A prayer for Owen Meany Read Online Free PDF Page A

Even in her rose garden, she did not want
to be seen underdressed. If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw
them out. When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my
grandmother said, "What? And have those people at the cleaners wonder what
I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?"
    From my grandmother I learned that logic is relative. But this story
really is about Owen Meany, about how I have apprenticed myself to his voice.
His cartoon voice has made an even stronger impression on me than has my
grandmother's imperious wisdom. Grandmother's memory began to elude her near
the end. Like many old people, she had a firmer grasp of her own childhood than
she had of the lives of her own children, or her grandchildren, or her
great-grandchildren. The more recent the memory was, the more poorly
remembered. "I remember you as a little boy," she told me, not long
ago, "but when I look at you now, I don't know who you are." I told
her I occasionally had the same feeling about myself. And in one conversation
about her memory, I asked her if she remembered little Owen Meany.
    "The labor man?" she said. "The unionist!"
    "No, Owen Meany," I said.
    "No," she said. "Certainly not."
    "The granite family?" I said. "The Meany Granite
Quarry. Remember?"
    "Granite," she said with distaste. "Certainly
not!"
    "Maybe you remember his voice?" I said to my
grandmother, when she was almost a hundred years old. But she was impatient
with me; she shook her head. I was getting up the nerve to imitate Owen's
voice.
    "I turned out the lights in the secret passageway, and
scared him," I reminded Grandmother.
    "You were always doing that," she said indifferently.
"You even did that to Lydia-when she still had both her legs."
    "TURN ON THE LIGHT!" said Owen Meany. "SOMETHING
IS TOUCHING MY FACE! TURN ON THE LIGHT! IT'S SOMETHING WITH A TONGUE! SOMETHING
IS LICKING ME!" Owen Meany cried.
    "It's just a cobweb, Owen," I remember telling him.
    "IT'S TOO WET FOR A COBWEB! IT'S A TONGUE I TURN ON THE
LIGHT!"
    "Stop it!" my grandmother told me. "I remember, I
remember-for God's sake," she said. "Don't ever do that again!"
she told me. But it was from my grandmother that I gained the confidence that I
could imitate Owen Meany's voice at all. Even when her memory was shot,
Grandmother remembered Owen's voice; if she remembered him as the instrument of
her daughter's death, she didn't say. Near the end, Grandmother didn't remember
that I had become an Anglican-and a Canadian. The Meanys, in my grandmother's
lexicon, were not Mayflower stock. They were not descended from the founding
fathers; you could not trace a Meany back to John Adams. They were descended from
later immigrants; they were Boston Irish. The Meanys made their move to New
Hampshire from Boston, which was never England; they'd also lived in Concord,
New Hampshire, and in Barre, Vermont-those were much more working-class places
than Gravesend. Those were New England's true granite kingdoms. My grandmother
believed that mining and quarrying, of all kinds, was groveling work-and that
quarriers and miners were more closely related to moles than to men. As for the
Meanys: none of the family was especially small, except for Owen. And for all
the dirty tricks we played on him, he tricked us only once. We were allowed to
swim in one of his father's quarries only if we entered and left the water one
at a time and with a stout rope tied around our waists. One did not actually
swim in those quarry lakes, which were rumored to be as deep as the ocean; they
were as cold as the ocean, even in late summer; they were as black and still as
pools of oil. It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you'd
jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth-our fear of what was on the bottom, and
how far below us the bottom was. Owen's father, Mr. Meany, insisted on the
rope-insisted on one-at-a-time, in-and-out. It was one of the