My grandmother, seeing her pastor so tense and tongue-tied, took his arm and whispered to him, "It's just a dog. Just say a little something, for the children."
But Mr. Merrill began to stutter; the more my mother shivered, the more the Rev. Mr. Merrill shivered in response, the more his mouth trembled and he could not utter the simplest rite--he failed to form the first sentence. Mr. Fish, who was never a frequenter of any of the town churches, hoisted the burlap sack and dropped Sagamore into the underworld.
It was Owen Meany who found the words: "'I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE, SAITH THE LORD: HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.'"
It seemed a lot to say--for a dog--and the Rev. Mr. Merrill, freed from his stutter, was struck silent.
"'... SHALL NEVER DIE,'" Owen repeated. The wind, gusting, covered my mother's face with her hair as she reached for Owen's hand.
Over all rituals, over all services--over every rite of passage--Owen Meany would preside.
That Christmas of '53, whether rehearsing the Nativity, or testing Potter's prophylactic on the third floor of Waterhouse Hall, I was only dimly aware of Owen as the conductor of an orchestra of events--and totally unaware that this orchestration would lead to a single sound. Not even in Owen's odd room did I perceive enough, although no one could escape the feeling that--at the very least--an altar-in-progress was under construction there.
It was hard to tell if the Meanys celebrated Christmas. A clump of pine boughs had been crudely gathered and stuck to the front farmhouse door by a huge, ugly staple--the kind fired from a heavy-duty, industrial staple gun. The staple looked strong enough to bind granite to granite, or to hold Christ fast to the cross. But there was no particular arrangement to the pine boughs--it certainly did not resemble a wreath; it was as shapeless a mass as an animal's nest, only hastily begun and abandoned in a panic. Inside the sealed house, there was no tree; there were no Christmas decorations, not even candles in the windows, not even a decrepit Santa leaning against a table lamp.
On the mantel above the constantly smoldering fire--wherein the logs were either chronically wet, or else the coals had been left unstirred for hours--there was a creche with cheaply painted wooden figures. The cow was three-legged--nearly as precarious as one of Mary Beth Baird's cows; it was propped against a rather menacing chicken that was almost half the cow's size, not unlike the proportions of Barb Wiggin's turtledoves. A gouge through the flesh-toned paint of the Holy Mother's face had rendered her obviously blind and so ghastly to behold that someone in the Meany family had thoughtfully turned her face away from the Christ Child's crib--yes, there was a crib. Joseph had lost a hand--perhaps he had hacked it off himself, in a jealous rage, for there was something darkly smoldering in his expression, as if the smoky fire that left the mantel coated with soot had also colored Joseph's mood. One angel's harp was mangled, and from another angel's O-shaped mouth it was easier to imagine the wail of a mourner than the sweetness of singing.
But the creche's most ominous message was that the little Lord Jesus himself was missing; the crib was empty--that was why the Virgin Mary had turned her mutilated face away; why one angel dashed its harp, and another screamed in anguish; why Joseph had lost a hand, and the cow a leg. The Christ Child was gone--kidnapped, or run away. The very object of worship was absent from the conventional assembly.
There appeared to be more order, more divine management in evidence in Owen's room; still, there was nothing that represented anything as seasonal as Christmas--except the poinsettia-red dress that my mother's dummy wore; but I knew that dress was all the dummy had to wear, year-round.
The dummy had taken a position at the head of Owen's bed--closer to his bed than my mother had formerly positioned it in relationship to her own bed. From where Owen lay at night, it was instantly clear to me that he could reach out and touch the familiar figure.
"DON'T STARE AT THE DUMMY," he advised me. "IT'S NOT GOOD FOR YOU."
Yet, apparently, it was good for him--for there she was, standing over him.
The baseball cards, at one time so very much on display in Owen's room, were not--I was sure--gone; but they were out of sight. There was no baseball in evidence, either--although I was certain that the murderous ball was in the room. The foreclaws of my armadillo were surely there, but they were also not on display. And the Christ Child snatched from the crib ... I was convinced that the Baby Jesus was somewhere in Owen's room, perhaps in company with Potter's prophylactic, which Owen had taken home with him but which was no more visible than the armadillo's claws, the abducted Prince of Peace, and the so-called instrument of my mother's death.
It was not a room that invited a long visit; our appearances at the Meanys' house were brief, sometimes only for Owen to change his clothes, because--during that Christmas vacation, especially--he stayed overnight with me more than he stayed at home.
Mrs. Meany never spoke to me, or took any notice of me at all, when I came to the house; I could not remember the last time Owen had bothered to announce my presence--or, for that matter, his own presence--to his mother. But Mr. Meany was usually pleasant; I wouldn't say he was cheerful, or even enthusiastic, and he was not a fellow for small talk, but he offered me his cautious version of humor. "Why, it's Johnny Wheelwright!" he'd say, as if he were surprised I was there at all, or he hadn't seen me for years. Perhaps this was his unsubtle way of announcing my presence to Mrs. Meany, but that lady was unchanged by her husband's greeting; she remained in profile to both the window and to us. For variety, she would at times gaze into the fire, although nothing she saw there ever prompted her to tend to the logs or the coals; possibly she preferred smoke to flames.
And one day, when he must have been feeling especially conversational, Mr. Meany said: "Why, it's Johnny Wheelwright! How goes all that Christmas rehearsin'?"
"Owen's the star of the pageant," I said. As soon as I spoke, I felt the knuckles of his tiny fist in my back.
"You never said you was the star," Mr. Meany said to Owen.
"He's the Baby Jesus!" I said. "I'm just old Joseph."
"The Baby Jesus?" said Mr. Meany. "I thought you was an angel, Owen."
"NOT THIS YEAR," Owen said. "COME ON, WE GOTTA GO," he said to me, pulling the back of my shirt.
"You're the Christ Child?" his father asked him.
"I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN FIT IN THE CRIB," Owen said.
"Now we're not even using a crib," I explained. "Owen's in charge of the whole thing--he's the star and the director." Owen yanked my shirt so hard he untucked it.
"The director," Mr. Meany repeated flatly. That was when I felt cold, as if a draft had pushed itself into the house in an unnatural way--down the warm chimney. But it was no draft; it was Mrs. Meany. She had actually moved. She was staring at Owen. There was confusion in her expression, a mix of terror and awe--of shock; but also of a most familiar resentment. By comparison to such a stare, I realized what a relief his mother's profile must be to Owen Meany.
Outside, in the raw wind off the Squamscott, I asked Owen if I had said anything I shouldn't have said.
"I THINK THEY LIKE ME BETTER AS AN ANGEL," he said.
The snow never seemed to stick on Maiden Hill; it could never get a grip on the huge, upthrust slabs of granite that marked the rims of the quarries. In the pits themselves the snow was dirty, mixed with sand, tracked by birds and squirrels; the sides of the quarries were too steep for dogs. There is always so much sand around a granite quarry; somehow, it works its way to the top of the snow; and around Owen's house there was always so much wind that the sand stung against your face--like the beach in winter.
I watched Owen pull down the earflaps of his red-and-black-checkered hunter's cap; that was when I realized that I'd left my hat on his bed. We were on our way down Maiden Hill; Dan had said he'd meet us with the car, at the boathouse on the Swasey Parkway.
"Just a second," I told Owen. "I forgot my hat."
I ran back to the house; I left him kicking at a rock that had been frozen in the ruts of the dirt driveway.
I didn't knock; the clump of pine boughs on the door was blocking the most natural place to knock, anyway. Mr. Meany was standing by the mantel, either looking at the creche or at the fire. "Just forgot my hat," I said, when he looked up at me.
I didn't knock on the door of Owen's room, either. At first, I thought the dressmaker's dummy had moved; I thought that somehow it had found a way to bend at the waist and had sat down on Owen's bed. Then I realized that Mrs. Meany was sitting on the bed; she was staring quite intently at my mother's figure and she did not interrupt her gaze when I entered the room.
"Just forgot my hat," I repeated; I couldn't tell if she heard me.
I put on my hat and was leaving the room, closing the door as quietly as I could behind me, when she said, "I'm sorry about your poor mother." It was the first time she had ever spoken to me. I peeked back into the room. Mrs. Meany hadn't moved; she sat with her head slightly bowed to the dressmaker's dummy, as if she were awaiting some instructions.
It was noon when Owen and I passed under the railroad trestle bridge at the foot of the Maiden Hill Road, a few hundred yards below the Meany Granite Quarry; years later, the abutment of that bridge would be the death of Buzzy Thurston, who had successfully evaded the draft. But that Christmas of '53, when Owen and I walked under the bridge, was the first time our being there coincided with the passing of The Flying Yankee--the express train that raced between Portland and Boston, in just two hours. It screamed through Gravesend every day at noon; and although Owen and I had watched it hurtle through town from the Gravesend depot, and although we had put pennies on the tracks for The Flying Yankee to flatten, we had never before been directly under the trestle bridge exactly as The Flying Yankee was passing over us.
I was still thinking of Mrs. Meany's attitude of supplication before my mother's dummy when the trestlework of the bridge began to rattle. A fine grit sifted down between the railroad ties and the trestles and settled upon Owen and me; even the concrete abutments shook, and--shielding our eyes from the loosened sand--we looked up to see the giant, dark underbelly of the train, speeding above us. Through the gaps between the passing cars, flashes of the leaden, winter sky blinked down on us.
"IT'S THE FLYING YANKEE!" Owen managed to scream above the clamor. All trains were special to Owen Meany, who had never ridden on a train; but The Flying Yankee--its terrifying speed and its refusal to stop in Gravesend--represented to Owen the zenith of travel. Owen (who had never been anywhere) was a considerable romantic on the subject of travel.
"What a coincidence!" I said, when The Flying Yankee had gone; I meant that it was a far-fetched piece of luck that had landed us under the trestle bridge precisely at noon, but Owen smiled at me with his especially irritating combination of mild pity and mild contempt. Of course, I know now that Owen didn't believe in coincidences. Owen Meany believed that "coincidence" was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design--more powerful and unstoppable than The Flying Yankee.
The maid who looked after my grandmother, the maid who was Lydia's replacement after Lydia suffered her amputation, was named Ethel, and she was forced to endure the subtle comparisons that both Lydia and my grandmother made of her job-effectiveness. I say "subtle," only because my grandmother and Lydia never discussed these comparisons with Ethel directly; but in Ethel's company, Grandmother would say, "Do you remember, Lydia, how you used to bring up the jams and jellies from those shelves in the secret passageway--where they get so dusty--and line them all up in the kitchen, according to the dates when you'd put them up?"
"Yes, I remember," Lydia would say.
"That way, I could look them over and say, 'Well, we should throw out that one--it doesn't seem to be a favorite around here, and it's two years old.' Do you remember?" my grandmother would ask.
"Yes. One year we threw out all the quince," Lydia said.
"It was just pleasant to know what we had down there in the secret passageway," my grandmother remarked.
"Don't let things get the upper hand on you, I always say," Lydia said.
And the next morning, of course, poor Ethel--properly, albeit indirectly instructed--would haul out all the jams and jellies and dust them off for my grandmother's inspection.
Ethel was a short, heavyset woman with an ageless, blocky strength; yet her physical power was undermined by a slow mind and a brutal lack of confidence. Her forward motion, even with something as basic as cleaning the house, was characterized by the strong swipes of her stubby arms--but these confident efforts were followed or preceded by the hesitant, off-balance steps of her short, broad feet upon her thick ankles; she was a stumbler. Owen said she was too slow-witted to frighten properly, and therefore we rarely bothered her--even when we discovered opportunities to surprise her, in the dark, in the secret passageway. In this way, too, Ethel was Lydia's inferior, for Lydia had been great fun to terrorize, when she had two legs.
The maid hired to look after Lydia was--as we used to say in Gravesend--"a whole other ball game." Her name was Germaine, and both Lydia and Ethel bullied her; my grandmother purposefully ignored her. Among these contemptuous women, poor Germaine had the disadvantage of being young--and almost pretty, in a shy, mousy way. She possessed the nonspecific clumsiness of someone who makes such a constant effort to be inconspicuous that she is creatively awkward--without meaning to, Germaine hoarded attention to herself; her almost electric nervousness disturbed the atmosphere surrounding her.
Windows, when Germaine was attempting to slip past them, would suddenly shut themselves; doors would open. Precious vases would totter when Germaine approached them; when she reached to steady them, they would shatter. Lydia's wheelchair would malfunction the instant Germaine took tremulous command of it. The light in the refrigerator would burn out the instant Germaine opened the door. And when the garage light was left on all night, it would be discovered--in my grandmother's early-morning investigation--that Germaine had been the last to bed.
"Last one to bed turns out the lights," Lydia would say, in her litanic fashion.
"I was not only in bed but I was asleep, when Germaine came to bed," Ethel would announce. "I know I was asleep because she woke me up."
"I'm sorry," Germaine would whisper.
My grandmother would sigh and shake her head, as if several rooms of the great house had been consumed in a fire overnight and there was nothing to salvage--and nothing to say, either.
But I know why my grandmother sought to ignore Germaine. Grandmother, in a fit of Yankee frugality, had given Germaine all my mother's clothes. Germaine was a little too small for the clothes, although they were the nicest clothes Germaine had ever owned and she wore them both happily and reverentially--Germaine never realized that my grandmother resented seeing her in such painfully familiar attire. Perhaps my grandmother never knew how much she would resent seeing those clothes on Germaine when she gave them to her; and Grandmother had too much pride to admit her error. She could only look away. That the clothes didn't fit Germaine was referred to as Germaine's fault.
"You should eat more, Germaine," Grandmother would say, not looking at her--and never noticing what Germaine ate; only that my mother's clothes hung limply on her. But Germaine could have gorged herself and never matched my mother's bosom.
"John?" Germaine would whisper, when she would enter the secret passageway. The one overhead bulb at the bottom of those winding stairs never lit that passageway very brightly. "Owen?" she would ask. "Are you in here? Don't frighten me."
And Owen and I would wait until she had turned the L-shaped corner between the tall, dusty shelves at shoulder level--the odd shadows of the jam and jelly jars zigzagging across the cobwebbed ceiling; the higher, more irregular shadows cast by the bigger jars of tomato and sweet-pepper relish, and the brandied plums, were as looming and
contorted as volcanic conformations.
"'BE NOT AFRAID,'" Owen would whisper to Germaine in the dark; once, over that Christmas vacation, Germaine burst into tears. "I'M SORRY!" Owen called after her. "IT'S JUST ME!"
But it was Owen whom Germaine was especially afraid of. She was a girl who believed in the supernatural, in what she was always calling "signs"--for example, the rather commonplace mutilation and murder of a robin by one of the Front Street cats; to witness this torture was "a sure sign" you would be involved with an even greater violence yet to come. Owen himself was taken as a "sign" by poor Germaine; his diminutive size suggested to her that Owen was small enough to actually enter the body and soul of another person--and cause that person to perform unnatural acts.
It was a dinner table conversation about Owen's voice that revealed to me Germaine's point of view concerning that unnatural aspect of him. My grandmother had asked me if Owen or his family had ever taken any pains to inquire if something could be "done" about Owen's voice--"I mean medically," Grandmother said, and Lydia nodded so vigorously that I thought her hair pins might fall onto her dinner plate.
I knew that my mother had once suggested to Owen that her old voice and singing teacher might be able to offer Owen some advice of a corrective kind--or even suggest certain vocal exercises, designed to train Owen to speak more ... well ... normally. My grandmother and Lydia exchanged their usual glances upon the mere mention of that voice and singing teacher; I explained, further, that Mother had even written out the address and telephone number of this mysterious figure, and she had given the information to Owen. Owen, I was sure, had never contacted the teacher.
"And why not?" Grandmother asked. Why not, indeed? Lydia appeared to ask, nodding and nodding. Lydia's nodding was the most detectable manifestation of how her senility was in advance of my grandmother's senility--or so my grandmother had observed, privately, to me. Grandmother was extremely--almost clinically--interested in Lydia's senility, because she took Lydia's behavior as a barometer regarding what she could soon expect of herself.