for I am with you to deliver you,
says the Lord.
Then the Lord touches Jeremiah’s mouth, and says,
Behold, I have put my words in
your mouth.
See, I have set you this day over
nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.
It is on red-letter days, especially, that I think about Owen; sometimes I think about him too intensely, and that’s usually when I skip a Sunday service, or two—and I try not to pick up my prayer book for a while. I suppose the conversion of St. Paul has a special effect on a convert like me.
And how can I not think of Owen—when I read Paul’s letter to the Galatians, that part where Paul says, “And I was still not known by sight to the churches of Christ in Judea; they only heard it said, ‘He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.’ And they glorified God because of me.”
How well I know that feeling! I trust in God because of Owen Meany.
It was because I trusted Dan Needham that I gave the armadillo to Owen. I put it in a brown paper bag, which I put inside another brown paper bag, and although I had no doubt that Owen would know exactly what it was, before he opened the bags, I gave brief consideration to how shocked his mother might be if she opened the bags; but it was not her business to open the bags, I figured.
Owen and I were eleven; we had no other way to articulate what we felt about what had happened to my mother. He gave me his baseball cards, but he really wanted them back, and I gave him my stuffed armadillo, which I certainly hoped he’d give back to me—all because it was impossible for us to say to each other how we really felt. How did it feel to hit a ball that hard—and then realize that the ball had killed your best friend’s mother? How did it feel to see my mother sprawled in the grass, and to have the moronic chief of police complain about the missing baseball—and calling that stupid ball “the instrument of death” and “the murder weapon”? Owen and I couldn’t have talked about those things—at least, not then. So we gave each other our best-loved possessions, and hoped to get them back. When you think of it, that’s not so silly.
By my calculations, Owen was a day late returning the armadillo; he kept it overnight for two nights, which in my view was one night too many. But he did return it. Once again I heard the lowest-possible gear of the granite truck; once again, there was an early-morning drop-off at 80 Front Street, before Mr. Meany went ahead with the rest of the day’s heavy business. And there were the same brown paper bags that I had used on the step by the back door; it was a little dangerous to leave the armadillo outside on the step, I thought, given the indiscriminate appetites of that certain Labrador retriever belonging to our neighbor Mr. Fish. Then I remembered that Sagamore was dead.
But my greatest indignation was to follow: missing from the armadillo were the little animal’s front claws—the most useful and impressive parts of its curious body. Owen had returned the armadillo, but he’d kept the claws!
Well—friendship being one thing, and the armadillo quite another—I was so outraged by this discovery that I needed to talk to Dan Needham. As always, Dan made himself available. He sat on the edge of my bed while I sniveled; without its claws, the beast could no longer stand upright—not without pitching forward and resting on its snout. There was virtually no position I could find for the armadillo that did not make the creature resemble a supplicant—not to mention, a wretched amputee. I was quite upset at how my best friend could have done this to me, until Dan Needham informed me that this was precisely what Owen felt he had done to me, and to himself: that we were both maimed and mutilated by what had happened to us.
“Your friend is most original,” Dan Needham said, with the greatest respect. “Don’t you see, Johnny? If he could, he would cut off his hands for you—that’s how it makes him feel, to have touched that baseball bat, to have swung that bat with those results. It’s how we all feel—you and me and Owen. We’ve lost a part of ourselves.” And Dan picked up the wrecked armadillo and began to experiment with it on my night table, trying—as I had tried—to find a position that allowed the beast to stand, or even to lie down, with any semblance of comfort or dignity; it was quite impossible. The thing had been crippled; it was rendered an invalid. And how had Owen arranged the claws? I wondered. What sort of terrible altarpiece had he constructed? Were the claws gripping the murderous baseball?
And so Dan and I became quite emotional, while we struggled to find a way to make the armadillo’s appearance acceptable—but that was the point, Dan concluded: there was no way that any or all of this was acceptable. What had happened was unacceptable! Yet we still had to live with it.
“It’s brilliant, really—it’s absolutely original,” Dan kept muttering, until he fell asleep on the other twin bed in my room, where Owen had spent so many nights, and I covered him up and let him sleep. When my grandmother came to kiss me good night, she kissed Dan good night, too. Then, in the weak glow from the night-light, I discovered that by opening the shallow drawer under the top of the night table, I could position the armadillo in such a way that it was possible for me to imagine it was something else. Half in and half out of the drawer, the armadillo resembled a kind of aquatic creature—it was all head and torso; I could imagine that those were some sort of stunted flippers protruding where its claws had been.
Just before I fell asleep, I realized that everything Dan had said about Owen’s intentions was correct. How much it has meant to my life that Dan Needham was almost never wrong! I was not as familiar with Wall’s History of Gravesend as I became when I was eighteen and read the whole thing for myself; but I was familiar with those parts of it that Owen Meany considered “important.” And just before I fell asleep, I also recognized my armadillo for what it was—in addition to all those things Dan had told me. My armadillo had been amputated to resemble Watahantowet’s totem, the tragic and mysterious armless man—for weren’t the Indians wise enough to understand that everything had its own soul, its own spirit?
It was Owen Meany who told me that only white men are vain enough to believe that human beings are unique because we have souls. According to Owen, Watahantowet knew better. Watahantowet believed that animals had souls, and that even the much-abused Squamscott River had a soul—Watahantowet knew that the land he sold to my ancestors was absolutely full of spirits. The rocks they had to move to plant a field—they were, forever after, restless and displaced spirits. And the trees they cut down to build their homes—they had a different spirit from the spirits that escaped those houses as the smoke from firewood. Watahantowet may have been the last resident of Gravesend, New Hampshire, who really understood what everything cost. Here, take my land! There go my arms!
It would take me years to learn everything that Owen Meany was thinking, and I didn’t understand him very well that night. Now I know that the armadillo told me what Owen was thinking although Owen himself would not until we were both students at Gravesend Academy; it wasn’t until then that I realized Owen had already conveyed his message to me—via the armadillo. Here is what Owen Meany (and the armadillo) said: “GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD’S INSTRUMENT.”
How could it ever have occurred to me that a fellow eleven-year-old was thinking any such thing? That Owen Meany was a Chosen One was the furthest thing from my mind; that Owen could even consider himself one of God’s Appointed would have been a surprise to me. To have seen him up in the air, at Sunday school, you would not have thought he was at work on God’s Assignment. And you must remember—forgetting about Owen—that at the age of eleven I did not believe there were “chosen ones,” or that God “appointed”
anyone, or that God gave “assignments.” As for Owen’s belief that he was “God’s instrument,” I didn’t know that there was other evidence upon which Owen was basing his conviction that he’d been specially selected to carry out the work of the Lord; but Owen’s idea—that God’s reasoning was somehow predetermining Owen’s every move—came from much more than that one unlucky swing and crack of the bat. As you shall see.
Today—January 30, 1987—it is snowing in Toronto; in the dog’s opinion, Toronto is improved by snow. I enjoy walking the dog when it’s snowing, because the dog’s enthusiasm is infectious; in the snow, the dog establishes his territorial rights to the St. Clair Reservoir as if he were the first dog to relieve himself there—an illusion that is made possible by the fresh snow covering the legion of dog turds for which the St. Clair Reservoir is famous.
In the snow, the clock tower of Upper Canada College appears to preside over a preparatory school in a small New England town; when it’s not snowing, the cars and buses on the surrounding roads are more numerous, the sounds of traffic are less muted, and the presence of downtown Toronto seems closer. In the snow, the view of the clock tower of Upper Canada College—especially from the distance of Kilbarry Road, or, closer, from the end of Frybrook Road—reminds me of the clock tower of the Main Academy Building in Gravesend; fastidious, sepulchral.
In the snow, there is something almost like New England about where I live on Russell Hill Road; granted, Torontonians do not favor white clapboard houses with dark-green or black shutters, but my grandmother’s house, at 80 Front Street, was brick—Torontonians prefer brick and stone. Inexplicably, Torontonians clutter their brick and stone houses with too much trim, or with window trim and shutters—and they also carve their shutters with hearts or maple leaves—but the snow conceals these frills; and on some days, like today, when the snow is especially wet and heavy, the snow turns even the brick houses white. Toronto is sober, but not austere; Gravesend is austere, but also pretty; Toronto is not pretty, but in the snow Toronto can look like Gravesend—both pretty and austere.
And from my bedroom window on Russell Hill Road, I can see both Grace Church on-the-Hill and the Bishop Strachan chapel; how fitting that a boy whose childhood was divided by two churches should live out his present life in view of two more! But this suits me now; both churches are Anglican. The cold, gray stones of both Grace Church and The Bishop Strachan School are also improved by snow.