He went to get the pickup truck, in which he said he'd follow me to the shop; while I was waiting for him, I heard Mrs. Meany call out from the sealed house: 'Stop!'
I had not been to the monument shop since Owen had surgically created my draft deferment. When Owen had been home for Christmas-it was his last Christmas, -he had spent a lot of time in the monument shop, catching up on orders that his father had, as usual, fallen behind with, or had botched in other ways. Owen had several times invited me to the shop, to have a beer with him, but I had declined the invitations; I was still adjusting to life without a right index finger, and I assumed that the sight of the diamond wheel would give me the shivers. It was a quiet Christmas leave for him. We practiced the shot for three or four days in a row; of course, my part in this exercise was extremely limited, but I still had to catch the ball and pass it back to him. The finger gave me no trouble; Owen was very pleased about that. And I thought it would have been ungenerous of me to complain about the difficulty I had with other tasks-writing and eating, for example; and typing, of course. It was a kind of sad Christmas for him; Owen didn't see much of Hester, whose remarks-only a few months before- concerning her refusal to attend his funeral appeared to have hurt his feelings. And then everything that happened after Christmas hastened a further decline in his relationship with Hester, who grew ever more radical in her opposition to the war, beginning in January, with McCarthy announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. 'Who's he kidding?' Hester asked. 'He's about as good a candidate as he is a poet' Then in February, Nixon announced his candidacy. 'Talk about going to the dogs!' Hester said. And in the same month, there was the all-time-high weekly rate for U.S. casualties in Vietnam- Americans were killed in one week! Hester sent Owen a nasty letter. 'You must b>e up to your asshole in bodies-even in Arizona!' Then in March, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination; in the same month, President Johnson said he would not seek reelection. Hester considered Johnson's resignation a triumph of the 'Peace Movement'; a month later, when Humphrey announced that he was a candidate, Owen Meany wrote Hester and said: 'SOME TRIUMPH FOR THE SO-CALLED MOVEMENT-JUST WAIT AND SEE!'
I think I know what he was doing; he was helping her to fall out of love with him before he died. Hester couldn't have known that she'd seen the last of him-but he knew that he'd never see her again. All this was in my mind when I went to the monument shop with that moron Mr. Meany. >
The gravestone was unusually large but properly simple. LT PAUL O. MEANY, JR. Under the name were the dates-the correct dates of his birth, and of his death-and under the dates was the simple Latin inscription that meant 'forever.'
IN AETERNUM It was such an outrage that Mr. Meany had wanted me to see this; but I continued to look at the stone. The lettering was exactly as Owen preferred it-it was his favorite style-and the beveled edges along the sides and the top of the grave were exceedingly fine. From what Owen had said-and from the crudeness of the work with the diamond wheel that I had already seen on my mother's gravestone-I'd had no idea that Mr. Meany was capable of such precise craftsmanship. I'd also had no idea that Mr. Meany was familiar with Latin-Owen, naturally, had been quite a good Latin student. There was a tingle in the stump of my right index finger when I said to Mr. Meany: 'You've done some very fine work with the diamond wheel.'
He said: 'That ain't my work-that's his work! He done it when he was home on leave. He covered it up-and told me not to look at it, not so long as he was alive, he said.' I looked at the stone again.
'So you added just the date- the date of death?' I asked him; but I already had the shivers-I already knew the answer.
'I added nothin'l' said Mr. Meany. 'He knew the date. I thought you knew that much.' I knew 'that much,' of course-and I'd already looked at the diary and satisfied myself that he'd always known the exact date. But to see it so strongly carved in his gravestone left no room for doubt- he'd last been home on leave for Christmas, ; he'd finished his own gravestone more than half a year before he died!
'If you can believe Mister Meany,' the Rev. Lewis Merrill said to me, when I told him. 'As you say, the man is a 'monster of superstition'-and the mother may simply be 'retarded.' That they would believe Owen was a 'virgin birth' is monstrous! But that they would tell him-when he was so young, and so impressionable-that is a more 'unspeakable outrage,' as Owen was always saying, than any such 'outrage' the Meanys suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church. Speak to Father Findley about that!'
'Owen talked to you about it?' I asked.
'All the time,' said Pastor Merrill, with an irritatingly dismissive wave of his hand. 'He talked to me, he talked to Father Findley-why do you think Findley forgave him for that vandalism of his blessed statue? Father Findley knew what a lot of rubbish that monstrous mother and father had been feeding Owen-for years!'
'But what did you tell Owen about it?' I asked.
'Certainly not that I thought he was the second Christ!' the Rev. Mr. Merrill said.
'Certainly not,' I said. 'But what did he say?'
The Rev. Lewis Merrill frowned. He began to stutter. 'Owen M-M-M-Meany didn't exactly believe he was J-J-J-Jesus-but he said to me that if I could believe in one v-v-v-virgin birth, why not in another one?'
'That sounds like Owen,' I said.
