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!”
“Owen talked to you about it?” I asked.
“All the time,” said Pastor Merrill, with an irritatingly dismissive wave of his hand. “He talked to me, he talked to Father Findley—why do you think Findley forgave him for that vandalism of his blessed statue? Father Findley knew what a lot of rubbish that monstrous mother and father had been feeding Owen—for years!”
“But what did you tell Owen about it?” I asked.
“Certainly not that I thought he was the second Christ!” the Rev. Mr. Merrill said.
“Certainly not,” I said. “But what did he say?”
The Rev. Lewis Merrill frowned. He began to stutter. “Owen M-M-M-Meany didn’t exactly believe he was J-J-J-Jesus—but he said to me that if I could believe in one v-v-v-virgin birth, why not in another one?”
“That sounds like Owen,” I said.
“Owen b-b-b-believed that there was a purpose to everything that h-h-h-happened to him—that G-G-G-God meant for the story of his life to have some m-m-m-meaning. God had p-p-p-picked Owen,” Pastor Merrill said.
“Do you believe that?” I asked him.
“My faith …” he started to say; then he stopped. “I believe …” he started again; then he stopped again. “It is obvious that Owen Meany was g-g-g-gifted with certain precognitive p-p-p-powers—visions of the f-f-f-future are not unheard of, you know,” he said.
I was angry with the Rev. Mr. Merrill for making of Owen Meany what Mr. Merrill so often made of Jesus Christ, or of God—a subject for “metaphysical speculation.” He turned Owen Meany into an intellectual problem, and I told him so.
“You want to call Owen, and everything that happened to him, a m-m-m-miracle—don’t you?” Mr. Merrill asked me.
“Well, it is ‘miraculous,’ isn’t it?” I asked him. “You must agree it is at least extraordinary!”
“You sound positively converted,” Mr. Merrill said condescendingly. “I would be careful not to confuse your g-g-g-grief with genuine, religious belief…”
“You don’t sound to me as if you believe very much!” I said angrily.
“About Owen?” he asked me.
“Not just about Owen,” I said. “You don’t seem to me to believe very much in God—or in any of those so-called miracles. You’re always talking about ‘doubt as the essence and not the opposite of faith’—but it seems to me that your doubt has taken control of you. I think that’s what Owen thought about you, too.”
“Yes, that’s true—that’s what he thought about m-m-m-me,” the Rev. Lewis Merrill said. We sat together in the vestry office, not talking, for almost an hour, or maybe two hours; it grew dark while we sat there, but Mr. Merrill didn’t move to turn on the desk lamp.