Anyway, I crossed the border without incident. A Canadian customs officer asked me about the granite doorstop—JULY 1952. He seemed surprised when I told him it was a wedding present. The customs officer also asked me if I was a draft dodger; although I might have appeared—to him—too old to be dodging the draft, they had been drafting people over twenty-six for more than a year. I answered the question by showing the officer my missing finger.
“I’m not worried about the war,” I told him, and he let me into Canada without any more questions.
I might have ended up in Montreal; but too many people were pissy to me there, because I couldn’t speak French. And I arrived in Ottawa on a rainy day; I just kept driving until I got to Toronto. I’d never seen a lake as large as Lake Ontario; I knew I was going to miss the view of the Atlantic Ocean from the breakwater at Rye Harbor, so the idea of a lake that looked as big as the sea was appealing to me.
Not much else has happened to me. I’m a churchgoer and a schoolteacher. Those two devotions need not necessarily yield an unexciting life, but my life has been determinedly unexciting; my life is a reading list. I’m not complaining; I’ve had enough excitement. Owen Meany was enough excitement for a lifetime.
How it must have disappointed Owen … to discover that my father was such an insipid soup of a man. Lewis Merrill was so innocuous, how could I have remembered seeing him in those bleacher seats? Only Mr. Merrill could have escaped my attention. As many times as I searched the audience at the performances of The Gravesend Players (and the Rev. Mr. Merrill was always there), I always missed him, I never remembered him as he was in those bleacher seats, I simply overlooked him. In any gathering, not only did Mr. Merrill not stand out—he didn’t even show up!
How it has disappointed me … to discover that my father was just another Joseph. I never dared tell Owen, but once I dreamed that JFK was my father; after all, my mother was just as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe! How it has disappointed me … to discover that my father is just another man like me.
As for my faith: I’ve become my father’s son—that is, I’ve become the kind of believer that Pastor Merrill used to be. Doubt one minute, faith the next—sometimes inspired, sometimes in despair. Canon Campbell taught me to ask myself a question when the latter state settles upon me. Whom do I know who’s alive whom I love? Good question—one that can bring you back to life. These days, I love Dan Needham and the Rev. Katherine Keeling; I know I love them because I worry about them—Dan should lose some weight, Katherine should gain some! What I feel for Hester isn’t exactly love; I admire her—she’s certainly been a more heroic survivor than I’ve been, and her kind of survival is admirable. And then there are those distant, family ties that pass for love—I’m talking about Noah and Simon, about Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred. I look forward to seeing them every Christmas.
I don’t hate my father; I just don’t think about him very much—and I haven’t seen him since that day he committed Owen Meany’s body to the ground. I hear from Dan that he’s a whale of a preacher, and that there’s not a trace of the slight stutter that once marred his speech. At times I envy Lewis Merrill; I wish someone could trick me the way I tricked him into having such absolute and unshakable faith. For although I believe I know what the real miracles are, my belief in God disturbs and unsettles me much more than not believing ever did; unbelief seems vastly h
arder to me now than belief does—but belief poses so many unanswerable questions!
How could Owen Meany have known what he “knew”? It’s no answer, of course, to believe in accidents, or in coincidences; but is God really a better answer? If God had a hand in what Owen “knew,” what a horrible question that poses! For how could God have let that happen to Owen Meany?
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean—make sure they know what they mean!
It was more than a year after I came to Canada, when the town churches of Gravesend—and Hurd’s Church, upon the urging of Lewis Merrill—organized a so-called Vietnam Moratorium. On a given day in October, all the church bells were rung at 6:00 A.M.—I’m sure that pissed some people off!—and services were held as early as 7:00. Following the services, a parade then commenced from the town bandstand, marching up Front Street to assemble on the lawn in front of the Main Academy Building on the Gravesend campus; there followed a peaceful demonstration, so-called, and a few of the standard antiwar speeches. Typically, the town newspaper, The Gravesend News-Letter, did not editorialize on the event, except to say that a march against mayhem on the nation’s highways would be a more significant use of such civilian zeal; as for the academy newspaper, The Grave reported that it was “about time” the school and the town combined forces to demonstrate against the evil war. The News-Letter estimated the crowd was less than four hundred people—“and almost as many dogs.” The Grave claimed that the crowd swelled to at least six hundred “well-behaved” people. Both papers reported the only counterdemonstration. As the parade swung up Front Street—just past the old Town Hall, where The Gravesend Players had for so long been entertaining both young and old—a former American Legion commander stepped off the sidewalk and waved a North Vietnamese flag in the face of a young tuba player in the Gravesend Academy marching band.
Dan told me that the former American Legion commander was none other than Mr. Morrison, the cowardly mailman.
“I’d like to know how that idiot got his hands on a North Vietnamese flag!” my grandmother said.
Thus, with precious little to interrupt them, the years have also swung up Front Street and marched on by.
Owen Meany taught me to keep a diary; but my diary reflects my unexciting life, just as Owen’s diary reflected the vastly more interesting things that happened to him. Here’s a typical entry from my diary.
“Toronto: November 17, 1970—the Bishop Strachan greenhouse burned down today, and the faculty and students had to evacuate the school buildings.”
And let’s see: I also note in my diary every day when the girls sing “Sons of God” in morning chapel. I also entered in my diary the day that a journalist from some rock-music magazine tried to stop me for an on-the-spot “interview” as I was about to take a seat in morning chapel. He was a wild, hairy young man in a purple caftan—oblivious to how the girls stared at him and seemingly held together by wires and cords that entangled him in his cumbersome recording equipment. There he was, uninvited—unannounced!—sticking a microphone in my face and asking me, as Hester the Molester’s “kissing cousin,” if I didn’t agree that it all began to “happen” for Hester after she met someone called “Janet the Planet.”
“I beg your pardon!” I said. Around me, streams of girls were staring and giggling.
The interviewer was interested in asking me about Hester’s “influences”; he was writing a piece about Hester’s “early years,” and he had some ideas about who had influenced her—he said he wanted to “bounce” his ideas off me! I said I didn’t know who the fuck “Janet the Planet” even was, but if he was interested in who had “influenced” Hester, he should begin with Owen Meany. He didn’t know the name, he asked me how to spell it. He was very puzzled, he thought he’d heard of everyone!
“And would this be someone who was an influence in her early years?” he wanted to know. I assured him that Owen’s influence on Hester could be counted among the earliest.
And let’s see: what else? There was Mrs. Meany’s death, not long after Owen’s; I made note of it. And there was that spring when I was in Gravesend for Grandmother’s funeral—it was at the old Congregational Church, Grandmother’s lifelong church, and Pastor Merrill did not perform the service; whoever had replaced him at the Congregational Church was the officiant. There was still a lot of snow on the ground that spring—old, dead-gray snow—and I was opening another beer for Dan and myself in the kitchen at 80 Front Street, when I happened to look out the kitchen window at the withered rose garden, and there was Mr. Meany! Grayer than the old snow, and following some melted and refrozen footprints in the crust, he made his way slowly toward the house. I thought he was a kind of apparition. Speechless, I pointed at him, and Dan said: “It’s just poor old Mister Meany.”
The Meany Granite Company was dead and gone; the quarries had been unworked—and for sale—for years. Mr. Meany had a part-time job as a meter reader for the electric company. He appeared in the rose garden once a month, Dan said; the electric meter was on the rose-garden side of the house.
I didn’t want to speak with him; but I watched him through the window. I’d written him my condolences when I’d heard that Mrs. Meany had died—and how she’d died—but he’d never written back; I hadn’t expected him to write back.
Mrs. Meany had caught fire. She’d been sitting too close to the fireplace and a spark, an ember, had ignited the American flag, which—Mr. Meany told Dan—she was accustomed to wrapping around herself, like a shawl. Although her burns had not appeared to be that severe, she died in the hospital—of undisclosed complications.
When I saw Mr. Meany reading the electric meter at 80 Front Street, I realized that Owen’s medal had not been consumed with the flag in the fire. Mr. Meany wore the medal—he always wore it, Dan said. The cloth that shielded the pin above the medal was much faded—red and white stripes on a chevron of blue—and the gold of the medal itself blazed less brightly than it had blazed that day when a beam of sunlight had been reflected by it in Hurd’s Church; but the raised, unfurled wings of the American eagle were no less visible.
Whenever I think of Owen Meany’s medal for heroism, I’m reminded of Thomas Hardy’s diary entry in 1882—Owen showed it to me, that little bit about “living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.” I remember it whenever I think of Mr. Meany wearing Owen’s medal while he reads the electric meters.
Let’s see: there’s not much else—there’s almost nothing to add. Only this: that it took years for me to face my memory of how Owen Meany died—and once I forced myself to remember the details, I could never forget how he died; I will never forget it. I am doomed to remember this.
I had never been a major participant in Fourth of July celebrations in Gravesend; but the town was faithfully patriotic—it did not allow Independence Day to pass unnoticed. The parade was organized at the bandstand in the center of town, and marched nearly the whole length of Front Street, achieving peak band noise and the maximum number of barking dogs, and accompanying children on bicycles, at the midpoint of the march—precisely at 80 Front Street, where my grandmother was in the habit of viewing the hullabaloo from her front doorstep. Grandmother suffered ambivalent feelings every Fourth of July; she was patriotic enough to stand on her doorstep waving a small American flag—the flag itself was not any larger than the palm of her hand—but at the same time, she frowned upon all the ruckus; she frequently reprimanded the children who rode their bicycles across her lawn, and she shouted at the dogs to stop their fool barking.
I often watched the parade pass by, too; but after my mother died, Owen Meany and I never followed the parade on our bicycles—for the final destination of the band and the marchers was the cemetery on Linden Street. From 80 Front Street, we could hear the guns saluting the dead heroes; it was the habit in Gravesend to conclude a Memorial Day parade and a Veterans Day parade and an Independence Day parade with manly gunfire over the graves that knew too much quiet all the other days of the year.