“She just conceived a child—like the Christ Child,” said Mr. Meany.
“He’ll never believe you! No one ever believes you!” cried Mrs. Meany.
“You’re saying that Owen was a virgin birth?” I asked Mr. Meany; he wouldn’t look at me, but he nodded vigorously.
“She was a virgin—yes!” he said.
“They never, never, never, never believe you!” called out Mrs. Meany.
“Be quiet!” he called back to her.
“There couldn’t have been … some accident?” I asked.
“I told you, we didn’t ever do it!” he said roughly.
“Stop!” Mrs. Meany called out; but she spoke with less urgency now. She was completely crazy, of course. She might have been retarded. She might not even have known how to “do it,” or even if or when she had done it. She might have been lying, all these years, or she might have been too powerfully damaged to even remember the means by which she’d managed to get pregnant!
“You really believe …” I started to say.
“It’s true!” Mr. Meany said, squeezing my hand until I winced. “Don’t be like those damn priests!” he said. “They believe that story, but they wouldn’t listen to this one! They even teach that other story, but they tell us our story is worse than some kinda sin! Owen was no sin!” said Mr. Meany.
“No, he wasn’t,” I said softly. I wanted to kill Mr. Meany—for his ignorance! I wanted to stuff that madwoman into the fireplace!
“I went from one church to the next—those Catholics!” he shouted. “All I knew was granite,” he said. That really is all he knows! I thought. “I worked the quarries in Concord, summers, when I was a boy. When I met the Missus, when she … conceived Owen … there wasn’t no Catholic in Concord we could even talk to! It was an outrage … what they said to her!”
“Stop!” Mrs. Meany called out quietly.
“We moved to Barre—there was good granite up there. I wish I had granite half as good here!” Mr. Meany said. “But the Catholic Church in Barre was no different—they made us feel like we was blasphemin’ the Bible, like we was tryin’ to make up our own religion, or somethin’.”
Of course they had made up their own “religion”; they were monsters of superstition, they were dupes of the kind of hocus-pocus that the television evangelists call “miracles.”
“When did you tell Owen?” I asked Mr. Meany. I knew they were stupid enough to have told him what they preposterously believed.
“Stop!” Mrs. Meany called out; her voice now sounded merely habitual—or as if she were imparting a prerecorded message.
“When we thought he was old enough,” Mr. Meany said; I shut my eyes.
“How old would he have been—when you told him?” I asked.
“I guess he was ten or eleven—it was about the time he hit that ball,” Mr. Meany told me.
Yes, that would do it, I thought. I imagined that would have been a time when the story of his “virgin birth” would have made quite an impression on Owen Meany—real son-of-God stuff! I imagined that the story would have given Owen the shivers. It seemed to me that Owen Meany had been used as cruelly by ignorance as he had been used by any design. I had seen what God had used him for; now I saw how ignorance had used him, too.
It had been Owen, I remembered, who had said that Christ had been USED—when Barb Wiggin had implied that Christ had been “lucky,” when the Rev. Dudley Wiggin had said that Christ, after all, had been “saved.” Maybe God had used Owen; but certainly Mr. and Mrs. Meany, and their colossal ignorance, had used Owen, too!
I thought that I had everything I wanted; but Mr. Meany was surprised I didn’t take the dressmaker’s dummy, too. “I figure everythin’ he kept was for somethin’!” Mr. Meany said.
I couldn’t imagine what my mother’s sad red dress, her dummy, and Mary Magdalene’s stolen arms could ever possibly be for—and I said so, a little more tersely than I meant to. But, no matter, the Meanys were invulnerable to such subtleties as tone of voice. I said good-bye to Mrs. Meany, who would not speak to me or even look at me; she went on staring into the fireplace, at some imaginary point beyond the dead ashes—or deep within them. I hated her! I thought she was a convincing argument for mandatory sterilization.
In the rutted, dirt driveway, Mr. Meany said to me: “I got some-thin’ I’d like to show you—it’s at the monument shop.”
He went to get the pickup truck, in which he said he’d follow me to the shop; while I was waiting for him, I heard Mrs. Meany call out from the sealed house: “Stop!”
I had not been to the monument shop since Owen had surgically created my draft deferment. When Owen had been home for Christmas—it was his last Christmas, 1967—he had spent a lot of time in the monument shop, catching up on orders that his father had, as usual, fallen behind with, or had botched in other ways. Owen had several times invited me to the shop, to have a beer with him, but I had declined the invitations; I was still adjusting to life without a right index finger, and I assumed that the sight of the diamond wheel would give me the shivers.
It was a quiet Christmas leave for him. We practiced the shot for three or four days in a row; of course, my part in this exercise was extremely limited, but I still had to catch the ball and pass it back to him. The finger gave me no trouble; Owen was very pleased about that. And I thought it would have been ungenerous of me to complain about the difficulty I had with other tasks—writing and eating, for example; and typing, of course.
It was a kind of sad Christmas for him; Owen didn’t see much of Hester, whose remarks—only a few months before—concerning her refusal to attend his funeral appeared to have hurt his feelings. And then everything that happened after Christmas hastened a further decline in his relationship with Hester, who grew ever more radical in her opposition to the war, beginning in January, with McCarthy announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Who’s he kidding?” Hester asked. “He’s about as good a candidate as he is a poet!” Then in February, Nixon announced his candidacy. “Talk about going to the dogs!” Hester said. And in the same month, there was the all-time-high weekly rate for U.S. casualties in Vietnam—543 Americans were killed in one week! Hester sent Owen a nasty letter. “You must be up to your asshole in bodies—even in Arizona!” Then in March, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination; in the same month, President Johnson said he would not seek reelection. Hester considered Johnson’s resignation a triumph of the “Peace Movement”; a month later, when Humphrey announced that he was a candidate, Owen Meany wrote Hester and said: “SOME TRIUMPH FOR THE SO-CALLED MOVEMENT—JUST WAIT AND SEE!”