igure of the woman in the red dress was standing beside him, my mother’s double, her dressmaker’s dummy. I know now that there were three holy men at 80 Front Street that day—three guys with their eyes on the weather. Owen wasn’t watching the departing honeymooners, either. Owen was also watching the skies, with one arm around the dummy’s waist, sagging on her hip, his troubled face peering upward. I should have known then what angel he was watching for; but it was a busy day, my mother was asking for Owen—I just ran upstairs and brought him to her. He didn’t seem to mind the hail; the pellets clattered off the car all around him, but I didn’t see one hit him. He stuck his face in the window and my mother kissed him. Then she asked him how he was getting home. “You’re not walking home, or taking your bike, Owen—not in this weather,” she said. “Do you want a ride?”
“ON YOUR HONEYMOON?” he asked.
“Get in,” she said. “Dan and I will drop you.”
He looked awfully pleased; that he should get to go on my mother’s honeymoon—even for a little bit of the way! He tried to slide into the car, past her, but his trousers were wet and they stuck against my mother’s skirt.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Let me out. You get in first.” She meant that he was small enough to straddle the drive-shaft hump, in the middle of the seat, between her and Dan, but when she stepped outside the Buick—even for just a second—a hailstone ricocheted off the roof of the car and smacked her right between the eyes.
“Ow!” she cried, holding her head.
“I’M SORRY!” Owen said quickly.
“Get in, get in,” Mother said, laughing.
They started to drive away.
It was then Hester realized that Owen had successfully made off with her panties.
She ran out in the driveway and stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the slowly moving car; Dan and my mother, facing forward, stuck their hands out the windows, risking the hailstones, and waved. Owen turned around in the seat between them and faced backward; his grin took up his whole face, and it was very clear, from the flash of white, what he was waving to Hester.
“Hey! You little creep!” Hester called. But the hail was turning back to rain; Hester was instantly soaked as she stood there in the driveway—and her yellow dress clung to her so tenaciously that it was easy to see what she was missing. She bolted for the house.
“Young lady,” my Aunt Martha said to her, “where on earth are your…”
“Merciful Heavens, Hester!” my grandmother said.
But the heavens did not look merciful, not at the moment. And my grandmother’s crones, observing Hester, must have been thinking: That may be Martha’s girl but she’s got more of Tabby’s kind of trouble in her.
Simon and Noah were gathering hailstones before they could melt in the returning rain. I ran outside to join them. They let fly at me with a few of the bigger ones; I gathered my own supply and fired back. I was surprised by the hailstones’ coldness—as if they had traveled to earth from another, much icier universe. Squeezing a hailstone the size of a marble in my hand, feeling it melt in my palm, I was also surprised by its hardness; it was as hard as a baseball.
Mr. Chickering, our fat and friendly Little League coach and manager—the man who decided, that day, to have Owen bat for me, the man who instructed Owen to “Swing away!”—Mr. Chickering is spending his last days in the Soldiers’ Home on Court Street. The wrecked images that his bout with Alzheimer’s hurl at him from time to time have left him jumpy and dazed, but curiously alert. Like a man sitting under a tree full of children pelting him with acorns, he seems to expect he’ll be hit at any moment, he even appears to be looking forward to it, but he has no notion where the acorns come from (despite what must be the firm feeling of the trunk of the tree against his back). When I visit him—when the acorns fly at him, and hit him just the right way—he perks up instantly. “You’re on deck, Johnny!” he says cheerfully. And once he said, “Owen’s batting for you, Johnny!” But, at other times, he is far away; perhaps he is turning my mother’s face to the ground, but taking care to close her eyes first—or else he is pulling down the skirt of her dress, for decency’s sake, and pinching her splayed knees together. Once, when he appeared to fail to recognize me—when I could establish no coherent communication with him—he spoke up as I was leaving; it was a sad, reflective voice that said, “You don’t want to see her, Johnny.”
At my mother’s funeral, in Hurd’s Church, Mr. Chickering was visibly moved. I’m certain that his rearranging of my mother’s body in its repose had been the only time he had ever touched her; both the memory of that, and of Police Chief Pike’s inquiries regarding the “instrument of death,” the “murder weapon,” had clearly rattled Mr. Chickering, who wept openly at the funeral, as if he were mourning the death of baseball itself. Indeed, not only had Owen and I quit the team—and that infernal game—forever; other members of our Little League team had used the upsetting incident as a means to get out of a tedious obligation that had been much more their parents’ notion of something that was “good for them” than it had ever been their sport of choice. Mr. Chickering, who was completely good-hearted, had always told us that when we won, we won as a team, and when we lost, we lost as a team. Now—in his view—we had killed as a team; but he wept in his pew as if he bore more than his share of team responsibility.
He had encouraged some of my other teammates and their families to sit with him—among them, the hapless Harry Hoyt, who’d received a base on balls with two outs, who’d made his own, small contribution to Owen Meany coming to the plate. After all, Harry could have been the last out—in which case, my mother would have taken Owen and me home from the game, as usual. But Harry had walked. He sat in Hurd’s, quite riveted by Mr. Chickering’s tears. Harry was almost innocent. We had been so many runs behind, and there were already two outs in our last inning; it made no sense for Harry Hoyt to walk. What possible good could a base on balls have done us? Harry should have been swinging away.
He was an otherwise harmless creature, although he would cause his mother no little grief. His father was dead, his mother was—for years—the receptionist at the Gas Works; she got all the calls about the billing errors, and the leaks. Harry would never be Gravesend Academy material. He dutifully finished Gravesend High School and enlisted in the Navy—the Navy was popular around Gravesend. His mother tried to get Harry out of the service, claiming she was a widow who needed his support; but—in the first place—she had a job, and in the second place, Harry wanted to go in the Navy. He was embarrassed by his mother’s lack of patriotic zeal; it may have been the only time he argued with anyone, but he won the argument—he got to go to Vietnam, where he was killed by one of the poisonous snakes of that region. It was a Russell’s viper and it bit him while he was peeing under a tree; a later revelation was that the tree stood outside a whorehouse, where Harry had been waiting his turn. He was like that; he was a walker—when there was no good reason to walk.
His death made his mother quite political—or at least “quite political” for Gravesend. She called herself a war resister and she advertised that in her home she would give free counsel on how to evade the draft; it was never very accurately demonstrated that her evening draft-counseling sessions so exhausted her that she became an inadequate receptionist at the Gas Works—yet the Gas Works let her go. Several patriots from the town were apprehended in the act of vandalizing her car and garage; she didn’t press charges, but she was gossiped about as a corrupter of the morals of youth. Although she was a plain, even dowdy woman, she was accused of seducing several of her young draft counselees, and she eventually moved away from Gravesend—I think she moved to Portsmouth; that was far enough away. I remember her at my mother’s funeral; she didn’t sit with her son Harry, where Mr. Chickering had gathered the team in adjacent pews. She was never a team player, Mrs. Hoyt; but Harry was.
Mrs. Hoyt was the first person I remember who said that to criticize a specific American president was not anti-American; that to criticize a specific American policy was not antipatriotic; and that to disapprove of our involvement in a particular war against the communists was not the same as taking the communists’ side. But these distinctions were lost on most of the citizens of Gravesend; they are lost on many of my former fellow Americans today.
I don’t remember seeing Buzzy Thurston at my mother’s funeral. He should have been there. After Harry Hoyt walked, Buzzy Thurston should have been the last out. He hit such an easy grounder—it was as sure an out as I’ve ever seen—but somehow the shortstop bobbled the ball. Buzzy Thurston reached base on an error. Who was that shortstop? He should have been in Hurd’s Church, too.
Possibly Buzzy wasn’t there because he was Catholic; Owen suggested this, but there were other Catholics in attendance—Owen was simply expressing his particular prejudice. And I may be doing Buzzy an injustice; maybe he was there—after all, Hurd’s was packed; it was as full as it had been for my mother’s wedding. All those same crones of my grandmother were there. I know what they came to see. How does royalty react to this? How will Harriet Wheelwright respond to Fate with a capital F—to a Freak Accident (with a capital F, too), or to an Act of God (if that’s what you believe it was)? All those same crones, as black and hunchbacked as crows gathered around some roadkill—they came to the service as if to say: We acknowledge, O God, that Tabby Wheelwright was not allowed to get off scot-free.
Getting off “scot-free” was a cardinal crime in New Hampshire. And by the birdy alertness visible in the darting eyes of my grandmother’s crones, I could tell that—in their view—my mother had not escaped her just reward.
Buzzy Thurston, there or not there, would not get off scot-free, either. I really didn’t dislike Buzzy—especially after he spoke up for Owen, when Owen and I got ourselves in hot water with some of Buzzy’s Catholic classmates because of a little incident at St. Michael’s, the parochial school. But Buzzy was judged harshly for his role in reaching base and bringing Owen Meany up to bat (if judgment is what you believe it was). He was not Gravesend Academy material, either; yet he
did a postgraduate year at the academy, because he was a fair athlete—your standard outdoor New England variety: a football, hockey, and baseball man. He did not always need to reach base on an error.
He was not outstanding, not at anything, but he was good enough to go to the state university, and he lettered in three sports there. He missed a year of competition with a knee injury, and managed to finagle a fifth year of college—retaining his student draft deferment for the extra year. After that, he was “draft material,” but he rather desperately strove to miss the trip to Vietnam by poisoning himself for his physical. He drank a fifth of bourbon a day for two weeks; he smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano; he started a fire in his parents’ oven, baking peyote; he was hospitalized with a colon disorder, following an LSD experience wherein he became convinced that his own Hawaiian sports shirt was edible, and he consumed some of it—including the buttons and the contents of the pocket: a book of matches, a package of cigarette papers, and a paper clip.
Given the provincialism of the Gravesend draft board, Buzzy was declared psychologically unfit to serve, which had been his crafty intention. Unfortunately, he had grown to like the bourbon, the marijuana, the peyote, and the LSD; in fact, he so worshiped their excesses that he was killed one night on the Maiden Hill Road by the steering column of his Plymouth, when he drove head-on into the abutment of the railroad bridge that was only a few hundred yards downhill from the Meany Granite Quarry. It was Mr. Meany who called the police. Owen and I knew that bridge well; it followed an especially sharp turn at the bottom of a steep downhill run—it called for caution, even on our bicycles.
It was the ill-treated Mrs. Hoyt who observed that Buzzy Thurston was simply another victim of the Vietnam War; although no one listened to her, she maintained that the war was the cause of the many abuses Buzzy had practiced upon himself—just as surely as the war had axed her Harry. To Mrs. Hoyt, these things were symptomatic of the Vietnam years: the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the suicidally fast driving, and the whorehouses in Southeast Asia, where many American virgins were treated to their first and last sexual experiences—not to mention the Russell’s vipers, waiting under the trees!