What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism—namely, their own. They thought that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would be the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar “movement” with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say—two years later, in 1969—so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war—they made that war last longer. That’s what I saw. I took my missing finger home to New Hampshire, and let Hester get arrested in Washington by herself; she was not exactly alone—there were mass arrests that October.
By the end of ’67, there was trouble in California, there was trouble in New York; and there were five hundred thousand U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. More than sixteen thousand Americans had been killed there. That was when General Westmoreland said, “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view.”
That was what prompted Owen Meany to ask: “WHAT END?” The end of the war would not come soon enough to save Owen.
They put him in a closed casket, of course; the casket was draped with the U.S. flag, and his medal was pinned to the flag. Like any first lieutenant on active duty, he rated a full military funeral with honors, with escort officers, with taps—with the works. He could have been buried at Arlington; but the Meanys wanted him buried in Gravesend. Because of the medal, because the story of Owen’s heroism was in all the New Hampshire newspapers, that oaf—the Rev. Dudley Wiggin—wanted Owen to have an Episcopalian service; Rector Wiggin, who was a virulent supporter of the Vietnam War, wanted to perform Owen’s funeral in Christ Church.
I prevailed upon the Meanys to use Hurd’s Church—and to let the Rev. Lewis Merrill perform the service. Mr. Meany was still angry at Gravesend Academy for expelling Owen, but I convinced him that Owen would be “outraged in heaven” if the Wiggins ever got their hands on him.
“Owen hated them,” I told Mr. and Mrs. Meany. “And he had a rather special relationship with Pastor Merrill.”
It was the summer of ’68; I was sick of hearing white people talk about how Soul on Ice had changed their lives—I’ll bet Eldridge Cleaver was sick of hearing that, too—and Hester said that if she heard “Mrs. Robinson” one more time, she would throw up. That spring—in the same month—Martin Luther King had been assassinated and Hair had opened on Broadway; the summer of ’68 suffered from what would become the society’s commonplace blend of the murderous and the trivial.
It was stifling hot in the Meanys’ sealed house—sealed tight, I was always told, because Mrs. Meany was allergic to the rock dust. She sat with her familiarly unfocused gaze, directed—as it often was—into the dead ashes in the fireplace, above which the dismembered Nativity figures surrounded the empty cradle in the crèche. Mr. Meany prodded one of the andirons with the dirty toe of his boot.
“They gave us fifty thousand dollars!” said Mr. Meany; Mrs. Meany nodded her head—or she appeared to nod her head. “Where’s the government get that kind of money?” he asked me; I shook my head. I knew the money came from us.
“I’m familiar with Owen’s favorite hymns,” I told the Meanys. “I know Pastor Merrill will say a proper prayer.”
“A lot of good all Owen’s prayin’ done him!” said Mr. Meany; he kicked the andiron.
Later, I went and sat on the bed in Owen’s room. The severed arms from the vandalized statue of Mary Magdalene were oddly attached to my mother’s dressmaker’s dummy—formerly, as armless as she was headless. The pale, whitewashed arms were too long for the smaller proportions of my mother’s figure; but I suppose that these overreaching arms had only enhanced Owen’s memory of the affection my mother had felt for him. His Army duffel bag was on the bed beside me; the Meanys had not unpacked it.
“Would you like me to unpack his bag?” I asked the Meanys.
“I’d be happy if you would,” his father told me. Later, he came into the room and said: “I’d be happy if there was anythin’ of his you wanted—I know he’d have liked you to have it.”
In the duffel bag was his diary, and his well-worn paperback edition of Selections from the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas—I took them both; and his Bible. It was tough looking at his things. I was surprised that he had never unpackaged all the baseball cards that he had so symbolically delivered to me, and that I’d returned to him; I was surprised at how withered and grotesque were my armadillo’s amputated claws—they had once seemed such treasures, and now, in addition to their ugliness, they even appeared much smaller than I’d remembered them. But most of all I was surprised that I couldn’t find the baseball.
“It ain’t here,” Mr. Meany said; he was watching me from the door of Owen’s room. “Look all you want, but you won’t find it. It never was here—I know, I been lookin’ for it for years!”
“I just assumed …” I said.
“Me too!” said Mr. Meany.
The baseball, the so-called “murder weapon,” the so-called “instrument of death”—it never was in Owen Meany’s room!
I read the passage Owen had underlined most fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas—“Demonstration of God’s Existence from Motion.” I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen Meany’s bed.
Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.
The bed moved; Mr. Meany had sat down beside me. Without looking at me, he covered my hand with his workingman’s paw; he was not in the least squeamish about touching the stump of my amputated finger.
“You know, he wasn’t … natural,”
Mr. Meany said.
“He was very special,” I said; but Mr. Meany shook his head.
“I mean he wasn’t normal, he was born … different,” said Mr. Meany.
Except for the time she’d told me she was sorry about my poor mother, I had never heard Mrs. Meany speak; my unfamiliarity with her voice—and the fact that she spoke from her position at the fireplace, in the living room—made her voice quite startling to me.
“Stop!” she called out. Mr. Meany held my hand a little tighter.
“I mean he was born unnaturally,” said Mr. Meany. “Like the Christ Child—that’s what I mean,” he said. “Me and his mother, we didn’t ever do it…”
“Stop!” Mrs. Meany called out.