“Tabby!” he said in a whisper. He dropped the ball, which rolled out to the Front Street sidewalk. “God—forgive me!” said Pastor Merrill. “Tabby—I didn’t tell him! I promised you I wouldn’t, and I didn’t—it wasn’t me!” my father cried. His head began to sway—he couldn’t look at her—and he covered his eyes with both hands. He fell on his side, his head touching the grass border of the vestry path, and he drew up his knees to his chest—a
s if he were cold, or a baby going to sleep. He kept his eyes covered tightly, and he moaned: “Tabby—forgive me, please!”
After that, he began to babble incoherently; his voice was just a murmur, and he made slight jerking or twitching movements where he lay on the ground. There was just enough noise and motion from him to assure me that he wasn’t dead. I confess: I was slightly disappointed that the shock of my mother appearing before him hadn’t killed him. I picked up the dressmaker’s dummy and put her under my arm; one of Mary Magdalene’s dead-white arms fell off, and I carried this under my other arm. I picked up the baseball from the sidewalk and jammed it back into my pocket. I wondered if my father could hear me moving around, because he seemed to contort himself more tightly into a fetal position and to cover his eyes even more tightly—as if he feared my mother were coming nearer to him. Perhaps those bone-white, elongated arms had especially frightened him—as if Death itself had exaggerated my mother’s reach, and the Rev. Mr. Merrill was sure that she was going to touch him.
I put the dummy and Mary Magdalene’s arms into my Volkswagen and drove to the breakwater at Rye Harbor. It was midnight. I threw the baseball as far into the harbor as I could; it made a very small splash there—not disturbing the gulls. I flung Mary Magdalene’s long, heavy arms into the harbor, too; they made more of a splash, but the boats slapping on their moorings and the surf striking the breakwater outside the harbor had conditioned the gulls there to remain undisturbed by any noise of water.
Then I climbed out along the breakwater with the dummy in the red dress; the tide was high, and going out. I waded into the harbor channel, off the tip of the breakwater; I was quickly submerged, up to my chest, and I had to retreat to the last slab of granite on the breakwater—so that I could throw the dummy as far into the ocean as I could. I wanted to be sure that the dummy reached into the channel, which I knew was very, very deep. For a moment, I hugged the body of the dummy to my face; but whatever scent had once clung to the red dress had long ago departed. Then I threw the dummy into the channel.
For a horrible moment, it floated. There was air trapped under the hollow wire-mesh of the body. The dummy rolled over on its back in the water. I saw my mother’s wonderful bosom above the surface of the water—THE BEST BREASTS OF ALL THE MOTHERS! as Owen Meany had said. Then the dummy rolled again; bubbles of air escaped from the body, and “The Lady in Red” sank into the channel off the breakwater at Rye Harbor, where Owen Meany had firmly believed he had a right to sit and watch the sea.
I saw the sun come up, like a bright marble on the granite-gray surface of the Atlantic. I drove to the apartment I shared with Hester in Durham and took a shower and dressed for Owen’s funeral. I didn’t know where Hester was, but I didn’t care; I already knew how she felt about his funeral. I’d last seen Hester at 80 Front Street; with my grandmother, Hester and I had watched Bobby Kennedy be killed in Los Angeles—over and over again. That was when Hester had said: “Television gives good disaster.”
Owen had never said a word to me about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. That had happened in June 1968, when time was running out on Owen Meany. I’m sure that Owen was too preoccupied with his own death to have anything to say about Bobby Kennedy’s.
It was early in the morning, and I kept so few things in Hester’s apartment, it was no trouble to pack up what I wanted; mostly books. Owen had kept some books at Hester’s, too, and I packed one of them—C. S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms. Owen had circled a favorite sentence: “I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.” After I finished packing—and I’d left Hester a check for my share of the rent for the rest of the summer—I still had time to kill, so I read parts of Owen’s diary; I looked at the more disjointed entries, which were composed in a grocery-list style, as if he’d been making notes to himself. I learned that huachuca—as in Fort Huachuca—means “mountain of the winds.” And there were several pages of Vietnamese vocabulary and expressions—Owen had paid special attention to “COMMAND FORMS OF VERBS.” Two commands were written out several times—the pronunciation was emphasized; Owen had spelled the Vietnamese phonetically.
“NAM SOON—‘LIE DOWN’! DOONG SA—‘DON’T BE AFRAID’!”
I read that part over and over again, until I felt I had the pronunciation right. There was quite a good pencil drawing of a phoenix, that mythical bird that was supposed to burn itself on a funeral pyre and then rise up from its own ashes. Under the drawing, Owen had written: “OFTEN A SYMBOL OF REBORN IDEALISM, OR HOPE—OR AN EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY.” And on another page, jotted hastily in the margin—with no connection to anything else on the page—he had scrawled: “THIRD DRAWER, RIGHT-HAND SIDE.” This marginalia was not emphasized; in no way had he indicated that this was a message for me—but certainly, I thought, he must have remembered that time when he’d sat at Mr. Merrill’s desk, talking to Dan and me and opening and closing the desk drawers, without appearing to notice the contents.
Of course, he had seen the baseball—he had known then who my father was—but Owen Meany’s faith was huge; he had also known that God would tell me who my father was. Owen believed it was unnecessary to tell me himself. Besides: he knew it would only disappoint me.
Then I flipped to one of the parts of the diary where he’d mentioned me.
“THE HARDEST THING I EVER HAD TO DO WAS TO CUT OFF MY BEST FRIEND’S FINGER! WHEN THIS IS OVER, MY BEST FRIEND SHOULD MAKE A CLEAN BREAK FROM THE PAST—HE SHOULD SIMPLY START OVER AGAIN. JOHN SHOULD GO TO CANADA. I’M SURE IT’S A NICE COUNTRY TO LIVE IN—AND THIS COUNTRY IS MORALLY EXHAUSTED.”
Then I flipped to the end of the diary and reread his last entry.
“TODAY’S THE DAY! ‘… HE THAT BELIEVETH IN ME, THOUGH HE WERE DEAD, YET SHALL HE LIVE; AND WHOSOEVER LIVETH AND BELIEVETH IN ME SHALL NEVER DIE.’”
Then I closed Owen’s diary and packed it with the rest of my things. Grandmother was an early riser; there were a few photographs of her, and of my mother, that I wanted from 80 Front Street—and more of my clothes. I wanted to have breakfast in the rose garden with Grandmother; there was still a lot of time before Owen’s funeral—enough time to tell Grandmother where I was going.
Then I drove over to Waterhouse Hall and told Dan Needham what my plans were; also, Dan had something I wanted to take with me, and I knew he wouldn’t object—he’d been bashing his toes on it for years! I wanted the granite doorstop that Owen had made for Dan and my mother, his wedding present to them, the lettering in his famous, gravestone style—JULY 1952—and neatly beveled along the sides, and perfectly edged at the corners; it was crude, but it had been Owen’s earliest known work with the diamond wheel, and I wanted it. Dan told me that he understood everything, and that he loved me.
I told him: “You’re the best father a boy ever had—and the only father I ever needed.”
Then it was time for Owen Meany’s funeral.
Our own Gravesend chief of police, Ben Pike, stood at the heavy double doors of Hurd’s Church—as if he intended to frisk Owen Meany’s mourners for the “murder weapon,” the long-lost “instrument of death”; I was tempted to tell the bastard where he could find the fucking baseball. Fat Mr. Chickering was there, still grieving that he’d decided to let Owen Meany bat for me—that he’d told Owen to “swing away.” The Thurstons—Buzzy’s parents—were there, although they were Catholics and only recently had attended their own son’s funeral. And the Catholic priest—Father Findley—he was there, as was Mrs. Hoyt, despite how badly the town had treated her for her “anti-American” draft-counseling activities. Rector Wiggin and Barb Wiggin were not in attendance; they had so fervently sought to hold Owen’s service in Christ Church, no doubt they were miffed that they’d been rejected. Captain Wiggin, that crazed ex-pilot, had claimed that nothing could please him more than a bang-up funeral for a hero.
A unit of the New Hampshire National Guard provided a local funeral detail; they served as Owen’s so-called honor guard. Owen had once told me that they do this for money—they get one day’s pay. The casualty assistance officer—Owen’s body escort—was a young, frightened-looking first lieutenant who rendered a military salute more frequently than I thought was required of him; it was his first tour of duty in the Casualty Branch. The so-called survivor assistance officer was none other than Owen’s favorite professor of Military Science from the University of New Hampshire; Colonel Eiger greeted me most solemnly at the heavy double doors.
“I guess we were wrong about your little friend,” Colonel Eiger said to me.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“He proved he was quite suitable for combat,” Colonel Eiger said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. The colonel put his liver-spotted hand on my shoulder; then he stepped to one side of the heavy double doors and stood at attention, as if he meant to challenge Chief Ben Pike’s position of authority.
The honor guard, in white spats and white gloves, strode down the aisle in bridal cadence and smartly split to each side of the flag-draped casket, where Owen’s medal—pinned to the flag—brightly reflected the beam of sunlight that shone through the hole the baseball had made in the stained-glass window of the chancel. In the routine gloom of the old stone church, this unfamiliar beam of light appeared to be drawn to the bright gold of Owen’s medal—as if the light itself had burned a hole in the dark stained glass; as if the light had been searching for Owen Meany.
A stern, sawed-off soldier, whom Colonel Eiger had referred
to as a master sergeant, whispered something to the honor guard, who stood at parade rest and glanced anxiously at Colonel Eiger and the first lieutenant who was serving his first duty as a body escort. Colonel Eiger whispered something to the first lieutenant.
The congregation coughed; they creaked in the old, worn pews. The organ cranked out one dirge after another while the stragglers found their seats. Although Mr. Early was one of the ushers, and Dan Needham was another, most of the ushers were quarrymen—I recognized the derrickman and the dynamiters; I nodded to the signalman and the sawyers, and the channel bar drillers. These men looked like granite itself—its great strength can withstand a pressure of twenty thousand pounds per square inch. Granite, like lava, was once melted rock; but it did not rise to the earth’s surface—it hardened deep underground; and because it hardened slowly, it formed fairly large crystals.