“This will be more fun when you boys get a little older,” he used to say, as the ball rolled under the privet, or wobbled into my grandmother’s rose beds, and Owen and I purposely fumbled in front of Sagamore—such was our pleasure in watching the dog lunge and drool, lunge and drool.
Poor Mr. Fish. Owen and I dropped so many perfect passes. Owen liked to run with the ball until Sagamore ran him down; and then Owen would kick the ball in no particular or planned direction. It was dogball, not football, that we played on those afternoons, but Mr. Fish was ever optimistic that Owen and I would, miraculously—one day—grow up and play pass-and-catch as it was meant to be played.
A few houses down Front Street lived a young couple with a new baby; Front Street was not much of a street for young couples, and the street had only one new baby. The couple cruised the neighborhood with the air of an entirely novel species—as if they were the first couple in New Hampshire to have given birth. Owen shrieked so loudly when we played football with Mr. Fish that the young father or mother from down the street would fretfully appear, popping up over a hedge to ask us if we would keep our voices down “… because of the baby.”
His years in The Gravesend Players would exercise Mr. Fish’s natural ability at rolling his eyes; and after the young parent had returned to guard the precious newborn, Mr. Fish would commence rolling his eyes with abandon.
“STUPID BABY,” Owen complained, “WHO EVER HEARD OF TRYING TO CONTROL THE NOISE OUTDOORS?”
That had just happened—for about the hundredth time—the day Owen managed to punt the football out of the yard … out of my grandmother’s yard, and beyond Mr. Fish’s yard, too; the ball floated over the roof of my grandmother’s garage and rolled end-over-end down the driveway, toward Front Street, with Owen and me and Sagamore chasing after it. Mr. Fish stood sighing, with his hands on his hips; he did not chase after errant passes and kicks—these were imperfections that he sought to eliminate from our game—but on this day he was impressed by the unusual power of Owen Meany’s kick (if not the kick’s direction).
“That’s getting your foot into the ball, Owen!” Mr. Fish called. As the ball rolled into Front Street with Sagamore in close pursuit, the baby-rattle tinkle of the odd bell of the diaper truck dinged persistently, even at the moment of the truck’s sudden confluence with Sagamore’s unlucky head.
Poor Mr. Fish; Owen ran to get him, but Mr. Fish had heard the squealing tires—and even the dull thud—and he was halfway down the driveway when Owen met him. “I DON’T THINK YOU WANT TO SEE IT,” Owen said to him. “WHY DON’T YOU GO SIT DOWN AND LET US TAKE CARE OF THINGS?”
Mr. Fish was on his porch when the young parents came up Front Street, to complain again about the noise—or to investigate the delay of the diaper truck, because their baby was the sole reason the truck was there.
The diaper truck driver sat on the running board of the cab. “Shit,” he said. Up close, the odor of urine radiated from the truck in waves. My grandmother had her kindling delivered in burlap sacks, an
d my mother helped me empty one; I helped Owen get Sagamore into the sack. The football, still smeared with saliva, had gathered some gravel and a candy-bar wrapper; it lay uninvitingly at the curb.
In late September, in Gravesend, it could feel like August or like November; by the time Owen and I had dragged Sagamore in the sack to Mr. Fish’s yard, the sun was clouded over, the vividness seemed muted in the maple trees, and the wind that stirred the dead leaves about the lawn had grown cold. Mr. Fish told my mother that he would make a “gift” of Sagamore’s body—to my grandmother’s roses. He implied that a dead dog was highly prized, among serious gardeners; my grandmother wished to be brought into the discussion, and it was quickly agreed which rosebushes would be temporarily uprooted, and replanted, and Mr. Fish began with the spade. The digging was much softer in the rose bed than it would have been in Mr. Fish’s yard, and the young couple and their baby from down the street were sufficiently moved to attend the burial, along with a scattering of Front Street’s other children; even my grandmother asked to be called when the hole was ready, and my mother—although the day had turned much colder—wouldn’t even go inside for a coat. She wore dark-gray flannel slacks and a black, V-necked sweater, and stood hugging herself, standing first on one foot, then on the other, while Owen gathered strange items to accompany Sagamore to the underworld. Owen was restrained from putting the football in the burlap sack, because Mr. Fish—while digging the grave—maintained that football was still a game that would give us some pleasure, when we were “a little older.” Owen found a few well-chewed tennis balls, and Sagamore’s food dish, and his dog blanket for trips in the car; these he included in the burlap sack, together with a scattering of the brightest maple leaves—and a leftover lamb chop that Lydia had been saving for Sagamore (from last night’s supper).
The lights were turned on in some houses when Mr. Fish finished digging the grave, and Owen decided that the attendant mourners should hold candles, which Lydia was reluctant to provide; at my mother’s urging, Lydia produced the candles, and my grandmother was summoned.
“HE WAS A GOOD DOG,” Owen said, to which there were murmurs of approval.
“I’ll never have another one,” said Mr. Fish.
“I’ll remind you of that,” my grandmother remarked; she must have found it ironic that her rosebushes, having suffered years of Sagamore’s blundering, were about to be the beneficiaries of his decomposition.
The candlelit ritual must have looked striking from the Front Street sidewalk; that must be why the Rev. Lewis Merrill and his wife were drawn to our yard. Just as we were faced with a loss for words, the Rev. Mr. Merrill—who was already as pale as the winter months—appeared in the rose garden. His wife, red-nosed from the autumn’s first good dose of the common cold, was wearing her winter coat, looking prematurely sunk in deepest January. Taking their fragile constitutional, the Merrills had detected the presence of a religious ceremony.
My mother, shivering, seemed quite startled by the Merrills’ appearance.
“It makes me cold to look at you, Tabby,” Mrs. Merrill said, but Mr. Merrill glanced nervously from face to face, as if he were counting the living of the neighborhood in order to determine which poor soul was at rest in the burlap sack.
“Thank you for coming, Pastor,” said Mr. Fish, who was born to be an amateur actor. “Perhaps you could say a few words appropriate to the passing away of man’s best friend?”
But Mr. Merrill’s countenance was both stricken and uncomprehending. He looked at my mother, and at me; he stared at the burlap sack; he gazed into the hole in the rose bed as if it were his own grave—and no coincidence that a short walk with his wife had ended here.
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 crèche 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.