A Prayer for Owen Meany

Crawley

Dearborn

Hilton

Hutchinson

Littlefield

Read

Rishworth

Smart

Smith

Walker

Wardell

Wentworth

Wheelwright

I doubt it’s because she was a Wheelwright that my mother never gave up her maiden name; I think my mother’s pride was independent of her Wheelwright ancestry, and that she would have kept her maiden name if she’d been born a Meany. And I never suffered in those years that I had her name; I was little Johnny Wheelwright, father unknown, and—at the time—that was okay with me. I never complained. One day, I always thought, she would tell me about it—when I was old enough to know the story. It was, apparently, the kind of story you had to be “old enough” to hear. It wasn’t until she died—without a word to me concerning who my father was—that I felt I’d been cheated out of information I had a right to know; it was only after her death that I felt the slightest anger toward her. Even if my father’s identity and his story were painful to my mother—even if their relationship had been so sordid that any revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable light upon both my parents—wasn’t my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?

Of course, as Owen Meany pointed out to me, I was only eleven when she died, and my mother was only thirty; she probably thought she had a lot of time left to tell me the story. She didn’t know she was going to die, as Owen Meany put it.

Owen and I were throwing rocks in the Squamscott, the saltwater river, the tidal river—or, rather, I was throwing rocks in the river; Owen’s rocks were landing in the mud flats because the tide was out and the water was too far away for Owen Meany’s little, weak arm. Our throwing had disturbed the herring gulls who’d been pecking in the mud, and the gulls had moved into the marsh grass on the opposite shore of the Squamscott.

It was a hot, muggy, summer day; the low-tide smell of the mud flats was more brinish and morbid than usual. Owen Meany told me that my father would know that my mother was dead, and that—when I was old enough—he would identify himself to me.

“If he’s alive,” I said, still throwing rocks. “If he’s alive and if he cares that he’s my father—if he even knows he’s my father.”

And although I didn’t believe him that day, that was the day Owen Meany began his lengthy contribution to my belief in God. Owen was throwing smaller and smaller rocks, but he still couldn’t reach the water; there was a certain small satisfaction to the sound the rocks made when they struck the mud flats, but the water was more satisfying than the mud in every way. And almost casually, with a confidence that stood in surprising and unreasonable juxtaposition to his tiny size, Owen Meany told me that he was sure my father was alive, that he was sure my father knew he was my father, and that God knew who my father was; even if my father never came forth to identify himself, Owen told me, God would identify him for me. “YOUR DAD CAN HIDE FROM YOU,” Owen said, “BUT HE CAN’T HIDE FROM GOD.”

And with that announcement, Owen Meany grunted as he released a stone that reached the water. We were both surprised; it was the last rock either of us threw that day, and we stood watching the circle of ripples extending from the point of entry until even the gulls were assured we had stopped our disturbance of their universe, and they returned to our side of the Squamscott.

For years, there was a most successful salmon fishery on our river; no salmon would be caught dead there now—actually, the only salmon you could find in the Squamscott today would be a dead one. Alewives were also plentiful back then—and still were plentiful when I was a boy, and Owen Meany and I used to catch them. Gravesend is only nine miles from the ocean. Although the Squamscott was never the Thames, the big oceangoing ships once made their way to Gravesend on the Squamscott; the channel has since become so obstructed by rocks and shoals that no boat requiring any great draft of water could navigate it. And although Captain John Smith’s beloved Pocahontas ended her unhappy life on British soil in the parish churchyard of the original Gravesend, the spiritually armless Watahantowet was never buried in our Gravesend. The only sagamore to be given official burial in our town was Mr. Fish’s black Labrador retriever, run over by a diaper truck on Front Street and buried—with the solemn attendance of some neighborhood children—in my grandmother’s rose garden.

For more than a century, the big business of Gravesend was lumber, which was the first big business of New Hampshire. Although New Hampshire is called the Granite State, granite—building granite, curbstone granite, tombstone granite—came after lumber; it was never the booming business that lumber was. You can be sure that when all the trees are gone, there will still be rocks around; but in the case of granite, most of it remains underground.

My uncle was in the lumber business—Uncle Alfred, the Eastman Lumber Company; he married my mother’s sister, my aunt, Martha Wheelwright. When I was a boy and traveled up north to visit my cousins, I saw log drives and logjams, and I even participated in a few log-rolling contests; I’m afraid I was too inexperienced to offer much competition to my cousins. But today, my Uncle Alfred’s business, which is in his children’s hands—my cousins’ business, I should say—is real estate. In New Hampshire, that’s what you have left to sell after you’ve cut down the trees.

But there will always be granite in the Granite State, and little Owen Meany’s family was in the granite business—not ever a recommended business in our small, seacoast part of New Hampshire, although the Meany Granite Quarry was situated over what geologists call the Exeter Pluton. Owen Meany used to say that we residents of Gravesend were sitting over a bona fide outcrop of intrusive igneous rock; he would say this with an implied reverence—as if the consensus of the Gravesend community was that the Exeter Pluton was as valuable as a mother lode of gold.

My grandmother, perhaps owing to her descendants from Mayflower days, was more partial to trees than to rocks. For reasons that were never explained to me, Harriet Wheelwright thought that the lumber business was clean and that the granite business was dirty. Since my grandfather’s business was shoes, this made no sense to me; but my grandfather died before I was born—his famous decision, to not unionize his shoeshop, is only hearsay to me. My grandmothe

r sold the factory for a considerable profit, and I grew up with her opinions regarding how blessed were those who murdered trees for a living, and how low were those who handled rocks. We’ve all heard of lumber barons—my uncle, Alfred Eastman, was one—but who has heard of a rock baron?

The Meany Granite Quarry in Gravesend is inactive now; the pitted land, with its deep and dangerous quarry lakes, is not even valuable as real estate—it never was valuable, according to my mother. She told me that the quarry had been inactive all the years that she was growing up in Gravesend, and that its period of revived activity, in the Meany years, was fitful and doomed. All the good granite, Mother said, had been taken out of the ground before the Meanys moved to Gravesend. (As for when the Meanys moved to Gravesend, it was always described to me as “about the time you were born.”) Furthermore, only a small portion of the granite underground is worth getting out; the rest has defects—or if it’s good, it’s so far underground that it’s hard to get out without cracking it.

Owen was always talking about cornerstones and monuments—a PROPER monument, he used to say, explaining that what was required was a large, evenly cut, smooth, unflawed piece of granite. The delicacy with which Owen spoke of this—and his own, physical delicacy—stood in absurd contrast to the huge, heavy slabs of rock we observed on the flatbed trucks, and to the violent noise of the quarry, the piercing sound of the rock chisels on the channeling machine—THE CHANNEL BAR, Owen called it—and the dynamite.

I used to wonder why Owen wasn’t deaf; that there was something wrong with his voice, and with his size, was all the more surprising when you considered that there was nothing wrong with his ears—for the granite business is extremely percussive.

It was Owen who introduced me to Wall’s History of Gravesend, although I didn’t read the whole book until I was a senior at Gravesend Academy, where the tome was required as a part of a town history project; Owen read it before he was ten. He told me that the book was FULL OF WHEELWRIGHTS.