A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

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

  SUPPORT THE GI’S

  BRING OUR BOYS HOME NOW!

  I was carrying nothing; I was still a little self-conscious about my missing finger. The scar tissue was new enough so that any exertion caused the stump to look inflamed. But I tried to feel I was part of the demonstration; sadly, I didn’t feel I was a part of it—I didn’t feel I was part of anything. I had a 4-F deferment; I would never have to go to war, or to Canada. By the simple act of removing the first two joints of my right index finger, Owen Meany had enabled me to feel completely detached from my generation.

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

  What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism—namely, their own. They thought that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would be the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar “movement” with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say—two years later, in 1969—so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war—they made that war last longer. That’s what I saw. I took my missing finger home to New Hampshire, and let Hester get arrested in Washington by herself; she was not exactly alone—there were mass arrests that October.

  By the end of ’67, there was trouble in California, there was trouble in New York; and there were five hundred thousand U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. More than sixteen thousand Americans had been killed there. That was when General Westmoreland said, “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view.”

  That was what prompted Owen Meany to ask: “WHAT END?” The end of the war would not come soon enough to save Owen.

  They put him in a closed casket, of course; the casket was draped with the U.S. flag, and his medal was pinned to the flag. Like any first lieutenant on active duty, he rated a full military funeral with honors, with escort officers, with taps—with the works. He could have been buried at Arlington; but the Meanys wanted him buried in Gravesend. Because of the medal, because the story of Owen’s heroism was in all the New Hampshire newspapers, that oaf—the Rev. Dudley Wiggin—wanted Owen to have an Episcopalian service; Rector Wiggin, who was a virulent supporter of the Vietnam War, wanted to perform Owen’s funeral in Christ Church.

  I prevailed upon the Meanys to use Hurd’s Church—and to let the Rev. Lewis Merrill perform the service. Mr. Meany was still angry at Gravesend Academy for expelling Owen, but I convinced him that Owen would be “outraged in heaven” if the Wiggins ever got their hands on him.

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

  It was the summer of ’68; I was sick of hearing white people talk about how Soul on Ice had changed their lives—I’ll bet Eldridge Cleaver was sick of hearing that, too—and Hester said that if she heard “Mrs. Robinson” one more time, she would throw up. That spring—in the same month—Martin Luther King had been assassinated and Hair had opened on Broadway; the summer of ’68 suffered from what would become the society’s commonplace blend of the murderous and the trivial.

  It was stifling hot in the Meanys’ sealed house—sealed tight, I was always told, because Mrs. Meany was allergic to the rock dust. She sat with her familiarly unfocused gaze, directed—as it often was—into the dead ashes in the fireplace, above which the dismembered Nativity figures surrounded the empty cradle in the crèche. Mr. Meany prodded one of the andirons with the dirty toe of his boot.

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

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

  “A lot of good all Owen’s prayin’ done him!” said Mr. Meany; he kicked the andiron.

  Later, I went and sat on the bed in Owen’s room. The severed arms from the vandalized statue of Mary Magdalene were oddly attached to my mother’s dressmaker’s dummy—formerly, as armless as she was headless. The pale, whitewashed arms were too long for the smaller proportions of my mother’s figure; but I suppose that these overreaching arms had only enhanced Owen’s memory of the affection my mother had felt for him. His Army duffel bag was on the bed beside me; the Meanys had not unpacked it.

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

  “I’d be happy if you would,” his father told me. Later, he came into the room and said: “I’d be happy if there was anythin’ of his you wanted—I know he’d have liked you to have it.”

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

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

  “I just assumed …” I said.

  “Me too!” said Mr. Meany.

  The baseball, the so-called “murder weapon,” the so-called “instrument of death”—it never was in Owen Meany’s room!

  I read the passage Owen had underlined most fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas—“Demonstration of God’s Existence from Motion.” I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen Meany’s bed.

  Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.

  The bed moved; Mr. Meany had sat down beside me. Without looking at me, he covered my hand with his workingman’s paw; he was not in the least squeamish about touching the stump of my amputated finger.

  “You know, he wasn’t … natural,”
Mr. Meany said.

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

  “I mean he wasn’t normal, he was born … different,” said Mr. Meany.

  Except for the time she’d told me she was sorry about my poor mother, I had never heard Mrs. Meany speak; my unfamiliarity with her voice—and the fact that she spoke from her position at the fireplace, in the living room—made her voice quite startling to me.

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

  “I mean he was born unnaturally,” said Mr. Meany. “Like the Christ Child—that’s what I mean,” he said. “Me and his mother, we didn’t ever do it…”

  “Stop!” Mrs. Meany called out.

  “She just conceived a child—like the Christ Child,” said Mr. Meany.

  “He’ll never believe you! No one ever believes you!” cried Mrs. Meany.

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

  “She was a virgin—yes!” he said.

  “They never, never, never, never believe you!” called out Mrs. Meany.

  “Be quiet!” he called back to her.

  “There couldn’t have been … some accident?” I asked.

  “I told you, we didn’t ever do it!” he said roughly.

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

  “You really believe …” I started to say.

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

  “No, he wasn’t,” I said softly. I wanted to kill Mr. Meany—for his ignorance! I wanted to stuff that madwoman into the fireplace!

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

  “Stop!” Mrs. Meany called out quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

  “How old would he have been—when you told him?” I asked.

  “I guess he was ten or eleven—it was about the time he hit that ball,” Mr. Meany told me.

  Yes, that would do it, I thought. I imagined that would have been a time when the story of his “virgin birth” would have made quite an impression on Owen Meany—real son-of-God stuff! I imagined that the story would have given Owen the shivers. It seemed to me that Owen Meany had been used as cruelly by ignorance as he had been used by any design. I had seen what God had used him for; now I saw how ignorance had used him, too.

  It had been Owen, I remembered, who had said that Christ had been USED—when Barb Wiggin had implied that Christ had been “lucky,” when the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had said that Christ, after all, had been “saved.” Maybe God had used Owen; but certainly Mr. and Mrs. Meany, and their colossal ignorance, had used Owen, too!

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

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

  In the rutted, dirt driveway, Mr. Meany said to me: “I got some-thin’ I’d like to show you—it’s at the monument shop.”

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

  I had not been to the monument shop since Owen had surgically created my draft deferment. When Owen had been home for Christmas—it was his last Christmas, 1967—he had spent a lot of time in the monument shop, catching up on orders that his father had, as usual, fallen behind with, or had botched in other ways. Owen had several times invited me to the shop, to have a beer with him, but I had declined the invitations; I was still adjusting to life without a right index finger, and I assumed that the sight of the diamond wheel would give me the shivers.

  It was a quiet Christmas leave for him. We practiced the shot for three or four days in a row; of course, my part in this exercise was extremely limited, but I still had to catch the ball and pass it back to him. The finger gave me no trouble; Owen was very pleased about that. And I thought it would have been ungenerous of me to complain about the difficulty I had with other tasks—writing and eating, for example; and typing, of course.

  It was a kind of sad Christmas for him; Owen didn’t see much of Hester, whose remarks—only a few months before—concerning her refusal to attend his funeral appeared to have hurt his feelings. And then everything that happened after Christmas hastened a further decline in his relationship with Hester, who grew ever more radical in her opposition to the war, beginning in January, with McCarthy announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Who’s he kidding?” Hester asked. “He’s about as good a candidate as he is a poet!” Then in February, Nixon announced his candidacy. “Talk about going to the dogs!” Hester said. And in the same month, there was the all-time-high weekly rate for U.S. casualties in Vietnam—543 Americans were killed in one week! Hester sent Owen a nasty letter. “You must be up to your asshole in bodies—even in Arizona!” Then in March, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination; in the same month, President Johnson said he would not seek reelection. Hester considered Johnson’s resignation a triumph of the “Peace Movement”; a month later, when Humphrey announced that he was a candidate, Owen Meany wrote Hester and said: “SOME TRIUMPH FOR THE SO-CALLED MOVEMENT—JUST WAIT AND SEE!”

  I think I know what he was doing; he was helping her to fall out of love with him before he died. Hester couldn’t have known that she’d seen the last of him—but he knew that he’d never see her again.

  All this was in my mind when I went to the monument shop with that moron Mr. Meany.

  The gravestone was unusually large but properly simple.

  1LT PAUL O. MEANY, JR.

  Under the name were the dates—the correct dates of his birth, and of his death—and under the dates was the simple Latin inscription that meant “forever.”

  IN AETERNUM

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

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

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

  “I added nothin’!” said Mr. Meany. “He knew the date. I thought you knew that much.” I knew “that much,” of course—and I’d already looked at the diary and satisfied myself that he’d always known the exact date. But to see it so strongly carved in his gravestone left no room for doubt—he’d last been home on leave for Christmas, 1967; he’d finished his own gravestone more than half a year before he died!

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