Before they trouble themselves to read the second “phase” of Tess, called “Maiden No More,” I suggested that they trouble themselves to reread “The Maiden”—or, perhaps, read it for the first time, as the case may be!
“Pay attention,” I warned them. “When Tess says, ‘Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?’—pay attention! Pay attention to where Tess’s child is buried—‘in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where he lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.’ Ask yourself what Hardy thinks of ‘God’s allotment’—and what does he think of bad luck, of coincidence, of so-called circumstances beyond our control? And does he imagine that being a virtuous character exposes you to greater or fewer liabilities as you roam the world?”
“Sir?” said Leslie Ann Grew. That was very old-fashioned of her; it’s been years since anyone called me “Sir” at Bishop Strachan—unless it was a new kid. Leslie Ann Grew has been here for years. “If it’s another nice day tomorrow,” said Leslie Ann, “can we have class outside?”
“No,” I said; but I’m so slow—I feel so dull. I know what The Voice would have told her.
“ONLY IF IT RAINS,” Owen would have said. “IF IT POURS, THEN WE CAN HAVE CLASS OUTSIDE.”
At the start of the winter term of our tenth-grade year at Gravesend Academy, the school’s gouty minister—the Rev. Mr. Scammon, the officiant of the academy’s nondenominational faith and the lackluster teacher of our Religion and Scripture classes—cracked his head on the icy steps of Hurd’s Church and failed to regain consciousness. Owen was of the opinion that the Rev. Mr. Scammon never was fully conscious. For weeks after his demise, his vestments and his cane hung from the coat tree in the vestry office—as if old Mr. Scammon had journeyed no farther from this world than to the adjacent toilet. The Rev. Lewis Merrill was hired as his temporary replacement in our Religion and Scripture classes, and a Search Committee was formed to find a new school minister.
Owen and I had suffered through Religion One together in our ninth-grade year: old Mr. Scammon’s sweeping, Caesar-to-Eisenhower approach to the major religions of the world. We had been suffering Scammon’s Scripture course—and his Religion Two—when the icy steps of Hurd’s Church rose to meet him. The Rev. Mr. Merrill brought his familiar stutter and his almost-as-familiar doubts to both courses. In Scripture, he set us to work in our Bibles—to find plentiful examples of Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto the
m that call evil good and good evil.” In Religion Two—a heavy-reading course in “religion and literature”—we were instructed to divine Tolstoy’s meaning: “There was no solution,” Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is forget oneself.”
In both classes, Pastor Merrill preached his doubt-is-the-essence-of-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy; it was a point of view that interested Owen more than it had once interested him. The apparent secret was “belief without miracles”; a faith that needed a miracle was not a faith at all. Don’t ask for proof—that was Mr. Merrill’s routine message.
“BUT EVERYONE NEEDS A LITTLE PROOF,” said Owen Meany.
“Faith itself is a miracle, Owen,” said Pastor Merrill. “The first miracle that I believe in is my own faith itself.”
Owen looked doubtful, but he didn’t speak. Our Religion Two class—and our Scripture class, too—was an atheistic mob; except for Owen Meany, we were such a negative, anti-everything bunch of morons that we thought Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were more interesting writers than Tolstoy. And so the Rev. Lewis Merrill, with his stutter and his well-worn case of doubt, had his hands full with us. He made us read Greene’s The Power and the Glory—Owen wrote his term paper on “THE WHISKEY PRIEST: A SEEDY SAINT.” We also read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Lagerkvist’s Barabbas and Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov—Owen wrote my term paper on “SIN AND SMERDYAKOV: A LETHAL COMBINATION.” Poor Pastor Merrill! My old Congregationalist minister was suddenly cast in the role of Christianity’s defender—and even Owen argued with the terms of Mr. Merrill’s defense. The class loved Sartre and Camus—the concept of “the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation” was thrilling to us teenagers. The Rev. Mr. Merrill countered humbly with Kierkegaard: “What no person has a right to is to delude others into the belief that faith is something of no great significance, or that it is an easy matter, whereas it is the greatest and most difficult of all things.”
Owen, who’d had his doubts about Pastor Merrill, found himself in the role of the minister’s defender. “JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN’T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!” he said crossly. “LOOK AT THOSE WEIRDO TV MIRACLE-WORKERS—THEY’RE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN MAGIC! BUT THE REAL MIRACLES AREN’T ANYTHING YOU CAN SEE—THEY’RE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE WITHOUT SEEING. IF SOME PREACHER’S AN ASSHOLE, THAT’S NOT PROOF THAT GOD DOESN’T EXIST!”
“Yes, but let’s not say ‘asshole’ in class, Owen,” Pastor Merrill said.
And in our Scripture class, Owen said, “IT’S TRUE THAT THE DISCIPLES ARE STUPID—THEY NEVER UNDERSTAND WHAT JESUS MEANS, THEY’RE A BUNCH OF BUNGLERS, THEY DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD AS MUCH AS THEY WANT TO BELIEVE, AND THEY EVEN BETRAY JESUS. THE POINT IS, GOD DOESN’T LOVE US BECAUSE WE’RE SMART OR BECAUSE WE’RE GOOD. WE’RE STUPID AND WE’RE BAD AND GOD LOVES US ANYWAY—JESUS ALREADY TOLD THE DUMB-SHIT DISCIPLES WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. ‘THE SON OF MAN WILL BE DELIVERED INTO THE HANDS OF MEN, AND THEY WILL KILL HIM …’ REMEMBER? THAT WAS IN MARK—RIGHT?”
“Yes, but let’s not say ‘dumb-shit disciples’ in class, Owen,” Mr. Merrill said; but although he struggled to defend God’s Holy Word, Lewis Merrill—for the first time, in my memory—appeared to be enjoying himself. To have his faith assailed perked him up; he was livelier and less meek.
“I DON’T THINK THE CONGREGATIONALISTS EVER TALK TO HIM,” Owen suggested. “I THINK HE’S LONELY FOR CONVERSATION; EVEN IF ALL HE GETS IS AN ARGUMENT, AT LEAST WE’RE TALKING TO HIM.”
“I see no evidence that his wife ever talks to him,” Dan Needham observed. And the monosyllabic utterances of Pastor Merrill’s surly children were not of the engaging tones that invited conversation.
“WHY DOES THE SCHOOL WASTE ITS TIME WITH TWO SEARCH COMMITTEES?” asked The Voice in The Grave. “FIND A HEADMASTER—WE NEED A HEADMASTER—BUT WE DON’T NEED A SCHOOL MINISTER. WITH NO DISRESPECT FOR THE DEAD, THE REV. LEWIS MERRILL IS A MORE-THAN-ADEQUATE REPLACEMENT FOR THE LATE MR. SCAMMON: FRANKLY, MR. MERRILL IS AN IMPROVEMENT IN THE CLASSROOM. AND THE SCHOOL THINKS WELL ENOUGH OF HIS POWERS IN THE PULPIT TO HAVE ALREADY INVITED HIM TO BE THE GUEST PREACHER AT HURD’S CHURCH—ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS. THE REV. MR. MERRILL WOULD BE A GOOD SCHOOL MINISTER. WE SHOULD FIND OUT WHAT THE CONGREGATIONALISTS ARE PAYING HIM AND OFFER HIM MORE.”
And so they hired him away from the Congregationalists; once more, The Voice did not go unheard.
Toronto: May 12, 1987—a sunny, cool day, a good day to mow a lawn. The smell of freshly cut grass all along Russell Hill Road reflects how widespread is my neighbors’ interest in lawnmowing. Mrs. Brocklebank—whose daughter, Heather, is in my Grade 12 English class—took a slightly different approach to her lawn; I found her ripping her dandelions out by their roots.
“You’d better do the same thing,” she said to me. “Pull them out, don’t mow them under. If you chop them up with the mower, you’ll just make more of them.”
“Like starfish,” I said; I should have known better—it’s never a good idea to introduce Mrs. Brocklebank to a new subject, not unless you have time to kill. If I’d assigned “The Maiden” to Mrs. Brocklebank, she would have gotten everything right—the first time.
“What do you know about starfish?” she asked.
“I grew up on the seacoast,” I reminded her. It is occasionally necessary for me to tell Torontonians of the presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; they tend to think of the Great Lakes as the waters of the world.
“So what about starfish?” Mrs. Brocklebank asked.
“You cut them up, they grow more starfish,” I said.
“Is that in a book?” asked Mrs. Brocklebank. I assured her that it was. I even have a book that describes the life of the starfish, although Owen and I knew not to chop them up long before we read about them; every kid in Gravesend learned all about starfish at the beach at Little Boar’s Head. I remember my mother telling Owen and me not to cut them up; starfish are very destructive, and their powers of reproduction are not encouraged in New Hampshire.
Mrs. Brocklebank is persistent regarding new information; she goes after everything as aggressively as she attacks her dandelions. “I’d like to see that book,” she announced.
And so I began again with what has become a fairly routine labor: discouraging Mrs. Brocklebank from reading another book—I work as hard at discouraging her, and with as little success, as I sometimes labor to encourage those BSS girls to read their assignments.