I restrained myself from saying that I doubted any strychnine grew in Indiana or Arizona.
“HERE’S ANOTHER ENTRY IN THE ‘NO KIDDING!’ CATEGORY,” Owen said. “THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT ‘EVASION TECHNIQUES WHEN THERE IS LITTLE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FRIENDLY AND HOSTILE TERRITORY’—GET THIS: ‘IT IS DIFFICULT TO DISTINGUISH THE INSURGENT FROM THE FRIENDLY POPULACE.’”
I couldn’t help myself; I said: “I hope you don’t run into that problem in Indiana or Arizona.”
“LET’S HEAR SOMETHING FROM YOUR BOOK,” he said, closing his field manual.
I tried to explain about Mrs. Satterthwaite’s daughter—that she was a woman who’d left her husband and child to run off with another man, and now she wanted her husband to take her back, although she hated him and intended to make him miserable. A friend of the family—a priest—is confiding to Mrs. Satterthwaite his opinion of how her daughter will, one day, respond to an infidelity of her husband’s, which the priest believes is only to be expected. The priest believes that the daughter will “tear the house down”; that “the world will echo with her wrongs.”
Here is the scene I read to Owen Meany:
“‘Do you mean to say,’ Mrs. Satterthwaite said, ‘that Sylvia would do anything vulgar?’
“‘Doesn’t every woman who’s had a man to torture for years when she loses him?’ the priest asked. ‘The more she’s made an occupation of torturing him the less right she thinks she has to lose him.’”
“ WHAT A WORLD!” said Owen Meany.
There were more motorboats than loons on Loveless Lake; even at night, we heard more noise from engines than we heard from wildlife. We decided to drive north, through Dixville Notch, to Lake Francis; that was “real wilderness,” Simon had told us. Indeed, the camping on Lake Francis, which is one of New Hampshire’s northernmost lakes, was spectacular; but Owen Meany and I were not campers. On Lake Francis, the cries of the loons were so mournful that they frightened us; and the utter blackness of that empty lakeshore at night was terrifying. There was so much noise at night—insect, bird, and animal hoopla—that we couldn’t sleep. One morning, we saw a moose.
“LET’S GO HOME, BEFORE WE SEE A BEAR,” said Owen Meany. “BESIDES,” he said, “I SHOULD SPEND A LITTLE TIME WITH HESTER.”
But when we left Lake Francis, he turned the pickup north—toward Quebec.
“WE’RE VERY CLOSE TO CANADA,” he said. “I WANT TO SEE IT.”
At that particular border, there’s little to see—just forests, for miles, and a thin road so beaten by the winter that it is bruised to the color of pencil lead and pockmarked with frost heaves. The border outpost—the customs house—was a cabin; the gate across the road was as flimsy and innocent-looking as the gate guarding a railroad crossing—in fact, it was raised. The Canadian customs officers at the border didn’t pay any attention to us—although we parked the pickup truck about a hundred yards from the border, facing back toward the United States; then we lowered the tailgate of the truck and sat on it for a while, facing Canada. We sat there for half an hour before one of the Canadian customs officers walked a short distance in our direction and stood there, staring back at us.
No traffic passed us in either direction, and the dark fir trees that towered on either side of the border indicated no special respect for national boundaries.
“I’M SURE IT’S A NICE COUNTRY TO LIVE IN,” said Owen Meany, and we drove home to Gravesend.
We had a modest going-away party for him at 80 Front Street; Hester and Grandmother were a trifle teary, but the overall tone of our celebration was jolly. Dan Needham—our historian—delivered a lengthy and unresolved meditation on whether Fort Benjamin Harrison was named after William Henry Harrison’s father or grandson; Dan offered a similarly unresolved speculation on the origins of “Hoosier,” which we all knew was a nickname for a native of Indiana—but no one knew what else, if anything, a “Hoosier” was. Then we made Owen Meany stand in the dark inside the secret passageway, while Mr. Fish recited, too loudly, the passage that Owen had always admired from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
“‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once,’” Mr. Fish intoned.
“I KNOW! I KNOW! OPEN THE DOOR!” cried Owen Meany.
“‘Of all the wonders that I have yet heard,’” said Mr. Fish, “‘it seems to me the most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.’”
“OKAY! OKAY! I’M NOT AFRAID—BUT THERE ARE COBWEBS IN HERE! OPEN THE DOOR!” Owen cried.
Perhaps the darkness inspired him to insist that Hester and I follow him up to the attic. He wanted us to stand in the closet of Grandfather’s clothes with him; but this time we were not playing the armadillo game—we had no flashlight—and we were not in danger of having Hester grab our doinks. Owen just wanted us all to stand there for a moment, in the dark.
“Why are we doing this?” Hester asked.
“SSSHHH! FORM A CIRCLE, HOLD HANDS!” he commanded. We did as we were told; Hester’s hand was much bigger than Owen’s.
“Now what?” Hester asked.
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“SSSHHH!” Owen said. We breathed in the mothballs; the old clothes stirred against themselves—the mechanisms of the old umbrellas were so rusty that the umbrellas, I was sure, could never be opened again; and the brims of the old hats were so dry that they would crack if anyone attempted to give shape to them. “DON’T BE AFRAID,” said Owen Meany. That was all he had to say to us before he left for Indiana.
Several weeks went by before Hester and I heard from him; I guess they kept him pretty busy at Fort Benjamin Harrison. I would see Hester sometimes at night, along “the strip” at Hampton Beach; usually, some guy was with her—rarely the same guy, and never anyone she bothered to introduce me to.
“Have you heard anything from him?” I would ask her.
“Nothing yet,” she’d say. “Have you?”