No' to something."

"WELL, MAYBE IF YOU ASKED THEM NOT TO BE SO ROUGH WITH ME-UNTIL I GOT USED TO IT," he said. "THEY'D LISTEN TO YOU, WOULDN'T THEY?"

I could not imagine it-Owen together with my cousins! It seemed to me that they would be driven insane by the sight of him, and when he spoke-when they first encountered that voice-I could visualize their reaction only in terms of their inventing ways for Owen to be a projectile: they would make him the birdie for a badminton game; they would bind him to a single ski, launch him off the mountaintop, and race him to the bottom. They would make him sit in a salad bowl, and tow him-at high speeds-across Loveless Lake. They would bury him in sawdust and lose him; they'd never find him. Firewater would eat him.

"They're sort of hard to control-my cousins," I said. "That's the problem."

"YOU MAKE THEM SOUND LIKE WILD ANIMALS," Owen said.

"They are-kind of," I said.

"BUT YOU HAVE FUN WITH THEM," Owen said. "WOULDN'T I HAVE FUN, TOO?"

"I have fun, and I don't have fun," I told him. "I just think my cousins might be too much for you."

"YOU THINK I MIGHT BE TOO MUCH OF A WIMP FOR THEM," he said.

"I don't think you're a wimp, Owen," I said.

"BUT YOU THINK YOUR COUSINS WOULD THINK SO?" he said.

"I don't know," I said.

"MAYBE I COULD MEET THEM AT YOUR HOUSE, WHEN THEY COME FOR THANKSGIVING," he suggested. "IT'S FUNNY HOW YOU DON'T INVITE ME OVER WHEN THEY'RE STAYING HERE."

' 'My grandmother thinks there're too many kids in the house already-when they're here," I explained, but Owen sulked about it so moodily that I invited him to spend the night, which he always enjoyed. He went through this ritual of calling his father to ask if it was all right, but it was always all right with

Mr. Meany; Owen stayed at Front Street so frequently that he kept a toothbrush in my bathroom, and a pair of pajamas in my closet. And after Dan Needham gave me the armadillo, Owen grew almost as attached to the little animal-and to Dan-as I was. When Owen would sleep in the other twin bed in my room, with the night table between us, we would carefully arrange under the bedside lamp; in exact profile to both of us, the creature stared at the feet of our beds. The night-light, which was attached to one of the legs of the night table, shone upward, illuminating the armadillo's chin and the exposed nostrils of its thin snout. Owen and I would talk until we were drowsy; but in the morning, I always noticed that had been moved -its face was turned more toward Owen than to me; its profile was no longer perfect. And once when I woke up, I saw that Owen was already awake; he was staring back at the armadillo, and he was smiling. After Dan Needham's armadillo came into my life, and the first occasion for me to travel to Sawyer Depot arose, I was not surprised that Owen took this opportunity to express his concern for the armadillo's well-being.

"FROM WHAT YOU TELL ME ABOUT YOUR COUSINS," Owen said, "I DON'T THINK YOU SHOULD TAKE TO SAWYER DEPOT." It had never occurred to me to take with me, but Owen had clearly given some thought to the potential tragedy of such a journey. "YOU MIGHT FORGET IT ON THE TRAIN," he said, "OR THAT DOG OF THEIRS MIGHT CHEW ON IT. WHAT'S THE DOG'S NAME?"

"Firewater," I said.

"YES, FIREWATER-HE SOUNDS DANGEROUS TO TO ME," Owen said. "AND IF YOUR COUSINS ARE THESE RUFFIANS, LIKE YOU SAY, THERE'S NO TELLING WHAT KIND OF GAME THEY MIGHT THINK UP-THEY MIGHT RIP TO PIECES. OR LOSE IT IN THE SNOW."

"Yes, you're right," I said.

"IF THEY WANTED TO TAKE WATERSKIING, COULD YOU STOP THEM?" he asked.

"Probably not," I said.

"THAT'S JUST WHAT I THOUGHT," he said. "YOU BETTER NOT TAKE WITH YOU."

"Right," I said.

"YOU BETTER LET ME TAKE IT HOME. I CAN LOOK AFTER IT WHILE YOU'RE AWAY- IF IT'S ALL ALONE HERE, ONE OF THE MAIDS MIGHT DO SOMETHING STUPID-OR THERE COULD BE A FIRE," he said.

"I never thought of that," I said.

"WELL, IT WOULD BE VERY SAFE WITH ME," Owen said. Of course, I agreed. "AND I'VE BEEN THINKING," he added. "OVER NEXT THANKSGIVING, WHEN YOUR COUSINS ARE HERE, YOU BETTER LET ME TAKE HOME WITH ME THEN, TOO. IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE THEY'D BE TOO VIOLENT WITH IT. IT HAS A VERY DELICATE NOSE-AND THE TAIL CAN BREAK, TOO. AND I DON'T THINK IT'S A GOOD IDEA TO SHOW YOUR COUSINS THAT GAME WE PLAY WITH IN THE CLOSET WITH YOUR GRANDFATHER'S CLOTHES," he said. "IT SOUNDS TO ME LIKE THEY'D TRAMPLE ON IN THE DARK." Or else they'd throw it out the window, I thought.

"I agree," I said.

"GOOD," Owen said. "THEN IT'S ALL SETTLED: I'LL LOOK AFTER WHEN YOU'RE AWAY, AND WHEN YOUR COUSINS ARE HERE, I'LL LOOK AFTER IT, TOO-OVER NEXT THANKSGIVING, WHEN YOU'RE GOING TO INVITE ME OVER TO MEET YOUR COUSINS. OKAY?"

"Okay, Owen," I said.

"GOOD," he said; he was very pleased about it, if a trifle nervous. The first time he took home with him, he brought a box stuffed with cotton-it was such an elaborately conceived and strongly built carrying case that could have been mailed safely overseas in it. The box, Owen explained, had been used to ship some granite-carving tools-some grave-marking equipment-so it was very sturdy. Mr. Meany, in an effort to bolster the disappointing business at the quarry, was expanding his involvement in monument sales. Owen said his father resented selling some of his best pieces of granite to other granite companies that made gravestones, and charged an arm and a leg for them-according to Mr. Meany. He had opened a gruesome monument shop downtown-Meany Monuments, the store was called-and the sample gravestones in the storefront window looked not so much like samples as like actual graves that someone had built a store around.

"It's absolutely frightful," my grandmother said. "It's a cemetery in a store," she remarked indignantly, but Mr. Meany was new to monument sales; it was possible he needed just a little more time to make the store look right. Anyway, was packed in a box designed for transporting chisels-for something Owen called WEDGES AND FEATHERS-and Owen solemnly promised that no harm would corne to the diminutive beast. Apparently, Mrs. Meany was frightened by it-Owen gave his parents no forewarning that was visiting; but Owen maintained that this small shock served his mother right for going into his room uninvited. Owen's room (what little I ever saw of it) was as orderly and as untouchable as a museum. I think that is why it was so easy for me to imagine, for years, that the baseball that killed my mother was surely a resident souvenir in Owen's odd room. I will never forget the Thanksgiving vacation when I introduced Owen Meany to my reckless cousins. The day before my cousins were to arrive in Gravesend, Owen came over to Front Street to pick up the armadillo.

"They're not getting here until late tomorrow," I told him.

"WHAT IF THEY COME EARLY?" he asked. "SOMETHING COULD HAPPEN. IT'S BETTER NOT TO TAKE A CHANCE."

Owen wanted to come over to meet my cousins immediately following Thanksgiving dinner, but I thought the day after Thanksgiving would be better; I suggested that everyone always felt so stuffed after Thanksgiving dinner that it was never a very lively time.

"BUT I WAS THINKING THAT THEY MIGHT BE CALMER, RIGHT AFTER THEY HAD EATEN," Owen said. I admit, I enjoyed his nervousness. I was worried that my cousins might be in some rare, mellow condition when Owen met them, and therefore he'd think I'd just been making up stories about how wild they were-and that there was, therefore, no excuse for my never inviting him to Sawyer Depot. I wanted my cousins to like Owen, because / liked him-he was my best friend-but, at the same time, I didn't want everything to be so enjoyable that I'd have to invite Owen to Sawyer Depot the next time I went. I was sure that would be disastrous. And I was nervous that my cousins would make fun of Owen; and I confess I was nervous that Owen would embarrass me-I am ashamed of feeling that, to this day. Anyway, both Owen and I were nervous. We talked on the phone in whispers Thanksgiving night.

"ARE THEY ESPECIALLY WILD?" he asked me.

"Not especially," I said.

"WHAT TIME DO THEY GET UP? WHAT TIME TOMORROW SHOULD I COME OVER?" he asked.

"The boys get up early," I said, "but Hester sleeps a little later-or at least she stays in her room longer."

"NOAH IS THE OLDEST?" Owen said, although he had checked these statistics with me a hundred times.

"Yes," I said.

"AND SIMON IS THE NEXT OLDEST, ALTHOUGH HE'S JUST AS BIG AS NOAH-AND EVEN A LITTLE WILDER?" Owen said.

"Yes, yes," I said.

"AND HESTER'S THE YOUNGEST BUT SHE'S BIGGER THAN YOU," he said. "AND SHE'S PRETTY, BUT NOT THAT PRETTY, RIGHT?"

"Right," I said. Hester just missed the Eastman good looks. It was an especially masculine good looks that Noah and Simon got from my Uncle Alfred-broad shoulders, big bones, a heavy jaw-and from my Aunt Martha the boys got their blondness, and their aristocracy. But the broad shoulders, the big bones, and the heavy jaw-these were less attractive on Hester, who did not receive either my aunt's blondness or her aristocracy. Hester was as dark and hairy as Uncle Alfred-even including his bushy eyebrows, which were actually one solid eyebrow without a gap above the bridge of the nose-and she had Uncle Alfred's big hands. Hester's hands looked like paws. Yet Hester had sex appeal, in the manner-in those days-that tough girls were also sexy girls. She had a large, athletic body, and as a teenager she would have to straggle with her weight; but she had clear skin, she had solid curves; her mouth was aggressive, flashing lots of healthy teeth, and her eyes were taunting, with a dangerous-looking intelligence. Her hair was wild and thick.

"I have this friend," I told Hester that evening. I thought I would begin with her, and try to win her over-and then tell Noah and Simon about Owen; but even though I was speaking

quietly to Hester and I thought that Noah and Simon were engaged in finding a lost station on the radio, the boys heard me and were instantly curious.

"What friend?" Noah said.

"Well, he's my best friend," I said cautiously, "and he wants to meet all of you."

"Fine, great-so where is he, and what's his name?" Simon said.

"Owen Meany," I said as straightforwardly as possible.

"Who?" Noah said; the three of them laughed.

"What a wimp name!" Simon said.

"What's wrong with him?" Hester asked me.

' 'Nothing's wrong with him,'' I said, a little too defensively. "He's rather small."

"Rather small," Noah repeated, sounding very British.

"Rather a wimp, is he?" said Simon, imitating his brother.

"No, he's not a wimp," I said. "He's just small. And he has a funny voice," I blurted out.

"A funny voice!" Noah said in a funny voice.

"A funny voice?" said Simon in a different funny voice.

"So he's a little guy with a funny voice," Hester said. "So what? So what's wrong with him?"

"Nothing!" I repeated.

"Why should anything be wrong with him, Hester?" Noah asked her.

"Hester probably wants to molest him," Simon said.

"Shut up, Simon," Hester said.

"Both of you shut up," Noah said. "I want to know why Hester thinks there's something wrong with everybody."

"There's something wrong with all of your friends, Noah," Hester said. "And every friend of Simon's," she added. "I'll just bet there's something wrong with Johnny's friends, too."

"I suppose there's nothing wrong with your friends," Noah said to his sister.

'Hester doesn't have any friends!" Simon said.

'Shut up!" Hester said.

'I wonder why?" Noah said.

'Shut up!" Hester said.

'Well, there's nothing wrong with Owen," I said. "Except he

s small, and his voice is a little different."

'He sounds like fun," Noah said pleasantly. 'Hey," Simon said, patting me on the back. "If he's your friend, don't worry-we'll be nice to him."

"Hey," Noah said, patting me on the back, too. "Don't worry. We'll all have fun."

Hester shrugged. "We'll see," she said. I had not kissed her since Easter. In my summer visit to Sawyer Depot, we had been outdoors every waking minute and there'd been no suggestion to play "Last One Through the House Has to Kiss Hester." I doubted we'd get to play that game over Thanksgiving, either, because my grandmother did not allow racing all over the house at Front Street. So maybe I'll have to wait until Christmas, I thought.

"Maybe your friend would like to kiss Hester," Simon said.

"/ decide who kisses me," Hester said.

"Whoa!" Noah said.

"I think Owen will be a little timid around all of you," I ventured.

"You're saying he wouldn't like to kiss me?" Hester asked.

"I'm just saying he might be a little shy-around all of you," I said.

"You like kissing me," Hester said.

"I don't," I lied.

"You do," she said.

"Whoa!" said Noah.

"There's no stopping Hester the Molester!" Simon said.

"Shut up!" Hester said. And so the stage was set for Owen Meany. That day after Thanksgiving, my cousins and I were making so much noise up in the attic that we didn't hear Owen Meany creep up the attic stairs and open the trapdoor. I can imagine what Owen was thinking; he was probably waiting to be noticed so that he wouldn't have to announce himself-so that the very first thing my cousins would know about him wouldn't be that voice. On the other hand, the sight of how small and peculiar he was might have been an equal shock to my cousins. Owen must have been weighing these two ways of introducing himself: whether to speak up, which was always startling, or whether to wait until one of them saw him, which might be more than startling. Owen told me later that he just stood by the trapdoor-which he had closed loudly, on purpose, hoping that the door would get our attention. But we didn't notice the trapdoor. Simon had been pumping the foot pedals of the sewing machine so vigorously that the needle and bobbin were a blur

of activity, and Noah had managed to shove Hester's arm too close to the plunging needle and thread, so that the sleeve of Hester's blouse had been stitched to the piece of sample cloth she'd been sewing, and it was necessary for her to take her blouse off-in order to free herself from the machine, which Simon, insanely, refused to stop pedaling. While Owen was watching us, Noah was whacking Simon about his ears, to make him stop with the foot pedals, and Hester was standing in her T-shirt, tensed and flushed, wailing about her only white blouse, from which she was trying to extract a very random pattern of purple thread. And I was saying that if we didn't stop making such a racket, we could expect a ferocious lecture from Grandmother-regarding the resale value of her antique sewing machine. All this time, Owen Meany was standing by the trapdoor, observing us-alternately getting up the nerve to introduce himself, and deciding to bolt for home before any of us noticed that he was there. At that moment, my cousins must have seemed even worse than his worst dreams about them. It was shocking how Simon loved to be beaten; I never saw a boy whose best defense against the beating routinely administered by an older brother was to adore being beaten. Just as much as he loved to roll down mountains and to be flung off sawdust piles and to ski so wildly that he struck glancing blows to trees, Simon thrived under a hail of Noah's punches. It was almost always necessary for Noah to draw blood before Simon would beg for mercy-and if blood was drawn, somehow Simon had won; the shame was Noah's then. Now Simon appeared committed to pedaling the sewing machine into destruction-both hands gripping the taWetop, his eyes squinted shut against Noah's pounding fists, his knees pumping as furiously as if he were pedaling a bicycle in too-low a gear down a steep hill. The savagery with which Noah hit his brother could easily have misled any visitor regarding Noah's truly relaxed disposition and steadily noble character; Noah had learned that striking his brother was a workout requiring patience, deliberation, and strategy-it was no good giving Simon a bloody nose in a hurry; better to hit him where it hurt, but where he didn't bleed easily; better to wear him down. But I suspect that Hester must have impressed Owen Meany most of all. In her T-shirt, there was little doubt that she would one day have an impressive bosom; its early blossoming was as apparent as her manly biceps. And the way she tore the thread out of her damaged blouse with her teeth-snarling and cursing in the process, as if she were eating her blouse-must have demonstrated to Owen the full potential of Hester's dangerous mouth; at that moment, her basic rapaciousness was quite generously displayed. Naturally, my pleas regarding the inevitable, grandmotherly reprimand were not only unheeded; they went as unnoticed as Owen Meany, who stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the sun from the attic skylight shining through his protrusive ears, which were a glowing pink-the sunlight so bright that the tiny veins and blood vessels in his ears appeared to be illuminated from within. The powerful morning sun struck Owen's head from above, and from a little behind him, so that the light itself seemed to be presenting him. In exasperation with my unresponsive cousins, I looked up from the sewing machine and saw Owen standing there. With his hands clasped behind his back, he looked as armless as Watahantowet, and in that blaze of sunlight he looked like a gnome plucked fresh from a fire, with his ears still aflame. I drew in my breath, and Hester-with her raging mouth full of purple thread-looked up at that instant and saw Owen, too. She screamed.

"I didn't think he was human," she told me later. And from that moment of his introduction to my cousins, I would frequently consider the issue of exactly how human Owen Meany was; there is no doubt that, in the dazzling configurations of the sun that poured through the attic skylight, he looked like a descending angel-a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways. When Hester screamed, she frightened Owen so much that he screamed back at her-and when Owen screamed, my cousins were not only introduced to his rare voice; their movements were suddenly arrested. Except for the hairs on the backs of their necks, they froze-as they would if they'd heard a cat being slowly run over by a car. And from deep in a distant part of the great house, my grandmother spoke out: "Merciful Heavens, it's that boy again!"

I was trying to catch my breath, to say, "This is my best friend, the one I told you about," because I had never seen my cousins gape at anyone with such open mouths-and, in Hester's case, a mouth from which spilled much purple thread-but Owen was quicker.

"WELL, IT SEEMS I HAVE INTERRUPTED WHAT-

EVER GAME THAT WAS YOU WERE PLAYING," Owen said. "MY NAME IS OWEN MEANY AND I'M YOUR COUSIN'S BEST FRIEND. PERHAPS HE'S TOLD YOU ALL ABOUT ME. I'VE CERTAINLY HEARD ALL ABOUT YOU. YOU MUST BE NOAH, THE OLDEST," Owen said; he held out his hand to Noah, who shook it mutely. "AND OF COURSE YOU'RE SIMON, THE NEXT OLDEST-BUT YOU'RE JUST AS BIG AND EVEN A LITTLE WILDER THAN YOUR BROTHER. HELLO, SIMON," Owen said, holding out his hand to Simon, who was panting and sweating from his furious journey on the sewing machine, but who quickly took Owen's hand and shook it. "AND OF COURSE YOU'RE HESTER," Owen said, his eyes averted. "I'VE HEARD A LOT ABOUT YOU, AND YOU'RE JUST AS PRETTY AS I EXPECTED."

"Thank you," Hester mumbled, pulling thread out of her mouth, tucking her T-shirt into her blue jeans. My cousins stared at him, and I feared the worst; but I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. My cousins were both small-towners and outsiders; they had not grown up with Owen Meany, who was so strange to them that he inspired awe-yet they were no more likely to fall upon him, or to devise ways to torture him, than it was likely for a herd of cattle to attack a cat. And in addition to the brightness of the sun that shone upon him, Owen's face was blood-red-throbbing, I presumed, from his riding his bike into town; for a late November bike ride down Maiden Hill, given the prevailing wind off the Squamscott, was bitter cold. And even before Thanksgiving, the weather had been cold enough to freeze the freshwater part of the river; there was black ice all the way from Gravesend to Kensington Corners.

"WELL, I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT WHAT WE COULD DO," Owen announced, and my unruly cousins gave him their complete attention. "THE RIVER IS FROZEN, SO THE SKATING IS VERY GOOD, AND I KNOW YOU ENJOY VERY ACTIVE THINGS LIKE THAT-THAT YOU ENJOY THINGS LIKE SPEED AND DANGER AND COLD WEATHER. SO SKATING IS ONE IDEA," he said, "AND EVEN THOUGH THE RIVER IS FROZEN, I'M SURE THERE ARE CRACKS SOMEWHERE, AND EVEN The Armodiifo PLACES WHERE THERE ARE HOLES OF OPEN WATER-I FELL IN ONE LAST YEAR. I'M NOT SUCH A GOOD SKATER, BUT I'D BE HAPPY TO GO WITH YOU, EVEN THOUGH I'M GETTING OVER A COLD, SO I SUPPOSE I SHOULDN'T BE OUTSIDE FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME IN THIS WEATHER."

"No!" Hester said. "If you're getting over a cold, you should stay inside. We should play indoors. We don't have to go skating. We go skating all the time."

"Yes!" Noah agreed. "We should do something indoors, if Owen's got a cold."

"Indoors is best!" Simon said. "Owen should get over his cold." Perhaps my cousins were all relieved to hear that Owen was "getting over a cold" because they thought this might partially explain the hypnotic awfulness of Owen's voice; I could have told them that Owen's voice was uninfluenced by his having a cold-and his "getting over a cold" was news to me-but I was so relieved to see my cousins behaving respectfully that I had no desire to undermine Owen's effect on them.

"WELL, I'VE BEEN THINKING THAT INDOORS WOULD BE BEST, TOO," Owen said, "AND UNFORTUNATELY I REALLY CAN'T INVITE YOU TO MY HOUSE, BECAUSE THERE'S REALLY NOTHING TO DO IN THE HOUSE, AND BECAUSE MY FATHER RUNS A GRANITE QUARRY, HE'S RATHER STRICT ABOUT THE EQUIPMENT AND THE QUARRIES THEMSELVES, WHICH ARE OUTDOORS, ANYWAY. INDOORS, AT MY HOUSE, WOULD NOT BE A LOT OF FUN BECAUSE MY PARENTS ARE RATHER STRANGE ABOUT CHILDREN."

"That's no problem!" Noah blurted.

"Don't worry!" Simon said. "There's lots to do here, in this house."

"Everyone's parents are strange!" Hester told Owen reassuringly, but I couldn't think of anything to say. In the years I'd known Owen, the issue of how strange his parents were-not only "about children"-had never been discussed between us. It seemed, rather, the accepted knowledge of the town, not to be mentioned-except in passing, or in parentheses, or as an aside among intimates.

"WELL, I'VE BEEN THINKING THAT WE COULD PUT ON YOUR GRANDFATHER'S CLOTHES-YOU'VE TOLD YOUR COUSINS ABOUT THE CLOTHES?" Owen

asked me; but I hadn't. I thought they would think that dressing up in Grandfather's clothes was either baby play, or morbid, or both; or that they would surely destroy the clothes, discovering that merely dressing up in them was insufficiently violent -therefore leading them to a game, the object of which was to rip the clothes off each other; whoever was naked last won.

"Grandfather's clothes?" Noah said with unaccustomed reverence. Simon shivered; Hester nervously plucked purple thread from here and there. And Owen Meany-at the moment, our leader-said, "WELL, THERE'S ALSO THE CLOSET WHERE THE CLOTHES ARE KEPT. IT CAN BE SCARY IN THERE, IN THE DARK, AND WE COULD PLAY SOME KIND OF GAME WHERE ONE OF US HIDES AND ONE OF US HAS TO FIND WHOEVER IT IS-IN THE DARK. WELL," Owen said, "THAT COULD BE INTERESTING."

"Yes! Hiding in the dark!" Simon said.

"I didn't know those were Grandfather's clothes in there," Hester said.

"Do you think the clothes are haunted, Hester?" Noah asked.

"Shut up," Hester said.

"Let Hester hide in there, in the dark," Simon said, "and we'll take turns trying to find her."

"I don't want you pawing around in the dark for me," Hester said.

"Hester, we just have to find you before you find us," Noah said.

"No, it's who touches who first!" Simon said.

"You touch me, I'll pull your doink, Simon," Hester said.

"Whoa!" Noah said. "That's it! That's the game! We got to find Hester before she pulls our doinks.''

"Hester the Molester!" Simon said predictably.

"Only if I'm allowed to get used to the dark!" Hester said. "I get to have an advantage! I'm allowed to get used to the dark-and whoever's looking for me comes into the closet with no chance to get used to how dark it is."

"THERE'S A FLASHLIGHT," Owen Meany said nervously. "MAYBE WE COULD USE A FLASHLIGHT, BECAUSE IT WOULD STILL BE PRETTY DARK."

"No flashlight!" Hester said.

"No!" Simon said. "Whoever goes into the closet after Hester gets the flashlight shined in his face before he goes in-so he's blind, so he's the opposite of being used to the dark!"

"Good idea!" Noah said.

"I get as long as I need to get myself hidden," Hester said. "And to get used to the dark."

"No!" Simon said. "We'll count to twenty."

"A hundred!" Hester said.

"Fifty," Noah said; so it was fifty. Simon started counting, but Hester hit him.

"You've got to wait till I'm completely inside the closet," she said. As she moved toward the closet, she had to brush past Owen Meany, and a curious thing happened to her when she was next to him. Hester stood still and put her hand out to Owen-her big paw, uncharacteristically tentative and gentle, reached out and touched his face, as if there were a force in Owen's immediate vicinity that compelled the passerby to touch him. Hester touched him, and she smiled-Owen's little face was level with those nubbins of Hester's early bosom, which appeared to be implanted under her T-shirt. Owen was quite accustomed to people feeling compelled to touch him, but in Hester's case he retreated a trifle anxiously from her touch-though not so much that she was offended. Then Hester went clomping into the closet, stumbling over the shoes, and we heard her rustling among the clothes, and the hangers squeaking on the metal rods, and what sounded like the hatboxes sliding over the overhead shelves-once she said, "Shit!" And another time, "What's that?" By the time the noises quieted down, we had Simon completely dazed under the flashlight's close-up glare; Simon was eager to be first, and by the time we shoved him into the closet, he was certifiably blind-even if he'd been trying to walk around in the daylight. No sooner was Simon inside the closet, and we'd closed the door behind him, than we heard Hester attack him; she must have grabbed his "doink" harder than she'd meant to, because he howled with more pain than surprise, and there were tears in his eyes, and he was still doubled over and holding fast to his private parts when he tumbled out of the closet and rolled upon the attic floor.

"Jesus, Hester!" Noah said. "What did you do to him?"

"I didn't mean to," came her voice from the dark closet.

"No fair pulling the doink and the balls!" Simon cried, still doubled up on the floor.

"I didn't mean to," she repeated sweetly.

"You bitch!" Simon said.

"You're always rough with me, Simon," Hester said.

"You can't be rough with balls and doinksV Noah said. But Hester was not talking; we could hear her positioning herself for her next attack, and Noah whispered to Owen and me that since there were two doors to the closet, we should surprise Hester by entering from the other door.

"WHO IS WE?" Owen whispered. Noah pointed to him, silently, and I shone the flashlight into Owen's wide and darting eyes, which gave his face the sudden anxiety of a cornered mouse.

"No fair grabbing so hard, Hester!" Noah called, but Hester didn't answer.

"SHE'S JUST TRYING TO CONCEAL HER HIDING PLACE," Owen whispered-to reassure himself. Then Noah and I flung Owen into the closet through the other door: the closet was L-shaped, and by Owen's entering on the short arm of the L, Noah and I figured that he would not encounter Hester before the first corner-and only then if Hester managed to move, because her hiding place would surely be nearer the top of the L.

"No fair using the other door!" Hester promptly called, which Noah and I felt was further to Owen's advantage, since she must have given away her position in the closet-at least, to some general degree. Then there was silence. I knew what Owen was doing: he was hoping that his eyes would grow used to the dark before Hester found him, and he wasn't going to begin to move-to try to find her-until he could see a little.

"What in hell's going on in there?" Simon asked, but there was no sound. Then we detected the occasional bumping of one of Grandfather's hundreds of shoes. Then silence. Then another slight movement of shoes. As I learned later, Owen was crawling on all fours, because he most feared-and expected-an attack from one of the large, overhead shelves. He had no way of knowing that Hester had stretched herself out on the floor of the closet, and that she had covered herself with one of Grandfather's topcoats, over which she'd positioned the usual number of shoes. She lay motionless, and-except for her head and her hands-invisible. But her head was pointed the wrong way; that is, she had to roll her eyes up into the top of her head and watch Owen Meany approaching her by staring at him upside down, looking over her own forehead and her considerable head of hair. What Owen touched first, as he approached her on all fours, was that live and kinky tangle of Hester's hair, which suddenly moved under his little hand-and Hester's arms reached up over her head, seizing Owen around his waist. To her credit, Hester never had any intention of grabbing Owen's "doink"; but finding it so easy to hold Owen around the waist, Hester decided to run her hands up his ribs and tickle him. Owen looked extremely susceptible to tickling, which he was, and Hester's gesture was of the friendliest of intentions-especially for Hester-but the combination of putting his hand on live hair, in the dark, coupled with being tickled by a girl who, Owen thought, was merely tickling him en route to grabbing his doink, was too much for him; he wet his pants. The instant recognition of Owen's accident surprised Hester so much that she dropped him. He fell on top of her-and he wriggled free of her, and out of the closet, and through the trapdoor and down the stairs. Owen ran through the house so fast and noiselessly that even my grandmother failed to notice him; and if my mother hadn't happened to be looking out the kitchen window, she would not have seen him-with his jacket unzipped, and his boots unlaced, and his hat on crooked-mounting his bicycle with some difficulty in the icy wind.

"Jesus, Hester!" Noah said. "What did you do to him?"

"I know what she did to him!" Simon said.

"It wasn't that," Hester said simply. "I just tickled him, and he wet his pants." She did not report this to mock Owen, and-as a testimony to my cousins' basically decent natures-the news was not greeted with their usual rowdiness, which I associated with Sawyer Depot as firmly as various forms of skiing and collision.

"The poor little guy]" Simon said.

"I didn't mean to," Hester said. My mother called to me and I had to go tell her what had happened to Owen, whereupon she made me put on my outdoor clothes while she started the car. I thought I knew the route Owen would take home, but he must have been pedaling very hard because we did not overtake him by the Gas Works on Water Street, and when we passed Dewey Street without

sighting him-and there was no sign of him at Salem Street, either-I began to think he had taken the Swasey Parkway out of town. And so we doubled back, along the Squamscott, but he wasn't there. We finally found him, already out of town, laboring up Maiden Hill; we slowed down when we saw his red-and-black wool hunter's jacket and the matching checkered cap with the earflaps protruding, and by the time we pulled alongside him, he had run out of steam and had gotten off to walk his bicycle. He knew it was us without looking at us but he wouldn't stop walking-so my mother drove slowly beside him, and rolled down the window.

"IT WAS AN ACCIDENT, I JUST GOT TOO EXCITED, I HAD TOO MUCH ORANGE JUICE FOR BREAKFAST-AND YOU KNOW I CAN'T STAND BEING TICKLED," Owen said. "NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT TICKLING."

"Please don't go home, Owen," my mother said.

"Everything's all right," I told him. "My cousins are very sorry."

"I PEED ON HESTER!" Owen said. "AND I'M GOING TO GET IN TROUBLE AT HOME," he said-still walking his bike at a good pace. "MY FATHER GETS MAD ABOUT PEEING. HE SAYS I'M NOT A BABY ANYMORE, BUT SOMETIMES I GET EXCITED."

"Owen, I'll wash and dry your clothes at our house," my mother told him. "You can wear something of Johnny's while yours are drying."

"NOTHING OF JOHNNY'S WILL FIT ME," Owen said. "AND I HAVE TO TAKE A BATH."

"You can take a bath at our house, Owen," I told him. "Please come back."

"I have some outgrown things of Johnny's that will fit you, Owen," my mother said.

"BABY CLOTHES, I SUPPOSE," Owen said, but he stopped walking; he leaned his head on his bike's handlebars.

"Please get in the car, Owen," my mother said. I got out and helped him put his bicycle in the back, and then he slid into the front seat, between my mother and me.

"I WANTED TO MAKE A GOOD IMPRESSION BECAUSE I WANTED TO GO TO SAWYER DEPOT," he said. "NOW YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME."

I found it incredible that he still wanted to go, but my mother said, "Owen, you can come with us to Sawyer Depot, anytime."

"JOHNNY DOESN'T WANT ME TO COME," he told Mother-as if I weren't there in the car with them.

"It's not that, Owen," I said. "It's that I thought my cousins would be too much for you." And on the evidence of him wetting his pants, I did not say, it struck me that my cousins were too much for him. "That was a very mild game for my cousins, Owen," I added.

"DO YOU THINK I CARE WHAT THEY DO TO ME?" he shouted; he stamped his little foot on the drive-shaft hump.

"DO YOU THINK I CARE IF THEY START AN AVALANCHE WITH ME?" he screamed. "WHEN DO I GET TO GO ANYWHERE! IF I DIDN'T GO TO SCHOOL OR TO CHURCH OR TO EIGHTY FRONT STREET, I'D NEVER GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" he cried. "IF YOUR MOTHER DIDN'T TAKE ME TO THE BEACH, I'D NEVER GET OUT OF TOWN. AND I'VE NEVER BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINS," he said. "I'VE NEVER EVEN BEEN ON A TRAIN! DON'T YOU THINK I MIGHT LIKE GOING ON A TRAIN-TO THE MOUNTAINS?" he yelled. My mother stopped the car and hugged him, and kissed him, and told him he was always welcome to come with us, anywhere we went; and I rather awkwardly put my arm around him, and we just sat that way in the car, until he had composed himself sufficiently for his return to Front Street, where he marched in the back door, past Lydia's room and the maids fussing in the kitchen, up the back stairs past the maids' rooms, to my room and my bathroom, where he closed himself in and drew a deep bath. He handed me his sodden clothes, and I brought the clothes to the maids, who began their work on them. My mother knocked on the bathroom door, and, looking the other way, she extended her arm into the room, where Owen took a stack of my outgrown clothes from her-they were not baby clothes, as he had feared; they were just extremely small clothes.

"What shall we do with him?" Hester asked while we were waiting for Owen to join us in the upstairs den-or so it had been called, "the den," when my grandfather was alive; it was a children's room whenever my cousins visited.

"We'll do whatever he wants," Noah said.

"That's what we did the last time!" Simon said.

"Not quite," Hester said.

"WELL, I'VE BEEN THINKING," Owen said when he walked into the den-even pinker than usual; he was spanking clean, as they say, with his hair slicked back. In his stocking feet, he was slipping a little on the hardwood floor; and when he reached the old Oriental, he stood with one foot balanced on top of the other, twisting his hips back and forth as he talked-his hands, like butterflies, flitting up and down between his waist and his shoulders. "I APOLOGIZE FOR BECOMING OVEREXCITED. I THINK I KNOW A GAME THAT WOULD NOT BE QUITE AS EXCITING FOR ME, BUT AT THE SAME TIME I THINK IT WOULD NOT BE BORING FOR YOU," he said. "YOU SEE, ONE OF YOU GETS TO HIDE ME- SOMEWHERE, IT COULD BE ANYWHERE-AND THE OTHERS HAVE TO FIND ME. AND WHOEVER CAN FIND A PLACE TO HIDE ME THAT TAKES THE LONGEST TIME FOR THE OTHERS TO FIND ME-WHOEVER THAT IS WINS. YOU SEE, IT'S PRETTY EASY TO FIND PLACES IN THIS HOUSE TO HIDE ME-BECAUSE THIS HOUSE IS HUGE AND I'M SMALL," Owen added.

"I go first," Hester said. "I get to hide him first." No one argued; wherever she hid him, we never found him. Noah and Simon and I-we thought it would be easy to find him. I knew every inch of my grandmother's house, and Noah and Simon knew almost everything about Hester's diabolical mind; but we couldn't find him. Hester stretched out on the couch in the den, looking at old issues of Life magazine, growing more and more content as we searched and searched, and darkness fell; I even expressed to Hester my concern that she had put Owen somewhere where he might have run out of air, or-as the hours dragged on-where he would suffer severe cramps from having to maintain an uncomfortable position. But Hester dismissed these concerns with a wave of her hand, and when it was suppertime, we had to give up; Hester made us wait in the downstairs front hall, and she went and got Owen, who was very happy and walking without a limp, and breathing without difficulty-although his hair looked slept on. He stayed for supper, and he told me after we'd eaten that he wouldn't mind staying overnight, too-my mother invited him to stay, because (she said) his clothes hadn't completely dried. And although I asked him-"Where'd she hide you? Just give me a clue! Tell me what part of the house, just tell me which floor\"-he wouldn't disclose his triumph. He was wide awake, and in no mood to sleep, and he was irritatingly philosophic regarding the true character of my cousins, whom he said I had failed to present fairly to him.

"YOU HAVE REALLY MISJUDGED THEM," he lectured me. "PERHAPS WHAT YOU CALL THEIR WILD-NESS IS JUST A MATTER OF LACK OF DIRECTION. SOMEONE HAS TO GIVE ANY GROUP OF PEOPLE DIRECTION, YOU KNOW." I lay there thinking I couldn't wait until he came to Sawyer Depot, and my cousins got him on skis and simply pointed him downhill; that might shut him up about providing adequate "direction." But there was no turning him off; he just babbled on and on. I got drowsy, and turned my back to him, and therefore I was confused when I heard him say, "IT'S HARD TO GO TO SLEEP WITHOUT IT, ONCE YOU GET USED TO IT- ISN'T IT?"

"Without what?" I asked him. "Used to what, Owen?"

"THE ARMADILLO," he said. And so that day after Thanksgiving, when Owen Meany met my cousins, provided me with two very powerful images of Owen-especially on the night I tried to get to sleep after had killed my mother. I lay in bed knowing that Owen would be thinking about my mother, too, and that he would be thinking not only of me but also of Dan Needham-of how much we both would miss her-and if Owen was thinking of Dan, I knew that he would be thinking about the armadillo, too. It was also important: that day when my mother and I chased after Owen in the car-and I saw the posture of his body jerking on his bicycle, trying to pedal up Maiden Hill; and I saw how he faltered, and had to get off the bike and walk it the rest of the way. That day provided me with a cold-weather picture of how Owen must have looked on that warm, summer evening when he was struggling home after the Little League game-with his baseball uniform plastered to his back. What was he going to tell his parents about the game? It would take years for me to remember the decision regarding whether I should spend the night after that fatal game with Dan Needham, in the apartment that he and my mother had moved into, with me, after they'd married-it was a faculty apartment in one of the academy dormitories-or whether I would be more comfortable spending that terrible night back in my old room in my grandmother's house at

Front Street. So many of the details surrounding that game would take years to remember! Anyway, Dan Needham and my grandmother agreed that it would be better for me to spend the night at Front Street, and so-in addition to the disorientation of waking up the next morning, after very little sleep, and gradually realizing that the dream of my mother being killed by a baseball that Owen Meany hit was not a dream-I faced the further disorientation of not immediately knowing where I was. It was very much like waking up as a kind of traveler in science fiction, someone who had traveled "back in time"-because I had grown used to waking up in my room in Dan Needham's apartment. And as if all this weren't sufficiently bewildering, there was a noise I had never before associated with Front Street; it was a noise in the driveway, and my bedroom windows didn't face the driveway, so I had to get out of bed and leave my room to see what the noise was. I was pretty sure I knew. I had heard that noise many times at the Meany Granite Quarry; it was the unmistakable, very lowest gear of the huge, flatbed hauler-the truck Mr. Meany used to carry the granite slabs, the curbstones and cornerstones, and the monuments. And sure enough, the Meany Granite Company truck was in my grandmother's driveway-taking up the whole driveway-and it was loaded with granite and gravestones. I could easily imagine my grandmother's indignation-if she was up, and saw the truck there. I could just hear her saying, "How incredibly tasteless of that man! My daughter not dead a day and what is he doing-giving us a tombstone? I suppose he's already carved the letters!" That is actually what / thought. But Mr. Meany did not get out of the cab of his track. It was Owen who got out on the passenger side, and he walked around to the rear of the flatbed and removed several large cartons from the rest of the load; the cartons were Clearly not full of granite or Owen would not have been able to lift them off by himself. But he managed this, and brought all the cartons to the step by the back door, where I was sure he was going to ring the bell. I could still hear his voice saying "I'M SORRY!"-while my head was hidden under Mr. Chicker-ing's warm-up jacket-and as much as I wanted to see Owen, I knew I would burst into tears as soon as he spoke, or as soon as I had to speak to him. And therefore I was relieved when he didn't ring the bell; he left the cartons at the back door and ran quickly to the cab, and Mr. Meany drove the granite truck out of the driveway, still in the very lowest gear. In the cartons were all of Owen's baseball cards, his entire collection. My grandmother was appalled, but for several years she didn't understand Owen or appreciate him; to her, he was "that boy," or "that little guy," or "that voice." I knew the baseball cards were Owen's favorite things, they were what amounted to his treasure-I could instantly identify with how everything connected to the game of baseball had changed for him, as it had changed for me (although I'd never loved the game as Owen had loved it). I knew without speaking to Owen that neither of us would ever play Little League ball again, and that there was some necessary ritual ahead of us both-wherein we would need to throw away our bats and gloves and uniforms, and every stray baseball there was to be found around our houses and yards (except for that baseball, which I suspected Owen had relegated to a museum-piece status). But I needed to talk to Dan Needham about the baseball cards, because they were Owen's most prized possessions -indeed, his only prized possessions-and since my mother's accident had made baseball a game of death, what did Owen want me to do with his baseball cards? Did they merely represent how he was washing his hands of the great American pastime, or did he want me to assuage my grief by indulging in the pleasure I would derive from burning all those baseball cards? On that day, it would have been a pleasure to burn them.

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

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

"What?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There must be no Soviet beachhead in Central America," President Reagan said. He also insisted that he would not sacrifice his proposed nuclear missiles in space-his beloved Star Wars plan-to a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union. He even said that "a key element of the U.S.-Soviet agenda" is "more responsible Soviet conduct around the world''-as if the United States were a bastion of' 'responsible conduct around the world"! I believe that President Reagan can say these things only because he knows that the American people will never hold him accountable for what he says; it is history that holds you accountable, and I've already expressed my opinion that Americans are not big on history. How many of them even remember their own, recent history? Was twenty years ago so long ago for Americans? Do they remember October , ? Fifty thousand antiwar demonstrators were in Washington; I was there; that was the ' 'March on the Pentagon''-remember? And two years later-in October of '-there were fifty thousand people in Washington again; they were carrying flashlights, they were asking for peace. There were a hundred thousand asking for peace in Boston Common; there were two hundred fifty thousand in New York. Ronald Reagan had not yet numbed the United States, but he had succeeded in putting California to sleep; he described the Vietnam protests as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." As president, he still didn't know who the enemy was. I now believe that Owen Meany always knew; he knew everything. We were seniors at Gravesend Academy in February of ; we watched a lot of TV at Front Street. President Kennedy said that U.S. advisers in Vietnam would return fire if fired upon.

"I HOPE WE'RE ADVISING THE RIGHT GUYS," Owen Meany said. That spring, less than a month before Gravesend Academy's graduation exercises, the TV showed us a map of Thailand; five thousand U.S. Marines and fifty jet fighters were being sent there-"in response to Communist expansion in Laos," President Kennedy said.

"I HOPE WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING," said Owen Meany. In the summer of ', the summer following our first year at the university, the Buddhists in Vietnam were demonstrating; there were revolts. Owen and I saw our first self-immolation-on television. South Vietnamese government forces, led by Ngo Dinh Diem-the elected president- attacked several Buddhist pagodas; that was in August. In May, Diem's brother-Ngo Dinh Nhu, who ran the secret police force-had broken up a Buddhist celebration by killing eight children and one woman.

"DIEM IS A CATHOLIC," Owen Meany announced. "WHAT'S A CATHOLIC DOING AS PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY OF BUDDHISTS?"

That was the summer that Henry Cabot Lodge became the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam; that was the summer that Lodge received a State Department cable advising him that the United States would "no longer tolerate" Ngo Dinh Nhu's "influence" on President Diem's regime. In two months, a military coup toppled Diem's South Vietnamese government; the next day, Diem and his brother, Nhu, were assassinated.

"IT LOOKS LIKE WE'VE BEEN ADVISING THE WRONG GUYS," Owen said. And the next summer, when we saw on TV the North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Tonkin Gulf-within two days, they attacked two U.S. destroyers-Owen said: "DO WE THINK THIS IS A MOVIE?"

President Johnson asked Congress to give him the power to "take all necessary measures to repel an armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was approved by the House by a unanimous vote of to ; it passed the Senate by a vote of to . But Owen Meany asked my grandmother's television set a question: "DOES THAT MEAN THE PRESIDENT CAN DECLARE A WAR WITHOUT DECLARING IT?"

That New Year's Eve-I remember that Hester drank too much; she was throwing up-there were barely more than twenty thousand U.S. military personnel in Vietnam, and only a dozen (or so) had been killed. By the time the Congress put an end to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution-in May of -there had been more than half a million U.S. military personnel in Vietnam; and more than forty thousand of them were dead. As early as , Owen Meany detected a problem of strategy. In March, the U.S. Air Force began Operation Rolling Thunder-to strike targets in North Vietnam; to stop the flow of supplies to the South-and the first American combat troops landed in Vietnam.

"THERE'S NO END TO THIS," Owen said. "THERE'S NO GOOD WAY TO END IT."

On Christmas Day, President Johnson suspended Operation Rolling Thunder; he stopped the bombing. In a month, the bombing began again, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened their televised hearings on the war. That was when my grandmother started paying attention. In the fall of , Operation Rolling Thunder was said to be "closing in on Hanoi"; but Owen Meany said, "I THINK HANOI CAN HANDLE IT."

Do you remember Operation Tiger Hound? How about Operation Masher/WhiteWing/Than Phong II? That one produced , "known enemy casualties." And then there was Operation Paul Revere/Than Phong -not quite so successful, only "known enemy casualties." And how about Operation Maeng Ho ? There were , "known enemy casualties."

By New Year's Eve, , a total of , U.S. military had been killed in action; it was Owen Meany who remembered that was more casualties than the enemy had suffered in Operation Maeng Ho.

"How do you remember such things, Owen?" my grandmother asked him. From Saigon, General Westmoreland was asking for "fresh manpower"; Owen remembered that, too. According to the State Department, according to Dean Rusk-remember him?-we were "winning a war of attrition."

"THAT'S NOT THE KIND OF WAR WE WIN," said Owen Meany. By the end of ', there were five hundred thousand U.S.

military personnel in Vietnam. That was when General West-moreland said, "We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view."

"WHAT END?" Owen Meany asked the general. "WHAT HAPPENED TO THE 'FRESH MANPOWER'? REMEMBER THE 'FRESH MANPOWER'?"

I now believe that Owen remembered everything; a part of knowing everything is remembering everything. Do you remember the Tet Offensive? That was in January of '; "Tet" is a traditional Vietnamese holiday-the equivalent of our Christmas and New Year's-and it was usual, during the Vietnam War, to observe a cease-fire for the holiday season. But that year the North Vietnamese attacked more than a hundred South Vietnamese towns-more than thirty provincial capitals. That was the year President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection-remember? That was the year Robert Kennedy was assassinated; you might recall that. That was the year Richard Nixon was elected president; maybe you remember him. In the following year, in -the year when Ronald Reagan described the Vietnam protests as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy"-there were still half a million Americans in Vietnam. I was never one of them. More than thirty thousand Canadians served in Vietnam, too. And almost as many Americans came to Canada during the Vietnam War; I was one of them-one who stayed. By March of -when Lt. William Galley was convicted of premeditated murder-I was already a landed immigrant, I'd already applied for Canadian citizenship. It was Christmas, , when President Nixon bombed Hanoi; that was an eleven-day attack, employing more than forty thousand tons of high explosives. As Owen had said: Hanoi could handle it. What did he ever say that wasn't right! remember what he said about Abbie Hoffman, for example-remember Abbie Hoffman? He was the guy who tried to "levitate" the Pentagon off its foundations; he was quite a clown. He was the guy who created the Youth International Party, the "Yippies"; he was very active in antiwar protests, while at the same time he conceived of a meaningful revolution as roughly anything that conveyed irreverence with comedy and vulgarity.

"WHO DOES THIS JERK THINK HE'S HELPING!" Owen said. It was Owen Meany who kept me out of Vietnam-a trick that only Owen could have managed.

"JUST THINK OF THIS AS MY LITTLE GIFT TO YOU"-that was how he put it. It makes me ashamed to remember that I was angry with him for taking my armadillo's claws. God knows, Owen gave me more than he ever took from me-even when you consider that he took my mother.