Dan Needham gave it to me. It was the first present any of my mother’s “beaus” gave me that I kept. For years—long after its claws were gone, and its tail fell off, and its stuffing came out, and its sides collapsed, and its nose broke in half, and its glass eyes were lost—I kept the bony plates from the shell of its back.
I loved the armadillo, of course, and Owen Meany also loved it. We would be playing in the attic, abusing my grandmother’s ancient sewing machine, or dressing up in my dead grandfather’s clothes, and Owen would say, out of nowhere, “LET’S GO GET THE ARMADILLO. LET’S BRING IT UP HERE AND HIDE IT IN THE CLOSET.”
The closet that housed my dead grandfather’s clothes was vast and mysterious, full of angles and overhead shelves, and rows upon rows of shoes. We would hide the armadillo in the armpit of an old tuxedo; we would hide it in the leg of an old pair of waders, or under a derby hat; we would hang it from a pair of suspenders. One of us would hide it and the other one would have to find it in the dark closet with the aid of only a flashlight. No matter how many times we had seen the armadillo, to come upon it in the black closet—to suddenly light up its insane, violent face—was always frightening. Every time the finder found it, he would yell.
Owen’s yelling would occasionally produce my grandmother, who would not willingly mount the rickety staircase to the attic and struggle with the attic’s trapdoor. She would stand at the foot of the staircase and say, “Not so loud, you boys!” And she would sometimes add that we were to be careful with the ancient sewing machine, and with Grandfather’s clothes—because she might want to sell them, someday. “That sewing machine is an antique, you know!” Well, almost everything at 80 Front Street was an antique, and almost none of it—Owen and I knew perfectly well—would ever be sold; not, at least, while my grandmother was alive. She liked her antiques, as was evidenced by the growing number of chairs and couches in the living room that no one was allowed to sit on.
As for the discards in the attic, Owen and I knew they were safe forever. And searching among those relics for the terrifying armadil
lo … which itself looked like some relic of the animal world, some throwback to an age when men were taking a risk every time they left the cave … hunting for that stuffed beast among the artifacts of my grandmother’s culture was one of Owen Meany’s favorite games.
“I CAN’T FIND IT,” he would call out from the closet. “I HOPE YOU DIDN’T PUT IT IN THE SHOES, BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO STEP ON IT BEFORE I SEE IT. AND I HOPE YOU DIDN’T PUT IT ON THE TOP SHELF BECAUSE I DON’T LIKE TO HAVE IT ABOVE ME—I HATE TO SEE IT LOOKING DOWN AT ME. AND IT’S NO FAIR PUTTING IT WHERE IT WILL FALL DOWN IF I JUST TOUCH SOMETHING, BECAUSE THAT’S TOO SCARY. AND WHEN IT’S INSIDE THE SLEEVES, I CAN’T FIND IT WITHOUT REACHING INSIDE FOR IT—THAT’S NO FAIR, EITHER.”
“Just shut up and find it, Owen,” I would say.
“NO FAIR PUTTING IT IN THE HATBOXES,” Owen would say, while I listened to him stumbling over the shoes inside the closet. “AND NO FAIR WHEN IT SPRINGS OUT AT ME BECAUSE YOU STRETCH THE SUSPENDERS IN THAT WAY … AAAAAAHHHHHH! THAT’S NO FAIR!”
Before Dan Needham brought anything as exotic as that armadillo or himself into my life, my expectations regarding anything unusual were reserved for Owen Meany, and for school holidays and portions of my summer vacation when my mother and I would travel “up north” to visit Aunt Martha and her family.
To anyone in coastal New Hampshire, “up north” could mean almost anywhere else in the state, but Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred lived in the White Mountains, in what everyone called “the north country,” and when they or my cousins said they were going “up north,” they meant a relatively short drive to any of several towns that were a little north of them—to Bartlett or to Jackson, up where the real skiing was. And in the summers, Loveless Lake, where we went to swim, was also “up north” from where the Eastmans lived—in Sawyer Depot. It was the last train station on the Boston & Maine before North Conway, where most of the skiers got off. Every Christmas vacation and Easter, my mother and I, and our skis, departed the train in Sawyer Depot; from the depot itself, we could walk to the Eastmans’ house. In the summer, when we visited at least once, it was an even easier walk—without our skis.
Those train rides—at least two hours from Gravesend—were the most concrete occasions I was given in which to imagine my mother riding the Boston & Maine in the other direction—south, to Boston, where I almost never went. But the passengers traveling north, I always believed, were very different types from the citybound travelers—skiers, hikers, mountain-lake swimmers: these were not men and women seeking trysts, or keeping assignations. The ritual of those train rides north is unforgettable to me, although I remember nothing of the equal number of rides back to Gravesend; return trips, to this day—from anywhere—are simply invitations to dull trances or leaden slumber.
But every time we rode the train to Sawyer Depot, my mother and I weighed the advantages of sitting on the left-hand side of the train, so that we could see Mt. Chocorua—or on the right-hand side, so that we could see Ossipee Lake. Chocorua was our first indication of how much snow there would be where we were going, but there’s more visible activity around a lake than there is on a mountain—and so we would sometimes “opt for Ossipee,” as Mother and I described our decision. We also played a game that involved guessing where everyone was going to get off, and I always ate too many of those little tea sandwiches that they served on board, the kind with the crusts cut off; this overeating served to justify my inevitable trip to that lurching pit with the railroad ties going by underneath me, in a blur, and the whoosh of rank air that blew upward on my bare bottom.
My mother would always say, “We’re almost at Sawyer Depot, Johnny. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable if you waited until we got to your Aunt Martha’s?”
Yes; and no. I could almost always have waited; yet it was not only necessary to empty my bladder and bowels before encountering my cousins—it was a needed test of courage to sit naked over that dangerous hole, imagining lumps of coal and loosened railroad spikes hurtling up at me at bruising speed. I needed the empty bladder and bowels because there was immediate, rough treatment ahead; my cousins always greeted me with instant acrobatics, if not actual violence, and I needed to brace myself for them, to frighten myself a little in order to be ready for all the future terrors that the vacation held in store for me.
I would never describe my cousins as bullies; they were good-natured, rambunctious roughnecks and daredevils who genuinely wanted me to have fun—but fun in the north country was not what I was used to in my life with the women at 80 Front Street, Gravesend. I did not wrestle with my grandmother or box with Lydia, not even when she had both her legs. I did play croquet with my mother, but croquet is not a contact sport. And given that my best friend was Owen Meany, I was not inclined to much in the way of athletic roughhousing.
My mother loved her sister and brother-in-law; they always made her feel special and welcome—they certainly made me feel that way—and my mother doubtless appreciated a little time away from my grandmother’s imperious wisdom.
Grandmother would come to Sawyer Depot for a few days at Christmas, and she would make a grand appearance for one weekend every summer, but the north country was not to Grandmother’s liking. And although Grandmother was perfectly tolerant of my solitary disruption of the adult life at 80 Front Street—and even moderately tolerant of the games I would play in that old house with Owen—she had scant patience for the disruption caused in any house by all her grandchildren. For Thanksgiving, the Eastmans came to 80 Front Street, a disturbance that my grandmother referred to in terms of “the casualties” for several months after their visit.
My cousins were active, combative athletes—my grandmother called them “the warriors”—and I lived a different life whenever I was with them. I was both crazy about them and terrified of them; I couldn’t contain my excitement as the time to see them drew near, but after several days, I couldn’t wait to get away from them—I missed the peace of my private games, and I missed Owen Meany; I even missed Grandmother’s constant but consistent criticism.
My cousins—Noah, Simon, and Hester (in order of their ages)—were all older than I: Hester was older by less than a year, although she would always be bigger; Simon was older by two years; Noah, by three. Those are not great differences in age, to be sure, but they were great enough in all those years before I was a teenager—when each of my cousins was better than I was, at everything.
Since they grew up in the north country, they were fabulous skiers. I was, at best, a cautious skier, modeling my slow, wide turns on my mother’s graceful but undaring stem Christie—she was a pretty skier of intermediate ability who was consistently in control; she did not think that the essence of the sport was speed, nor did she fight the mountain. My cousins raced each other down the slopes, cutting each other off, knocking each other down—and rarely restraining their routes of descent to the marked trails. They would lead me into the deep, unmanageable powder snow in the woods, and in my efforts to keep up with them, I would abandon the controlled, conservative skiing that my mother had taught me and end up straddling trees, embracing snow fences, losing my goggles in icy streams.
My cousins were sincere in their efforts to teach me to keep my skis parallel—and to hop on my skis—but a school-vacation skier is never the equal to a north-country native. They set such standards for recklessness that, eventually, I could no longer have fun skiing with my mother. I felt guilty that I made her ski alone; but my mother was rarely left alone for long. By the end of the day, some man—a would-be ski instructor, if not an actual ski instructor—would be coaching her at her side.
What I remember of skiing with my cousins is long, humiliating, and hurtling falls, followed by my cousins retrieving my ski poles, my mittens, and my hat—from which I became inevitably separated.
“Are you all right?” my eldest cousin, Noah, would ask me. “That looked rather harsh.”
“That looked neat!” my cousin Simon would say; Simon loved to fall—he skied to crash.
“You keep doing that, you’ll make yourself sterile,” said my cousin Hester, to whom every event of our shared childhood was either sexually exhilarating or sexually damaging.
In the summers, we went waterskiing on Loveless Lake, where the Eastmans kept a boathouse, the second floor of which was remodeled to resemble an English pub—Uncle Alfred was admiring of the English. My mother and Aunt Martha would go sailing, but Uncle Alfred drove the powerboat wildly and fast, a beer in his free hand. Because he did not water-ski himself, Uncle Alfred thought that the responsibility of the boat’s driver was to make the skier’s ride as harrowing as possible. He would double back in the middle of a turn so that the rope would go slack, or you could even catch up to the rope and ski over it. He drove a murderous figure 8; he appeared to relish surprising you, by putting you directly in the path of an oncoming boat or of another surprised water-skier on the busy lake. Regardless of the cause of your fall, Uncle Alfred took credit for it. When anyone racing behind the boat would send up a fabulous spray, skimming lengthwise across the water, skis ripped off, head under one second, up the next, and then under again—Uncle Alfred would shout, “Bingo!”
I am living proof that the waters of Loveless Lake are potable because I swallowed half the lake every summer while waterskiing with my cousins. Once I struck the surface of the lake with such force that my right eyelid was rolled up into my head in a funny way. My cousin Simon told me I had lost my eyelid—and my cousin Hester added that the lost eyelid would lead to blindness. But Uncle Alfred managed to locate the missing eyelid, after a few anxious minutes.
Indoor life with my cousins was no less vigorous. The savagery of pillow-fighting would leave me breathless, and there was a game that involved Noah and Simon tying me up and stuffing me in Hester’s laundry hamper, where Hester would always discover me; before she’d untie me, she’d accuse me of sniffing her underwear. I know that Hester especially looked forward to my visits because she suffered from being the constant inferior to her brothers—not that they abused her, or even teased her. Considering that they were boys, and older, and she was a girl, and younger, I though
t they treated her splendidly, but every activity my cousins engaged in was competitive, and it clearly irked Hester to lose. Naturally, her brothers could “best” her at everything. How she must have enjoyed having me around, for she could “best” me at anything—even, when we went to the Eastman lumberyard and the sawmill, at log-rolling. There was also a game that involved taking possession of a sawdust pile—those piles were often twenty or thirty feet high, and the sawdust nearer the bottom, in contact with the ground, was often frozen or at least hardened to a crusty consistency. The object was to be king of the mountain, to hurl all comers off the top of the pile—or to bury one’s attackers in the sawdust.