Owen Meany was as jumpy as a mouse. One of the nuns spoke to him.
"Officer?" she said.
"YES, MA'AM--HOW MAY I HELP YOU?" he said quickly.
"Some of the boys need to find a men's room," the nun said; one of the younger nuns tittered. "We can take the girls," the first nun said, "but if you'd be so kind--if you'd just go with the boys."
"YES, MA'AM--I'D BE HAPPY TO HELP THE CHILDREN," said Owen Meany.
"Wait till you see the so-called men's room," I told Owen; I led the way. Owen just concentrated on the children. There were seven boys; the nun who was also Vietnamese accompanied us--she carried the smallest boy. The boy who was crying had stopped as soon as he saw Owen Meany. All the children watched Owen closely; they had seen many soldiers--yes--but they had never seen a soldier who was almost as small as they were! They never took their eyes off him.
On we marched--when we passed by the game room, Major Rawls had his back to us; he didn't see us. Rawls was humping the pinball machine in a fury. In the mouth of a corridor I'd walked down before--it led nowhere--we marched past Dick Jarvits, the tall, lunatic brother of the dead warrant officer, standing in the shadows.
He wore the jungle fatigues; he was strapped up with an extra cartridge belt or two. Although it was dark in the corridor, he wore the kind of sunglasses that must have melted on his brother's face when the helicopter had caught fire. Because he was wearing sunglasses, I couldn't tell if Dick saw Owen or me or the children; but from the gape of his open mouth, I concluded that something Dick had just seen had surprised him.
The "Men's Temporary Facilities" were the same as I had left them. The same mops and pails were there, and the unhung mirror still leaned against the wall. The vast mystery sink confused the children; one of them tried to pee in it, but I pointed him in the direction of the crowded urinal. One of the children considered peeing in a pail, but I showed him the toilet in the makeshift, plywood stall. Owen Meany, the good soldier, stood under the window; he watched the door. Occasionally, he would glance above him, sizing up the deep window ledge below the casement window. Owen looked especially small standing under that window, because the window ledge was at least ten feet high--it towered above him.
The nun was waiting for her charges, just outside the door.
I helped one of the children unzip his fly; the child seemed unfamiliar with a zipper. The children all jabbered in Vietnamese; the small, high-ceilinged room--like a coffin standing upright on one end--echoed with their voices.
I've already said how slow I am; it wasn't until I heard their shrill, foreign voices that I remembered Owen's dream. I saw him watching the door, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.
"What's wrong?" I said to him.
"STAND BESIDE ME," he said. I was moving toward him when the door was kicked wide open and Dick Jarvits stood there, nearly as tall and thin as the tall, thin room; he held a Chicom grenade--carefully--in both hands.
"HELLO, DICK," said Owen Meany.
"You little twit!" Dick said. One of the children screamed; I suppose they'd all seen men in jungle fatigues before--I think that the little boy who screamed had seen a Chicom grenade before, too. Two or three of the children began to cry.
"DOONG SA," Owen Meany told them. "DON'T BE AFRAID," Owen told the children. "DOONG SA, DOONG SA," he said. It was not only because he spoke their language; it was his voice that compelled the children to listen to him--it was a voice like their voices. That was why they trusted him, why they listened. "DOONG SA," he said, and they stopped crying.
"It's just the place for you to die," Dick said to Owen. "With all these little gooks--with these little dinks!" Dick said.
"NAM SOON!" Owen told the children. "NAM SOON! LIE DOWN!" Even the littlest boy understood him. "LIE DOWN!" Owen told them. "NAM SOON! NAM SOON!" All the children threw themselves on the floor--they covered their ears, they shut their eyes. "NOW I KNOW WHY MY VOICE NEVER CHANGES," Owen said to me. "DO YOU SEE WHY?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said.
"WE'LL HAVE JUST FOUR SECONDS," Owen told me calmly. "YOU'LL NEVER GET TO VIETNAM, DICK," Owen told the terrible, tall boy--who ripped the fuse cord and tossed the bottle-shaped grenade, end over end, right to me.
"Think fast--Mister Fuckin' Intelligence Man!" Dick said.
I caught the grenade, although it wasn't as easy to handle as a basketball--I was lucky. I looked at Owen, who was already moving toward me.
"READY?" he said; I passed him the Chicom grenade and opened my arms to catch him. He jumped so lightly into my hands; I lifted him up--as easily as I had always lifted him.
After all: I had been practicing lifting up Owen Meany--forever.
The nun who'd been waiting for the children outside the door of the "Men's Temporary Facilities"--she hadn't liked the looks of Dick; she'd run off to get the other soldiers. It was Major Rawls who caught Dick running away from the temporary men's room.
"What have you done, you fuck-face?" the major screamed at Dick.
Dick had drawn the bayonet. Major Rawls seized Dick's machete--Rawls broke Dick's neck with one blow, with the dull edge of the blade. I'd sensed that there was something more bitter than anger in the major's uncommon, lake-green eyes; maybe it was just his contact lenses, but Rawls hadn't won a battlefield commission in Korea for nothing. He may not have been prepared to kill an unfortunate, fifteen-year-old boy; but Major Rawls was even less prepared to be killed by such a kid, who--as Rawls had said to Owen--was (at least on this earth) "beyond saving."
When Owen Meany said "READY?" I figured we had about two seconds left to live. But he soared far above my arms--when I lifted him, he soared even higher than usual; he wasn't taking any chances. He went straight up, never turning to face me, and instead of merely dropping the grenade and leaving it on the window ledge, he caught hold of the ledge with both hands, pinning the grenade against the ledge and trapping it there safely with his hands and forearms. He wanted to be sure that the grenade couldn't roll off the ledge and fall back in the room. He could just manage to wriggle his head--his whole head, thank God--below the window ledge. He clung there for less than a second.
Then the grenade detonated; it made a shattering "crack!"--like lightning when it strikes too close to you. There was a high-velocity projection of fragments--the fragmentation is usually distributed in a uniform pattern (this is what Major Rawls explained to me, later), but the cement window ledge prevented any fragments from reaching me or the children. What hit us was all the stuff that ricocheted off the ceiling--there was a sharp, stinging hail that rattled like BB's around the room, and all the chips of cement and tile, and the plaster debris, fell down upon us. The window was blown out, and there was an instant, acrid, burning stink. Major Rawls, who had just killed Dick, flung the door open and jammed a mop handle into the hinge assembly--to keep the door open. We needed the air. The children were holding their ears and crying; some of them were bleeding from their ears--that was when I noticed that my ears were bleeding, too, and that I couldn't actually hear anything. I knew--from their faces--that the children were crying, and I knew from looking at Major Rawls that he was trying to tell me to do something.
What does he want me to do? I wondered, listening to the pain in my ears. Then the nuns were moving among the children--all the children were moving, thank God; they were more than moving, they were grasping each other, they were tugging the habits of the nuns, and they were pointing to the torn-apart ceiling of the coffin-shaped room, and the smoking black hole above the window ledge.
Major Rawls was shaking me by my shoulders; I tried to read the major's lips because I still couldn't hear him.
The children were looking all around; they were pointing up and down and everywhere. I began to look around with them. Now the nuns were also looking. Then my ears cleared; there was a popping or a ripping sound, as if my ears were late in echoing the explosion, and then the children's voices were jabbering, and I heard what Major Rawls was screaming at me while he shook me.
"Where is he? Where is Owen?" Major Rawls was screaming.
I looked up at the black hole, where I'd last seen him clinging. One of the children was staring into the vast sink; one of the nuns looked into the sink, too--she crossed herself, and Major Rawls and I moved quickly to assist her.
But the nun didn't need our help; Owen was so light, even the nun could lift him. She picked him up, out of the sink, as she might have picked up one of the children; then she didn't know what to do with him. Another nun kneeled in the bomb litter on the floor; she settled back on her haunches and spread her habit smoothly across her thighs, and the nun who held Owen in her arms rested his head in the lap of the sister who'd thus arranged herself on the floor. The third and fourth nuns tried to calm the children--to make them move away from him--but the children crowded around Owen; they were all crying.
"DOONG SA-- DON'T BE AFRAID," he told them, and they stopped crying. The girl orphans had gathered in the doorway.
Major Rawls removed his necktie and tried to apply a tourniquet--just above the elbow of one of Owen's arms. I removed Owen's tie and tried to apply a tourniquet--in the same fashion--to his other arm. Both of Owen Meany's arms were missing--they were severed just below his elbows, perhaps three quarters of the way up his forearms; but he'd not begun to bleed too badly, not yet. A doctor told me later that--in the first moments--the arteries in his arms would have gone into spasm; he was bleeding, but not as much as you might expect from such a violent amputation. The tissue that hung from the stumps of his arms was as filmy and delicate as gossamer--as fine and intricate as old lace. Nowhere else was he injured.
Then his arms began to bleed more; the tighter Major Rawls and I applied our tourniquets, the more Owen bled.
"Go get someone," the major told one of the nuns.
"NOW I KNOW WHY YOU HAD TO BE HERE," Owen said to me. "DO YOU SEE WHY?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said.
"REMEMBER ALL OUR PRACTICING?" he asked me.
"I remember," I said.
Owen tried to raise his hands; he tried to reach out to me with his arms--I think he wanted to touch me. That was when he realized that his arms were gone. He didn't seem surprised by the discovery.
"REMEMBER WATAHANTOWET?" he asked me.
"I remember," I said.
Then he smiled at the "penguin" who was trying to make him comfortable in her lap; her wimple was covered with his blood, and she had wrapped as much of her habit around him as she could manage--because he was shivering.
"'... WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE,'" Owen said to her. The nun nodded in agreement; she made the sign of the cross over him.
Then Owen smiled at Major Rawls. "PLEASE SEE TO IT THAT I GET SOME KIND OF MEDAL FOR THIS," he asked the major, who bowed his head--and cranked his tourniquet tighter.
There was only the briefest moment, when Owen looked stricken--something deeper and darker than pain crossed over his face, and he said to the nun who held him: "I'M AWFULLY COLD, SISTER--CAN'T YOU DO SOMETHING?" Then whatever had troubled him passed over him completely, and he smiled again--he looked at us all with his old, infuriating smile.
Then he looked only at me. "YOU'RE GETTING SMALLER, BUT I CAN STILL SEE YOU!" said Owen Meany.
Then he left us; he was gone. I could tell by his almost cheerful expression that he was at least as high as the palm trees.
Major Rawls saw to it that Owen Meany got a medal. I was asked to make an eyewitness report, but Major Rawls was instrumental in pushing the proper paperwork through the military chain of command. Owen Meany was awarded the so-called Soldier's Medal: "For heroism that involves the voluntary risk of life under conditions other than those of conflict with an opposing armed force." According to Major Rawls, the Soldier's Medal rates above the Bronze Star but below the Legion of Merit. Naturally, it didn't matter very much to me--exactly where the medal was rated--but I think Rawls was right in assuming that the medal mattered to Owen Meany.
Major Rawls did not attend Owen's funeral. When I spoke on the telephone with him, Rawls was apologetic about not making the trip to New Hampshire; but I assured him that I completely understood his feelings. Major Rawls had seen his share of flag-draped caskets; he had seen his share of heroes, too. Major Rawls never knew everything that Owen had known; the major knew only that Owen had been a hero--he didn't know that Owen Meany had been a miracle, too.
There's a prayer I say most often for Owen. It's one of the little prayers he said for my mother, the night Hester and I found him in the cemetery--where he'd brought the flashlight, because he knew how my mother had hated the darkness.
"'INTO PARADISE MAY THE ANGELS LEAD YOU,'" he'd said over my mother's grave; and so I say that one for him--I know it was one of his favorites.
I am always saying prayers for Owen Meany.
And I often try to imagine how I might have answered Mary Beth Baird, when she spoke to me--at Owen's burial. If I could have spoken, if I hadn't lost my voice--what would I have said to her, how could I have answered her? Poor Mary Beth Baird! I left her standing in the cemetery without an answer.
"Do you remember how we used to lift him up?" she'd asked me. "He was so easy to lift up!" Mary Beth Baird had said to me. "He was so light--he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?" the former Virgin Mother had asked me.
I could have told her that it was only our illusion that Owen Meany weighed "nothing at all." We were only children--we are only children--I could have told her. What did we ever know about Owen? What did we truly know? We had the impression that everything was a game--we thought we made everything up as we went along. When we were children, we had the impression that almost everything was just for fun--no harm intended, no damage done.
When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth--so effortlessly--we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen's weightlessness; they were the forces we didn't have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in--and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands.
O God--please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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The author acknowledges his debt to Charles H. Bell's History of the Town of Exeter, New Hampshire (Boston: J. E. Farwell & Co., 1888), and to Mr. Bell's Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire: A Historical Sketch (Exeter, N.H.: William B. Morrill, News-Letter Press, 1883); all references in my novel to "Wall's History of Gravesend, N.H." are from these sources. Another valuable sourcebook for me was Vietnam War Almanac (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1985) by Harry G. Summers, Jr.; I am grateful to Colonel Summers, too, for his helpful correspondence. The Rev. Ann E. Tottenham, headmistress of The Bishop Strachan School, was a special source of help to me; her careful reading of the manuscript is much appreciated. I am indebted, too, to the students and faculty of Bishop Strachan; on numerous occasions, they were patient with me and generous with their time. I am a grateful reader of Your Voice by Robert Lawrence Weer (New York: Keith Davis, 1977), revised and edited by Keith Davis; a justly respected voice and singing teacher, Mr. Davis suffered my amateur attempts at "breathing for singers" most graciously. The advice offered by the fictional character of "Graham McSwiney" is verbatim et literatim to the teaching of Mr. Weer; my thanks to Mr. Davis for introducing me to the subject. I acknowledge, most of all, how much I owe to the writing of my former teacher Frederick Buechner; especially The Magnificent Defeat (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), The Hungering Dark (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), and The Alphabet of Grace (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). The Rev. Mr. Buechner's correspondence, his criticism of the manuscript, and the constancy of his encouragement have meant a great deal to me: thank you, Fred. And to three old friends--close readers with special knowledge--I am indebted: to Dr. Chas E. ("Skipper") Bickel, the granite master; to Brig. G
en. Charles C. ("Brute") Krulak, my hero; and to Ron Hansen, the body escort. To my first cousins in "the north country," Bayard and Curt: thank you, too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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JOHN IRVING has been nominated for a National Book Award three times--winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. In 1992, Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Irving's most recent novel is In One Person (2012).
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OTHER WORKS
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Also by John Irving
FICTION
In One Person
Last Night in Twisted River
Until I Find You
The Fourth Hand
A Widow for One Year
A Son of the Circus
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
The Cider House Rules
The Hotel New Hampshire
The World According to Garp
The 158-Pound Marriage
The Water-Method Man
Setting Free the Bears
NONFICTION
My Movie Business
The Imaginary Girlfriend
SCREENPLAYS
The Cider House Rules
CREDITS
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Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover photograph (c) by Judy Kennamer/Arcangel Images
COPYRIGHT
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A Prayer for Owen Meany is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.