I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear. “THIS IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS.”
After the service today, my fellow Torontonians and I stood in the sun on the church steps—and we lingered on the sidewalk along Lonsdale Road; the sun was so welcome, and so hot. We were childishly delighted by the heat, as if we’d spent years in an atmosphere as cold as the tomb where Mary Magdalene found Jesus missing. Leaning against me, and whispering into my ear—in a manner remindful of Owen Meany—Katherine Keeling said: “Those birds that flew north, and then south—today they’re flying north again.”
“Alleluia,” I said. I was thinking of Owen when I added, “He is risen.”
“Alleluia,” said the Rev. Mrs. Keeling.
That the television was always “on” at 80 Front Street ceased to tempt Owen and me. We could hear Grandmother, talking either to herself or to Ethel—or directly commenting to the TV—and we heard the rise and fall of the studio-made laughter. It was a big house; for four years, Owen and I had the impression that there was always a forbidding gathering of grown-ups, chattering away in a distant room. My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience and to amuse them, almost simultaneously—for they rewarded her humor with their punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice she used on them was uniformly abusive.
Thus Owen Meany and I learned what crap television was, without ever thinking that we hadn’t come to this opinion by ourselves; had my grandmother allowed us only two hours of TV a day, or not permitted us more than one hour on a “school night,” we probably would have become as slavishly devoted to television as the rest of our generation. Owen started out loving only a few things he saw on television, but he saw everything—as much of everything as he could stand.
After four years of television, though, he watched nothing but Liberace and the old movies. I did, or tried to do, everything Owen did. For example: in the summer of ’58 when we were both sixteen, Owen got his driver’s license before I got mine—not only because he was a month older, but because he already knew how to drive. He’d taught himself with his father’s various trucks—he’d been driving on those steep, loopy roads that ran around the quarries that pockmarked most of Maiden Hill.
He took his driver’s test on the day of his sixteenth birthday, using his father’s tomato-red pickup truck; in those days, there was no driver education course in New Hampshire, and you took your test with a local policeman in the passenger seat—the policeman told you where to turn, when to stop or back up or park. The policeman, in Owen’s case, was Chief Ben Pike himself; Chief Pike expressed concern regarding whether or not Owen could reach the pedals—or see over the steering wheel. But Owen had anticipated this: he was mechanically inclined, and he’d raised the seat of the pickup so high that Chief Pike hit his head on the roof; Owen had slid the seat so far forward that Chief Pike had considerable difficulty cramming his knees under the dashboard—in fact, Chief Pike was so physically uncomfortable in the cab of the pickup that he cut Owen’s test fairly short.
“HE DIDN’T EVEN MAKE ME PARALLEL-PARK!” Owen said; he was disappointed that he was denied the opportunity to show off his parallel-parking abilities—Owen Meany could slip that tomato-red pickup into a parking space that would have been challenging for a Volks
wagen Beetle. In retrospect, I’m surprised that Chief Pike didn’t search the interior of the pickup for that “instrument of death” he was always looking for.
Dan Needham taught me to drive; it was the summer Dan directed Julius Caesar in the Gravesend Academy summer school, and he would take me for lessons every morning before rehearsals. Dan would drive me out the Swasey Parkway and up Maiden Hill. I practiced on the back roads around the quarries—the roads on which Owen Meany learned to drive were good enough for me; and Dan judged it safer for me off the public highways, although the Meany Granite Company vehicles flew around those roads with reckless abandon.
The quarrymen were fearless drivers and they trucked the granite and their machinery at full throttle; but, in the summer, the trucks raised so much dust that Dan and I had warning when one was coming—I always had time to pull over, while Dan recited his favorite Shakespeare from Julius Caesar.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Whereupon, Dan would grip the dashboard and tremble while a dynamite truck hurtled past us.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me the most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Owen, too, was fond of that passage. When we saw Dan’s production of Julius Caesar, later that summer, I had passed my driver’s test; yet, in the evenings, when Owen and I would drive down to the boardwalk and the casino at Hampton Beach together, we took the tomato-red pickup and Owen always drove. I paid for the gas. Those summer nights of 1958 were the first nights I remember feeling “grown up”; we’d drive half an hour from Gravesend for the fleeting privilege of inching along a crowded, gaudy strip of beachfront, looking at girls who rarely looked at us. Sometimes, they looked at the truck. We could drive along this strip only two or three times before a cop would motion us over to the side of the street, examine Owen’s driver’s license—in disbelief—and then suggest that we find a place to park the truck and resume our looking at girls on foot, on either the boardwalk or on the sidewalk that threaded the arcades.
Walking with Owen Meany at Hampton Beach was ill-advised; he was so strikingly small, he was teased and roughed up by the delinquent young men who tilted the pinball machines and swaggered in the heated vicinity of the girls in their cotton-candy-colored clothes. And the girls, who rarely returned our glances when we were secure in the Meany Granite Company pickup, took very long (and giggling) looks at Owen when we were on foot. When he was walking, Owen didn’t dare look at the girls.
Therefore, when a cop would, inevitably, advise us to park the truck and pursue our interests “on foot,” Owen and I would drive back to Gravesend. Or we would drive to a popular daytime beach—Little Boar’s Head, which was beautifully empty at night. We’d sit on the sea wall, and feel the cool air off the ocean, and watch the phosphorescence sparkle in the surf. Or we would drive to Rye Harbor and sit on the breakwater, and watch the small boats slapping on the ruffled, pondlike surface; the breakwater itself had been built with the slag—the broken slabs—from the Meany Granite Quarry.
“THEREFORE, I HAVE A RIGHT TO SIT HERE,” Owen always said; no one, of course, ever challenged our being there.
Even though the girls ignored us that summer, that was when I noticed that Owen was attractive to women—not only to my mother.
It is difficult to say how he was attractive, or why; but even when he was sixteen, even when he was especially shy or awkward, he looked like someone who had earned what grasp of the world he had. I might have been particularly conscious of this aspect of him because he had truly earned so much more than I had. It was not just that he was a better student, or a better driver, or so philosophically sure of himself; here was someone I had grown up with, and had grown used to teasing—I had picked him up over my head and passed him back and forth, I had derided his smallness as surely as the other children had—and yet, suddenly, by the time he was sixteen, he appeared in command. He was more in command of himself than the rest of us, he was more in command of us than the rest of us—and with women, even with those girls who giggled when they looked at him, you sensed how compelled they were to touch him.
And by the end of the summer of ’58, he had something astonishing for a sixteen-year-old—in those days before all this ardent and cosmetic weightlifting, he had muscles! To be sure, he was tiny, but he was fiercely strong, and his sinewy strength was as visible as the strength of a whippet; although he was frighteningly lean, there was already something very adult about his muscular development—and why not? After all, he’d spent the summer working with granite. I hadn’t even been working.
In June, he’d started as a stonecutter; he spent most of the working day in the monument shop, cutting with the grain, WITH THE RIFT, as he called it—using the wedge and feathers. By the middle of the month, his father had taught him how to saw against the grain; the sawyers cut up the bigger slabs, and they finished the gravestones with what was called a diamond wheel—a circular blade, impregnated with diamonds. By July, he was working in the quarries—he was often the signalman, but his father apprenticed him to the other quarrymen: the channel bar drillers, the derrickman, the dynamiters. It seemed to me that he spent most of the month of August in a single, remote pit—one hundred and seventy-five feet deep, a football field in diameter. He and the other men were lowered to work in a grout bucket—“grout” is waste, the rubble of broken rock that is raised from the pit all day long. At the end of the day, they bring up the men in the bucket.
Granite is a dense, heavy stone; it weighs close to two hundred pounds per cubic foot. Ironically—even though they worked with the diamond wheel—most of the sawyers had all their fingers; but none of the quarrymen had all their fingers; only Mr. Meany had all his.
“I’LL KEEP ALL MINE, TOO,” Owen said. “YOU’VE GOT TO BE MORE THAN QUICK, YOU’VE GOT TO FEEL WHEN THE ROCK’S GOING TO MOVE BEFORE IT MOVES—YOU’VE GOT TO MOVE BEFORE THE ROCK MOVES.”
Just the slightest fuzz grew on his upper lip; nowhere else did his face show traces of a beard, and the faint moustache was so downy and such a pale-gray color that I first mistook it for pulverized granite, the familiar rock dust that clung to him. Yet his face—his nose, the sockets for his eyes, his cheekbones, and the contours of his jaw—had the gaunt definition that one sees in the faces of sixteen-year-olds only when they are starving.