Bishop Strachan girls-they are so smartly dressed, they drive Jaguars, they never have time to talk. I know that they dismiss the Rev. Mrs. Katherine Keeling as a typical headmistress type-Katherine is not the sort of woman they would look at twice. But she is wise and kind and witty and articulate; and she does not bullshit herself about What Easter means.
'EASTER MEANS WHAT IT SAYS,' said Owen Meany. At Christ Church on Easter Sunday, Rector Wiggin always said: 'Alleluia. Christ is risen.'
And we, the People-we said: 'The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.'
Toronto: April , -a humid, summery Easter Sunday. It does not matter what prelude begins the service; I will always hear Handel's Messiah-and my mother's not-quite-trained soprano singing, 'I know that my Redeemer liveth/' This morning, in Grace Church on-the-Hill, I sat very still, waiting for that passage in John; I knew what was coming. In
the old King James version, it was called a 'sepulchre'; in the Revised Standard version, it is just a 'tomb.' Either way, I know the story by heart.
'Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran, and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.' '
I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear. 'THIS IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS.'
After the service today, my fellow Torontonians and I stood in the sun on the church steps-and we lingered on the sidewalk along Lonsdale Road; the sun was so welcome, and so hot. We were childishly delighted by the heat, as if we'd spent years in an atmosphere as cold as the tomb where Mary Magdalene found Jesus missing. Leaning against me, and whispering into my ear-in a manner remindful of Owen Meany-Katherine Keeling said: 'Those birds that flew north, and then south-today they're flying north again.'
'Alleluia,' I said. I was thinking of Owen when I added, 'He is risen.'
'Alleluia,' said the Rev. Mrs. Keeling. That the television was always 'on' at Front Street ceased to tempt Owen and me. We could hear Grandmother, talking either to herself or to Ethel-or directly commenting to the TV-and we heard the rise and fall of the studio-made laughter. It was a big house; for four years, Owen and I had the impression that there was always a forbidding gathering of grown-ups, chattering away in a distant room. My grandmother sounded as if she were the haranguing leader of a compliant mob, as if it were her special responsibility to berate her audience and to amuse them, almost simultaneously-for they rewarded her humor with their punctual laughter, as if they were highly entertained that the tone of voice she used on them was uniformly abusive. Thus Owen Meany and I learned what crap television was, without ever thinking that we hadn't come to this opinion by ourselves; had my grandmother allowed us only two hours of TV a day, or not permitted us more than one hour on a 'school night,' we probably would have become as slavishly devoted to television as the rest of our generation. Owen started out loving only a few things he saw on television, but he saw everything-as much of everything as he could stand. After four years of television, though, he watched nothing but Liberace and the old movies. I did, or tried to do, everything Owen did. For example; in the summer of ' when we were both sixteen, Owen got his driver's license before I got mine-not only because he was a month older, but because he already knew how to drive. He'd taught himself with his father's various trucks-he'd been driving on those steep, loopy roads that ran around the quarries that pockmarked most of Maiden Hill. He took his driver's test on the day of his sixteenth birthday, using his father's tomato-red pickup truck; in those days, there was no driver education course in New Hampshire, and you took your test with a local policeman in the passenger seat-the policeman told you where to turn, when to stop or back up or park. The policeman, in Owen's case, was Chief Ben Pike himself; Chief Pike expressed concern regarding whether or not Owen could reach the pedals-or see over the steering wheel. But Owen had anticipated this: he was mechanically inclined, and he'd raised the seat of the pickup so high that Chief Pike hit his head on the roof; Owen had shd the seat so far forward that Chief Pike had considerable difficulty cramming his knees under the dashboard-in fact, Chief Pike was so physically uncomfortable in the cab of the pickup that he cut Owen's test fairly short.
'HE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE ME PARALLEL-PARK!' Owen said; he was disappointed that he was denied the opportunity to show off his parallel-parking abilities-Owen Meany could slip that tomato-red pickup into a parking space that would have been challenging for a Volkswagen Beetle. In retrospect, I'm surprised that Chief Pike didn't search the interior of the pickup for that 'instrument of death' he was always looking for. Dan Needham taught me to drive; it was the summer Dan directed Julius Caesar in the Gravesend Academy summer school, and he would take me for lessons every morning before rehearsals. Dan would drive me out the Swasey Parkway and up Maiden Hill. I practiced on the back roads around the quarries-the roads on which Owen Meany learned to drive were good enough for me; and Dan judged it safer for me off
the public highways, although the Meany Granite Company vehicles flew around those roads with reckless abandon. The quarrymen were fearless drivers and they trucked the granite and their machinery at full throttle; but, in the summer, the trucks raised so much dust that Dan and I had warning when one was coming-I always had time to pull over, while Dan recited his favorite Shakespeare from Julius Caesar. Cowards die many
