A Prayer for Owen Meany: Chapters 1–2

But I skip a Sunday service now and then; I make no claims to be especially pious; I have a church-rummage faith—the kind that needs patching up every weekend.

The Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock.

Together with the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for disturbing “the civil peace”; in truth, he did nothing more seditious than offer some heterodox opinions regarding the location of the Holy Ghost—but Massachusetts judged him harshly.

Together with the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for disturbing “the civil peace”; in truth, he did nothing more seditious than offer some heterodox opinions regarding the location of the Holy Ghost—but Massachusetts judged him harshly.

He was deprived of his weapons; and with his family and several of his bravest adherents, he sailed north from Boston to Great Bay, where he must have passed by two earlier New Hampshire outposts—what was then called Strawbery Banke, at the mouth of the Pascataqua (now Portsmouth), and the settlement in Dover.

Even if my father’s identity and his story were painful to my mother—even if their relationship had been so sordid that any revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable light upon both my parents—wasn’t my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?

And although Captain John Smith’s beloved Pocahontas ended her unhappy life on British soil in the parish churchyard of the original Gravesend, the spiritually armless Watahantowet was never buried in our Gravesend.

Owen Meany used to say that we residents of Gravesend were sitting over a bona fide outcrop of intrusive igneous rock; he would say this with an implied reverence—as if the consensus of the Gravesend community was that the Exeter Pluton was as valuable as a mother lode of gold.

She told me that the quarry had been inactive all the years that she was growing up in Gravesend, and that its period of revived activity, in the Meany years, was fitful and doomed.

It was Owen who introduced me to Wall’s History of Gravesend, although I didn’t read the whole book until I was a senior at Gravesend Academy, where the tome was required as a part of a town history project; Owen read it before he was ten.

My mother was not a brazen character. Her pregnancy, and her refusal to discuss it, must have struck the Wheelwrights with all the more severity because my mother had such a tranquil, modest nature.

It was from my cousins that I first heard that my mother was thought to be “a little simple”; it would have been from their mother—from Aunt Martha—that they would have heard this. By the time I heard these insinuations—“a little simple”—they were no longer fighting words; my mother had been dead for more than ten years.

And there was another time, when Owen and I had been catching alewives in the tidewater culvert that ran into the Squamscott under the Swasey Parkway and I slipped and broke my wrist; she didn’t take the Boston & Maine that week.

His cartoon voice has made an even stronger impression on me than has my grandmother’s imperious wisdom.

He was my best friend, and with our best friends we overlook many differences; but it wasn’t until we found ourselves attending the same Sunday school, and the same church, that I was forced to accept that my best friend’s religious faith was more certain (if not always more dogmatic) than anything I heard in either the Congregational or the Episcopal Church.

It was a stone church, and there was a ground-floor or even underground mustiness to the place, which was overcrowded with dark wood bric-a-brac, somber with dull gold organ pipes, garish with confused configurations of stained glass—through which not a single branch of a tree was visible.

In his waning years—ever watchful that Gravesend Academy devote itself to “pious and charitable purposes”—the Rev. Mr. Hurd was known to patrol Water Street in downtown Gravesend, looking for youthful offenders: specifically, young men who would not doff their hats to him, and young ladies who would not curtsy.

There was something about Mrs. Meany’s obdurate self-imprisonment that smacked of religious persecution—if not eternal damnation.

And her dress was never slatternly, never wanton, never garish; she was so conservative in her choice of colors that I remember little in her wardrobe that wasn’t black or white, except for some accessories—she had a fondness for red (in scarves, in hats, in shoes, in mittens and gloves).

We all thought that my mother was speaking euphemistically. I wasn’t present when she’d announced the particulars or the case of the first man she claimed she’d met on the train.

“But he’s called Dan,” my mother added, bringing a slight frown to my grandmother’s countenance.

Both Lydia and my grandmother stared at me, as if only my friends would be uncouth enough to make a call after dinner, uninvited.

They would suggest a game of catch in the backyard, and then rifle an uncatchable football into my small face, or they would palaver to me in baby talk about showing them my favorite toy—so that they might know what kind of thing was more appropriate to bring me, next time.

Therefore, although the living room was quite sumptuously arranged with upholstered chairs and couches, very little of this furniture was usable—and so a guest, his or her knees already bending in the act of sitting down, would suddenly snap to attention as my grandmother shouted, “Oh, for goodness sake, not there! You can’t sit there!”

Still, I wanted to see it, and with trepidation—and as silently as possible, so that the bores in the living room would not hear the paper crinkling of the two bags—I opened just a little bit of the bag within the bag.

But the passengers traveling north, I always believed, were very different types from the citybound travelers—skiers, hikers, mountain-lake swimmers: these were not men and women seeking trysts, or keeping assignations.

Uncle Alfred was a paragon of maleness, too, in that he was rich and he dressed like a lumberjack; that he spent most of the day behind a desk did not influence his appearance.

While wrestling with my cousins and me, Uncle Alfred was an ever-friendly bruiser; and the cologne of his rough-and-ready business, the veritable scent of the woods, was always upon him.

And the way she tore the thread out of her damaged blouse with her teeth—snarling and cursing in the process, as if she were eating her blouse—must have demonstrated to Owen the full potential of Hester’s dangerous mouth; at that moment, her basic rapaciousness was quite generously displayed.

And from that moment of his introduction to my cousins, I would frequently consider the issue of exactly how human Owen Meany was; there is no doubt that, in the dazzling configurations of the sun that poured through the attic skylight, he looked like a descending angel—a tiny but fiery god, sent to adjudicate the errors of our ways.

I knew without speaking to Owen that neither of us would ever play Little League ball again, and that there was some necessary ritual ahead of us both—wherein we would need to throw away our bats and gloves and uniforms, and every stray baseball there was to be found around our houses and yards (except for that baseball, which I suspected Owen had relegated to a museum-piece status).

Did they merely represent how he was washing his hands of the great American pastime, or did he want me to assuage my grief by indulging in the pleasure I would derive from burning all those baseball cards?

And there were the same brown paper bags that I had used on the step by the back door; it was a little dangerous to leave the armadillo outside on the step, I thought, given the indiscriminate appetites of that certain Labrador retriever belonging to our neighbor Mr. Fish.

There was virtually no position I could find for the armadillo that did not make the creature resemble a supplicant—not to mention, a wretched amputee.

And Dan picked up the wrecked armadillo and began to experiment with it on my night table, trying—as I had tried—to find a position that allowed the beast to stand, or even to lie down, with any semblance of comfort or dignity; it was quite impossible.

In the snow, the view of the clock tower of Upper Canada College—especially from the distance of Kilbarry Road, or, closer, from the end of Frybrook Road—reminds me of the clock tower of the Main Academy Building in Gravesend; fastidious, sepulchral.

In the snow, the view of the clock tower of Upper Canada College—especially from the distance of Kilbarry Road, or, closer, from the end of Frybrook Road—reminds me of the clock tower of the Main Academy Building in Gravesend; fastidious, sepulchral.

Toronto is sober, but not austere; Gravesend is austere, but also pretty; Toronto is not pretty, but in the snow Toronto can look like Gravesend—both pretty and austere.

He even said that “a key element of the U.S.-Soviet agenda” is “more responsible Soviet conduct around the world”—as if the United States were a bastion of “responsible conduct around the world”!

According to the State Department, according to Dean Rusk—remember him?—we were “winning a war of attrition.”