A Prayer for Owen Meany

But the crèche’s most ominous message was that the little Lord Jesus himself was missing; the crib was empty—that was why the Virgin Mary had turned her mutilated face away; why one angel dashed its harp, and another screamed in anguish; why Joseph had lost a hand, and the cow a leg. The Christ Child was gone—kidnapped, or run away. The very object of worship was absent from the conventional assembly.

There appeared to be more order, more divine management in evidence in Owen’s room; still, there was nothing that represented anything as seasonal as Christmas—except the poinsettia-red dress that my mother’s dummy wore; but I knew that dress was all the dummy had to wear, year-round.

The dummy had taken a position at the head of Owen’s bed—closer to his bed than my mother had formerly positioned it in relationship to her own bed. From where Owen lay at night, it was instantly clear to me that he could reach out and touch the familiar figure.

“DON’T STARE AT THE DUMMY,” he advised me. “IT’S NOT GOOD FOR YOU.”

Yet, apparently, it was good for him—for there she was, standing over him.

The baseball cards, at one time so very much on display in Owen’s room, were not—I was sure—gone; but they were out of sigh

t. There was no baseball in evidence, either—although I was certain that the murderous ball was in the room. The foreclaws of my armadillo were surely there, but they were also not on display. And the Christ Child snatched from the crib … I was convinced that the Baby Jesus was somewhere in Owen’s room, perhaps in company with Potter’s prophylactic, which Owen had taken home with him but which was no more visible than the armadillo’s claws, the abducted Prince of Peace, and the so-called instrument of my mother’s death.

It was not a room that invited a long visit; our appearances at the Meanys’ house were brief, sometimes only for Owen to change his clothes, because—during that Christmas vacation, especially—he stayed overnight with me more than he stayed at home.

Mrs. Meany never spoke to me, or took any notice of me at all, when I came to the house; I could not remember the last time Owen had bothered to announce my presence—or, for that matter, his own presence—to his mother. But Mr. Meany was usually pleasant; I wouldn’t say he was cheerful, or even enthusiastic, and he was not a fellow for small talk, but he offered me his cautious version of humor. “Why, it’s Johnny Wheelwright!” he’d say, as if he were surprised I was there at all, or he hadn’t seen me for years. Perhaps this was his unsubtle way of announcing my presence to Mrs. Meany, but that lady was unchanged by her husband’s greeting; she remained in profile to both the window and to us. For variety, she would at times gaze into the fire, although nothing she saw there ever prompted her to tend to the logs or the coals; possibly she preferred smoke to flames.

And one day, when he must have been feeling especially conversational, Mr. Meany said: “Why, it’s Johnny Wheelwright! How goes all that Christmas rehearsin’?”

“Owen’s the star of the pageant,” I said. As soon as I spoke, I felt the knuckles of his tiny fist in my back.

“You never said you was the star,” Mr. Meany said to Owen.

“He’s the Baby Jesus!” I said. “I’m just old Joseph.”

“The Baby Jesus?” said Mr. Meany. “I thought you was an angel, Owen.”

“NOT THIS YEAR,” Owen said. “COME ON, WE GOTTA GO,” he said to me, pulling the back of my shirt.

“You’re the Christ Child?” his father asked him.

“I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN FIT IN THE CRIB,” Owen said.

“Now we’re not even using a crib,” I explained. “Owen’s in charge of the whole thing—he’s the star and the director.” Owen yanked my shirt so hard he untucked it.

“The director,” Mr. Meany repeated flatly. That was when I felt cold, as if a draft had pushed itself into the house in an unnatural way—down the warm chimney. But it was no draft; it was Mrs. Meany. She had actually moved. She was staring at Owen. There was confusion in her expression, a mix of terror and awe—of shock; but also of a most familiar resentment. By comparison to such a stare, I realized what a relief his mother’s profile must be to Owen Meany.

Outside, in the raw wind off the Squamscott, I asked Owen if I had said anything I shouldn’t have said.

“I THINK THEY LIKE ME BETTER AS AN ANGEL,” he said.

The snow never seemed to stick on Maiden Hill; it could never get a grip on the huge, upthrust slabs of granite that marked the rims of the quarries. In the pits themselves the snow was dirty, mixed with sand, tracked by birds and squirrels; the sides of the quarries were too steep for dogs. There is always so much sand around a granite quarry; somehow, it works its way to the top of the snow; and around Owen’s house there was always so much wind that the sand stung against your face—like the beach in winter.

I watched Owen pull down the earflaps of his red-and-black-checkered hunter’s cap; that was when I realized that I’d left my hat on his bed. We were on our way down Maiden Hill; Dan had said he’d meet us with the car, at the boathouse on the Swasey Parkway.

“Just a second,” I told Owen. “I forgot my hat.” I ran back to the house; I left him kicking at a rock that had been frozen in the ruts of the dirt driveway.

I didn’t knock; the clump of pine boughs on the door was blocking the most natural place to knock, anyway. Mr. Meany was standing by the mantel, either looking at the crèche or at the fire. “Just forgot my hat,” I said, when he looked up at me.

I didn’t knock on the door of Owen’s room, either. At first, I thought the dressmaker’s dummy had moved; I thought that somehow it had found a way to bend at the waist and had sat down on Owen’s bed. Then I realized that Mrs. Meany was sitting on the bed; she was staring quite intently at my mother’s figure and she did not interrupt her gaze when I entered the room.

“Just forgot my hat,” I repeated; I couldn’t tell if she heard me.

I put on my hat and was leaving the room, closing the door as quietly as I could behind me, when she said, “I’m sorry about your poor mother.” It was the first time she had ever spoken to me. I peeked back into the room. Mrs. Meany hadn’t moved; she sat with her head slightly bowed to the dressmaker’s dummy, as if she were awaiting some instructions.

It was noon when Owen and I passed under the railroad trestle bridge at the foot of the Maiden Hill Road, a few hundred yards below the Meany Granite Quarry; years later, the abutment of that bridge would be the death of Buzzy Thurston, who had successfully evaded the draft. But that Christmas of ’53, when Owen and I walked under the bridge, was the first time our being there coincided with the passing of The Flying Yankee—the express train that raced between Portland and Boston, in just two hours. It screamed through Gravesend every day at noon; and although Owen and I had watched it hurtle through town from the Gravesend depot, and although we had put pennies on the tracks for The Flying Yankee to flatten, we had never before been directly under the trestle bridge exactly as The Flying Yankee was passing over us.

I was still thinking of Mrs. Meany’s attitude of supplication before my mother’s dummy when the trestlework of the bridge began to rattle. A fine grit sifted down between the railroad ties and the trestles and settled upon Owen and me; even the concrete abutments shook, and—shielding our eyes from the loosened sand—we looked up to see the giant, dark underbelly of the train, speeding above us. Through the gaps between the passing cars, flashes of the leaden, winter sky blinked down on us.