“Caroline Perkins!” I said.
“MAYBE ONE DAY,” he said seriously. “BUT SHE’S NOT A MOTHER, EITHER.”
“Irene Babson!” I said.
“DON’T GIVE ME THE SHIVERS,” Owen said. “YOUR MOTHER’S THE ONE,” he said worshipfully. “AND SHE SMELLS BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE, TOO,” he added. I agreed with him about this; my mother always smelled wonderful.
Your own mother’s bosom is a strange topic of conversation in which to indulge a friend, but my mother was an acknowledged beauty, and Owen possessed a completely reliable frankness; you could trust him, absolutely.
My mother was often our driver. She drove me out to the quarry to play with Owen; she picked Owen up to come play with me—and she drove him home. The Meany Granite Quarry was about three miles out of the center of town, not too far for a bike ride—except that the ride was all uphill. Mother would often drive me out there with my bike in the car, and then I could ride my bike home; or Owen would ride his bike to town, and she’d take him and his bike back. The point is, she was so often our chauffeur that he might have seemed to her like a second son. And to the extent that mothers are the chauffeurs of small-town life, Owen had reason to identify her as more his mother than his own mother was.
When we played at Owen’s, we rarely went inside. We played in the rock piles, in and around the pits, or down by the river, and on Sundays we sat in or on the silent machinery, imagining ourselves in charge of the quarry—or in a war. Owen seemed to find the inside of his house as strange and oppressive as I did. When the weather was inclement, we played at my house—and since the weather in New Hampshire is inclement most of the time, we played most of the time at my house.
And play is all we did, it seems to me now. We were both eleven the summer my mother died. It was our last year in Little League, which we were already bored with. Baseball, in my opinion, is boring; one’s last year in Little League is only a preview of the boring moments in baseball that lie ahead for many Americans. Unfortunately, Canadians play and watch baseball, too. It is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action. At least, Little Leaguers play the game more quickly than grown-ups—thank God! We never devoted the attention to spitting, or to tugging at our armpits and crotches, that is the essential expression of nervousness in the adult sport. But you still have to wait between pitches, and wait for the catcher and umpire to examine the ball after the pitch—and wait for the catcher to trot out to the mound to say something to the pitcher about how to throw the ball, and wait for the manager to waddle onto the field and worry (with the pitcher and the catcher) about the possibilities of the next pitch.
That day, in the last inning, Owen and I were just waiting for the game to be over. We were so bored, we had no idea that someone’s life was about to be over, too. Our side was up. Our team was far behind—we had been substituting second-string players for first-string players so often and so randomly that I could no longer recognize half of our own batters—and I had lost track of my place in the batting order. I wasn’t sure when I got to be up to bat next, and I was about to ask our nice, fat manager and coach, Mr. Chickering, when Mr. Chickering turned to Owen Meany and said, “You bat for Johnny, Owen.”
“But I don’t know when I bat,” I said to Mr. Chickering, who didn’t hear me; he was looking off the field somewhere. He was bored with the game, too, and he was just waiting for it to be over, like the rest of us.
“I KNOW WHEN YOU BAT,” Owen said. That was forever irritating about Owen; he kept track of things like that. He hardly ever got to play the stupid game, but he paid attention to all the boring details, anyway.
“IF HARRY GETS ON, I’M ON DECK,” Owen said. “IF BUZZY GETS ON, I’M UP.”
“Fat chance,” I said. “Or is there only one out?”
“TWO OUT,” Owen said.
Everyone on the bench was looking off the field, somewhere—even Owen, now—and I turned my attention to the intriguing object of their interest. Then I saw her: my mother. She’d just arrived. She was always late; she found the game boring, too. She had an instinct for arriving just in time to take me and Owen home. She was even a sweater girl in the summer, because she favored those summer-weight jersey dresses; she had a nice tan, and the dress was a simple, white-cotton one—clinging about the bosom and waist, full skirt below—and she wore a red scarf to hold her hair up, off her bare shoulders. She wasn’t watching the game. She was standing well down the left-field foul line, past third base, looking into the sparse stands, the almost-empty bleacher seats—trying to see if there was anyone she knew there, I guess.
I realized that everyone was watching her. This was nothing new for me. Everyone was always staring at my mother, but the scrutiny seemed especially intense that day, or else I am remembering it acutely because it was the last time I saw her alive. The pitcher was looking at home plate, the catcher was waiting for the ball; the batter, I suppose, was waiting for the ball, too; but even the fielders had turned their heads to gape at my mother. Everyone on our bench was watching her—Mr. Chickering, the hardest; maybe Owen, the next hardest; maybe me, the least. Everyone in the stands stared back at her as she looked them over.
It was ball four. Maybe the pitcher had one eye on my mother, too. Harry Hoyt walked. Buzzy Thurston was up, and Owen was on deck. He got up from the bench and looked for the smallest bat. Buzzy hit an easy grounder, a sure out, and my mother never turned her head to follow the play. She started walking parallel to the third-base line; she passed the third-base coach; she was still gazing into the stands when the shortstop bobbled Buzzy Thurston’s easy grounder, and the runners were safe all around.
Owen was up.
As a testimony to how boring this particular game was—and how very much lost it was, too—Mr. Chickering told Owen to swing away; Mr. Chickering wanted to go home, too.
Usually, he said, “Have a good eye, Owen!” That meant, Walk! That meant, Don’t lift the bat off your
shoulders. That meant, Don’t swing at anything.
But this day, Mr. Chickering said, “Hit away, kid!”
“Knock the cover off the ball, Meany!” someone on the bench said; then he fell off the bench, laughing.
Owen, with dignity, stared at the pitcher.
“Give it a ride, Owen!” I called.
“Swing away, Owen!” said Mr. Chickering. “Swing away!”
Now the guys on our bench got into it; it was time to go home. Let Owen swing and miss the next three pitches, and then we were free. In addition, we awaited the potential comedy of his wild, weak swings.
The first pitch was way outside and Owen let it go.
“Swing!” Mr. Chickering said. “Swing away!”
“THAT WAS TOO FAR AWAY!” Owen said. He was strictly by the book, Owen Meany; he did everything by the rules.