A prayer for Owen Meany: a novel

by John Irving

  Oh God, how often I have wished that I could relive that moment; I didn't know how to pray very well then-I didn't even believe in prayer. If I were given the opportunity to pray for Owen Meany now, I could do a better job of it; knowing what I know now, I might be able to pray hard enough. It would have helped me, of course, if I could have seen his diary; but he wasn't offering it-he was keeping his diary to himself. So often in its pages he had written his name-hisJuU name-in the big block letters he called MONUMENT STYLE or GRAVESEND LETTERING; so many times he had transcribed, in his diary, his name exactly the way he had seen it on Scrooge's grave. And I mean, before all the ROTC business- even before he was thrown out of school and knew that the U.S. Army would be his ticket through college. I mean, before he knew he was signing up-even then he had written his name in that way you see names inscribed on graves. LT PAUL O. MEANY, JR. That's how he wrote it; that was what the Ghost of the Future had seen on Scrooge's grave; that and the date-the date was written in the diary, too. He wrote the date in the diary many, many times, but he never told me what it was. Maybe I could have helped him, if I'd known that date. Owen believed he knew when he was going to die; he also believed he knew his rank-he would die a first lieutenant.

  And after the dream, he believed he knew more. The certainty of his convictions was always a little scary, and his diary entry about the dream is no exception. YESTERDAY I WAS KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL. LAST NIGHT I HAD A DREAM. NOW I KNOW FOUR THINGS. I KNOW THAT MY VOICE DOESN'T CHANGE-BUT I STILL DON'T KNOW WHY. I KNOW THAT I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT. I KNOW WHEN I'M GOING TO DIE-AND NOW A DREAM HAS SHOWN ME HOW I'M GOING TO DIE. I'M GOING TO BE A HERO I TRUST THAT GOD WILL HELP ME, BECAUSE WHAT I'M SUPPOSED TO DO LOOKS VERY HARD.

  THE FINGER

  UNTIL THE SUMMER of , I felt that I couldn't wait to grow up and be treated with the kind of respect imagined adults were routinely offered and adamantly thought they deserved-I couldn't wait to wallow in the freedom and the privileges I imagined grown-ups enjoyed. Until that summer, my long apprenticeship to maturity struck me as arduous and humiliating; Randy White had confiscated my fake draft card, and I wasn't yet old enough to buy beer-I wasn't independent enough to merit my own place to live, I wasn't earning enough to afford my own car, and I wasn't something enough to persuade a woman to bestow her sexual favors upon me. Not one woman had I ever persuaded! Until the summer of ', thought that childhood and adolescence were a purgatory without apparent end; I thought that youth, in a word, '' sucked.'' But Owen Meany, who believed he knew when and how he was going to die, was in no hurry to grow up. And as to my calling the period of our youth a "purgatory," Owen said simply, "THERE IS NO PURGATORY-THAT'S A CATHOLIC INVENTION. THERE'S LIFE ON EARTH, THERE'S HEAVEN-AND THERE'S HELL."

  "I think life on earth is hell," I said.

  "I HOPE YOU HAVE A NICE SUMMER," Owen said. It was the first summer we spent apart. I suppose I should be

  grateful for that summer, because it afforded me my first glimpse of what my life without Owen would be like-you might say, it prepared me. By the end of the summer of , Owen Meany had made me afraid of what the next phase was going to be. I didn't want to grow up anymore; what I wanted was for Owen and me to go on being kids for the rest of our lives-sometimes Canon Mackie tells me, rather ungenerously, that I have succeeded. Canon Campbell, God Rest His Soul, used to tell me that being a kid for the rest of my life was a perfectly honorable aspiration. I spent that summer of ' in Sawyer Depot, working for my Uncle Alfred. After what had happened to Owen, I didn't want to work for the Gravesend Academy Admissions Office and give guided tours of the school-not anymore. The Eastman Lumber Company offered me a good job. It was tiring, outdoor work; but I got to spend my time with Noah and Simon-and there were parties on Loveless Lake almost every night, and swimming and waterskiing on Loveless Lake nearly every day, after work, and every weekend. Uncle Alfred and Aunt Martha welcomed me into the family; they gave me Hester's room for the summer. Hester was keeping her school-year apartment in Durham, working as a waitress in one of those sandy, lobster-house restaurants ... I think it was in Kittery or Portsmouth. After she got off work, she and Owen would cruise ' 'the strip'' at Hampton Beach in the tomato-red pickup. Hester's school-year roommates were elsewhere for the summer, and Hester and Owen spent every night in her Durham apartment, alone. They were "living together as man and wife"-that was the disapproving and frosty way Aunt Martha put it, when she discussed it at all, which was rarely. Despite the fact that Owen and Hester were living together as man and wife, Noah and Simon and I could never be sure if they were actually "doing it." Simon was sure that Hester could not live without doing it, Noah somehow felt that Owen and Hester had done it-but that, for some special reason, they had stopped. I had the strangest feeling that anything between them was possible: that they did it and had always done it with abandon; that they had never done it, but that they might be doing something even worse-or better-and that the real bond between them (whether they "did it" or not) was even more passionate and far sadder than sex. I felt cut off from Owen-I was working with wood and smelling a cool, northern air that was scented with trees; he was working with granite and feeling the sun beat down on the unshaded quarry, inhaling the rock dust and smelling the dynamite. Chain saws were relatively new then; the Eastman Company used them for their logging operations, but very selectively- they were heavy and cumbersome, not nearly so light and powerful as they are today. In those days, we brought the logs out of the woods by horse and crawler tractor, and the timber was often cut by crosscut saws and axes. We loaded the logs onto the trucks by hand, using peaveys or cant dogs; nowadays, Noah and Simon have shown me, they use self-loading trucks, grapple skidders, and chippers. Even the sawmill has changed; there's no more sawdust! But in ', we debarked the logs at the mill and sawed them into various grades and sizes of lumber, and all that bark and sawdust was wasted; nowadays, Noah and Simon refer to that stuff as "wood-fired waste" or even "energy"-they use it to make their own electricity!

  "How's that for progress?" Simon is always saying. Now we're the grown-ups we were in such a hurry to become; now we can drink all the beer we want, with no one asking us for proof of our age. Noah and Simon have their own houses-their own wives and children-and they do an admirable job of looking after old Uncle Alfred and my Aunt Martha, who is still a lovely woman, although she's quite gray; she looks much the way Grandmother looked to me in the summer of '. Uncle Alfred's had two bypass operations, but he's doing fine. The Eastman Company has provided him and my Aunt Martha with a good and long life. My aunt manifests only the most occasional vestige of her old interest in who my actual father is or was; last Christmas, in Sawyer Depot, she managed to get me alone for a second and she said, "Do you still not know? You can tell me. I'll bet you know! How could you not have found out something-in all this time?"

  I put my finger to my lips, as if I were going to tell her something that I didn't want Uncle Alfred or Dan or Noah or Simon to hear. Aunt Martha grew very attentive-her eyes sparkling, her smile widening with mischief and conspiracy.

  "Dan Needham is the best father a boy could have," I whispered to her.

  "I know-Dan is wonderful," Aunt Martha said impatiently; this was not what she wanted to hear. And what do Noah and Simon and I still talk about-after all these years? We talk about what Owen "knew" or thought he

  knew; and we talk about Hester. We'll talk about Hester in our graves!

  "Hester the Molested" Simon says.

  "Who would have thought any of it possibleT' Noah asks. And every Christmas, Uncle Alfred or Aunt Martha will say: "I believe that Hester will be home for Christmas next year-that's what she says."

  And Noah and Simon will say: "That's what she always says."

  I suppose that Hester is my aunt and uncle's only unhappi-ness. Even in the summer of ', I felt this was true. They treated her differently from the way they treated Noah and Simon, and she made them pay for it; how angry they made her! She took her anger away from Sawyer Depot a
nd everywhere she went she found other things and people to fuel her colossal anger. I don't think Owen was angry, not exactly. But they shared a sense of some unfairness; there was an atmosphere of injustice that enveloped them both. Owen felt that God had assigned him a role that he was powerless to change; Owen's sense of his own destiny-his belief that he was on a mission-robbed him of his capacity for fun. In the summer of ', he was only twenty; but from the moment he was told that Jack Kennedy was "diddling" Marilyn Monroe, he stopped doing anything for pleasure. Hester was just plain pissed off; she just didn't give a shit. They were such a depressing couple! But in the summer of ', I thought my Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred were a perfect couple; and yet they depressed me because of how happy they were. In their happiness they reminded me of the brief time my mother and Dan Needham had been together-and how happy they'd been, too. Meanwhile, that summer, I couldn't manage to have a successful date. Noah and Simon did everything they could for me. They introduced me to every girl on Loveless Lake. It was a summer of wet bathing suits drying from the radio aerial of Noah's car-and the closest I came to sex was the view I had of the crotches of various girls' bathing suits, snapping in the wind that whipped past Noah's car. It was a convertible, a black-and-white ' Chevy, the kind of car that had fins. Noah would let me take it to the drive-in, if and when I managed to get a date.

  "How was the movie?" Noah would always ask me-when I brought the car home, always much too early.

  "He looks like he saw every minute of it," Simon would say-and I had. I saw eveiry minute of every movie I took every girl to. And more's the shame: Noah and Simon created countless opportunities for me to be alone with various dates at the Eastman boathouse. At night, that boathouse had the reputation of a cheap motel; but all I ever managed was a long game of darts, or sometimes my date and I would sit on the dock, withholding any comment on the spectacle of the hard and distant stars until (finally) Noah or Simon would arrive to rescue us from our awkward torment. I started feeling afraid-for no reason I could understand. Georgian Bay: July , -it's a shame you can buy The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star in Pointe au Baril Station; but, thank God, they don't carry The New York Times! The island in Georgian Bay that has been in Katherine Reeling's family since -when Ratherine's grandfather reputedly won it in a poker game-is about a fifteen-minute boat ride from Pointe au Baril Station; the island is in the vicinity of Burnt Island and Hearts Content Island and Peesay Point. I think it's called Gibson Island or Ormsby Island- there are both Gibsons and Ormsbys in Ratherine's family; I believe that Gibson was Ratherine's maiden name, but I forget. Anyway, there are a bunch of notched cedarwood cottages on the island, which is not served by electric power but is comfortably and efficiently supplied with propane gas-the refrigerators, the hot-water heater, the stoves, and the lamps are all run on propane; the tanks of gas are delivered to the island by boat. The island has its own septic system, which is a subject often discussed by the hordes of Reelings and Gibsons and Ormsbys who empty themselves into it-and who are fearful of the system's eventual rebellion. I would not have wanted to visit the Reelings-or the Gibsons, or the Ormsbys-on their island before the septic system was installed; but that period of unlighted encounters with spiders in outhouses, and various late-night frights in the privy-world, is another favorite topic of discussion among the families who share the island each summer. I have heard, many times, the story of Uncle Bulwer Ormsby who was attacked by an owl in the privy-which had no door, "the better to air it out!" the Reelings and the Gibsons and the Ormsbys all claimed. Uncle Bulwer was pecked on top of his head during

  a fortunate hiatus in what should have been a most private action, and he was so fearful of the attacking owl that he fled the privy with his pants down at his ankles, and did even greater injury to himself-greater than the owl's injury-by running headfirst into a pine tree. And every year that I've visited the island, there are the familiar disputes regarding what kind of owl it was-or even if it was an owl. Katherine's husband, Charlie Keeling, says it was probably a horsefly or a moth. Others say it was surely a screech owl-for they are known to be fierce in the defense of their nests, even to the extent of attacking humans. Others say that a screech owl's range does not extend to Georgian Bay, and that it was surely a merlin-a pigeon hawk; they are very aggressive and are often mistaken for the smaller owls at night. The company of Katherine's large and friendly family is comforting to me. The conversations tend toward legendary occurrences on the island-many of which include acts of bravery or cowardice from the old outhouse or privy period of their lives. Disputed encounters with nature are also popular; my days here are most enjoyably spent in identifying species of bird and mammal and fish and reptile and, unfortunately, insect-almost none of which is well known to me. Was that an otter or a mink or a muskrat? Was that a loon or a duck or a scoter? Does it sting or bite, or is it poisonous? These distinctions are punctuated by more direct questions to the children. Did you flush, turn off the gas, close the screen door, leave the water running (the pump is run by a gasoline engine)-and did you hang up your bathing suit and towel where they will dry? It is remindful to me of my Loveless Lake days-without the agony of dating; and Loveless Lake is a dinky pond compared to Georgian Bay. Even in the summer of ', Loveless Lake was overrun by motorboats-and in those days, many summer cottages flushed their toilets directly into the lake. The so-called great outdoors is so much greater and so much nicer in Canada than it ever was-in my time-in New Hampshire. But pine pitch on your fingers is the same everywhere; and the kids with their hair damp all day, and their wet bathing suits, and someone always with a skinned knee, or a splinter, and the sound of bare feet on a dock . . . and the quarreling, all the quarreling. I love it; for a short time, it is very soothing. I can almost imagine that I have had a life very different from the life I have had. One can learn much through the thin walls of summer houses. For example, I once heard Charlie Keeling tell Katherine that I was a "nonpracticing homosexual."

  "What does that mean?" Katherine asked him. I held my breath, I strained to hear Charlie's answer-for years I've wanted to know what it means to be a "nonpracticing homosexual."

  "You know what I mean, Katherine," Charlie said.

  "You mean he doesn't do it," Katherine said.

  "I believe he doesn't," Charlie said.

  "But when he thinks about doing it, he thinks about doing it with men?" Katherine asked.

  "I believe he doesn't think about it, at all," Charlie answered.

  "Then in what way is he 'homosexual,' Charlie?" Katherine asked. Charlie sighed; in summer houses, one can even hear the sighs.

  "He's not unattractive," Charlie said. "He doesn't have a girlfriend. Has he ever had a girlfriend?"

  "I fail to see how this makes him gay," Katherine said. "He doesn't seem gay, not to me."

  "I didn't say he was gay," Charlie said. "A nonpracticing homosexual doesn't always know what he is."

  So that's what it means to be a "nonpracticing homosexual," I thought: it means I don't know what I am! Every day there is a discussion of what we will eat-and who will take the boat, or one of the boats, to the station to fetch the food and the vitals. The shopping list is profoundly basic. gasoline

  batteries Band-Aids

  corn (if any) insect repellent hamburg and buns (lots) eggs

  milk flour

  butter beer (lots) fruit (if any)

  bacon tomatoes clothespins (for Prue) N lemons live bait I let the younger children show me how they have learned to drive the boat. I let Charlie Keeling take me fishing; I really enjoy fishing for smallmouth bass-one day a year. I lend a hand to whatever the most pressing project on the island is: the Ormsbys need to rebuild their deck; the Gibsons are replacing shingles on the boathouse roof. Every day, I volunteer to be the one to go to the station; shopping for a large family is a treat for me-for such a short time. I take a kid or two with me-for the pleasure of driving the boat would be wasted on me. And I always share my room with one of the Keeling childre
n-or, rather, the child is required to share his room with me. I fall asleep listening to the astonishing complexity of a child breathing in his sleep-of a loon crying out on the dark water, of the waves lapping the rocks onshore. And in the morning, long before the child stirs, I hear the gulls and I think about the tomato-red pickup cruising the coastal road between Hampton Beach and Rye Harbor; I hear the raucous, embattled crows, whose shrill disputations and harangues remind me that I have awakened in the real world-in the world I know-after all. For a moment, until the crows commence their harsh bickering, I can imagine that here, on Georgian Bay, I have found what was once called The New World-all over again, I have stumbled ashore on the undamaged land that Watahan-towet sold to my ancestor. For in Georgian Bay it is possible to imagine North America as it was-before the United States began the murderous deceptions and the unthinking carelessness that have all but spoiled it! Then I hear the crows. They bring me back to the world with their sounds of mayhem. I try not to think about Owen. I try to talk with Charlie Keeling about otters.

  "They have a long, flattened tail-the tail lies horizontally on the water," Charlie told me.

  "I see," I said. We were sitting on the rocks, on that part of the shoreline where one of the children said he'd seen a muskrat.

  "It was an otter," Charlie told the child.

  "You didn't see it, Dad," another of the children said. So Charlie and I decided to wait the creature out. A lot of freshwater clamshells marked the entrance to the animal's cave in the rocks onshore.