A prayer for Owen Meany Read Online Free PDF

few parental
rules from my childhood that remained unbroken, except once-by Owen. It was
never a rule that any of us cared to challenge; no one wanted to untie the rope
and plunge without hope of rescue toward the unknown bottom. But one fine
August day, Owen Meany untied the rope, underwater, and he swam underwater to
some hidden crevice in the rocky shore while we waited for him to rise. When he
didn't surface, we pulled up the rope. Because we believed that Owen was nearly
weightless, we refused to believe what our arms told us-that he was not at the
end of the rope. We didn't believe he was gone until we had the bulging knot at
the rope's end out of the water. What a silence that was!-interrupted only by
the drops of water from the rope falling into the quarry. No one called his
name; no one dove in to look for him. In that water, no one could seel I prefer
to believe that we would have gone in to look for him-if he'd given us just a
few more seconds to gather up our nerve-but Owen decided that our response was
altogether too slow and uncaring. He swam out from the crevice at the opposite
shore; he moved as lightly as a water bug across the terrifying hole that
reached, we were sure, to the bottom of the earth. He swam to us, angrier than
we'd ever seen him.
    "TALK ABOUT HURTING SOMEONE'S FEELINGS!" he cried.
"WHAT WERE YOU WATTING FOR? BUBBLES? DO YOU THINK I'M A FISH! WASN'T
ANYONE GOING TO TRY TO FIND ME?"
    "You scared us, Owen," one of us said. We were too
scared to defend ourselves, if there was any defending ourselves -ever-in
regard to Owen.
    "YOU LET ME DROWN!" Owen said. "YOU DIDN'T DO
ANYTHING! YOU JUST WATCHED ME DROWN! I'M ALREADY DEAD!" he told us.
"REMEMBER THAT: YOU LET ME DIE."
    What I remember best is Sunday school in the Episcopal Church.
Both Owen and I were newcomers there. When my mother married the second man she
met on the train, she and I changed churches; we left the Congregational Church
for the church of my adoptive father-he was, my mother said, an Episcopalian,
and although I never saw any evidence that he was a particularly serious
Episcopalian, my mother insisted that she and I move with him to his church. It
was a move that disturbed my grandmother, because we Wheelwrights had been in
the Congregational Church ever since we got over being Puritans ("ever
since we almost got over being Puritans," my grandmother used to say,
because-in her opinion- Puritanism had never entirely relinquished its hold on
us Wheelwrights). Some Wheelwrights-not only our founding father-had even been
in the ministry; in the last century, the Congregational ministry. And the move
upset the pastor of the Congregational Church, the Rev. Lewis Merrill; he'd
baptized me, and he was woebegone at the thought of losing my mother's voice
from the choir-he'd known her since she was a young girl, and (my mother always
said) he'd been especially supportive of her when she'd been calmly and
good-naturedly insisting on her privacy regarding my origins. The move did not
sit well with me, either-as you shall see. But Owen Meany's manner of making
and keeping a thing mysterious was to allude to something too dark and terrible
to mention. He was changing churches, he said, TO ESCAPE THE CATHOLICS-or,
actually, it was his father who was escaping and defying the Catholics by
sending Owen to Sunday school, to be confirmed, in the Episcopal Church. When
Congregationalists turned into Episcopalians, Owen told me, there was nothing
to it; it simply represented a move upward in church formality-in HOCUS-POCUS,
Owen called it. But for Catholics to move to the Episcopal Church
        was not only a
move away from the hocus-pocus; it was a move that risked eternal damnation.
Owen used to say, gravely, that his father would surely be damned for
initiating the move, but that the Catholics had committed an UNSPEAKABLE
OUTRAGE-that they had insulted his father and mother, irreparably. When I