'She never intended to tell you,' Dan Needham said. 'She made it clear to me that neither you nor I would ever know. I accepted that; you would have accepted that from her, too. It was yaw father who didn't accept that-not for four years.'
' 'But he could have spoken to me after Mother died,' I said. 'Who would have known that he'd broken a promise if he'd spoken to me? Only / would have known-and I would never have known that she'd made him promise anything. I never knew he was interested in identifying himself to me!' I said.
'He must be someone who can be trusted to keep a promise,' Dan said. 'I used to think he was jealous of me-that he wanted her to wait all that time just because he thought I would give her up or that she would get tired of me. I used to think he was trying to break us up-that he was only pretending to care about her being sure of me or wanting her permission to identify himself to you. But now I think that he must have sincerely wanted her to be right about me-and it must have been difficult for him to promise her that he would never try to contact you.'
'Did you know about 'The Lady in Red'?' I asked Dan Needham. 'Did you know about The Orange Grove-and all of that?'
' 'It was the only way she could see him, it was the only way they could talk,' Dan said. 'That's all I know about it,' he said. 'I won't ask you how you know about it.'
'Did you ever hear of Big Black Buster Freebody?'' I asked Dan.
'He was an old black musician-your mother was very fond of him,' Dan said. 'I remember who he was because of the last time your mother and I took a trip together, before she was killed-we went to Buster Freebody's funeral,' Dan said. And so Dan Needham believed that my father was a man of his word. How many men do we know like thaf! I wondered. It seemed pointless for me to disabuse Dan of his notion of my father's sincerity. It seemed almost pointless for me to know who my father was; I was quite sure that this knowledge would never greatly benefit Dan. How could it benefit him to know that the Rev. Lewis Merrill had sat in the bleacher seats, praying that my mother would die-not to mention that Pastor Merrill was arrogant enough to believe that his prayer had worked! I was sure that Dan didn't need to know these things. And why else would my mother have wanted us to leave the Congregational Church for the Episcopal-if not to get away from Mr. Merrill? My father was not a brave or an honorable man; but he had once tried to be brave and
honorable. He had been afraid, but he had dared-in his fashion-to pray for Owen Meany; he had done that pretty well. Whatever had he imagined might come of his identifying himself to me? What had become of his own children, sadly, was that they had not felt much from their father-not beyond his immeasurable and inexpressible remorse, which he clung to in the manner of a man who'd forgotten how to pray. / could teach him how to pray again, I thought. It was after speaking to Dan that I got an idea of how I might teach Pastor Merrill to believe again-I knew how I might encourage him to have a little faith. I thought of the sad man's shapeless middle child, who with her brutally short hair was barely identifiable as a girl; I thought of the tallish older boy, the sloucher-and cemetery vandal! And the youngest was a groveler, a scrounger under the pews-I couldn't even remember what its sex was. If Mr. Merrill failed to have faith in Owen Meany, if Mr. Merrill believed that God was punishing him with silence-I knew I could give Mr. Merrill something to believe in. If neither God nor Owen Meany could restore the Rev. Mr. MerriH's faith, I thought I knew a 'miracle' that my father was susceptible to believing in. It was about ten o'clock in the evening when I left Pastor Merrill sitting at his desk in the vestry office; it was only half an hour later when I finished talking with Dan and drove again past Kurd's Church at the corner of Front Street and Tan Lane. Lewis Merrill was still there, the light still on in the vestry office; and now there was also light shining through the stained-glass windows of the chancel-that enclosed and meant-to-be-sacred space surrounding the altar of a church, where (no doubt) my father was composing his last words for Owen Meany.
'I figure every thin' he kept was for somethin'!' Mr. Meany had said-about my mother's dummy in the red dress. I'm sure the poor fool didn't know how right he was about that. The Maiden Hill Road was dark; there were still some emergency-road-repair cones and unlit flares off the side of the road by the trestle bridge, the abutment of which had been the death of Buzzy Thurston. The accident had made quite a mess of the cornerstones of the bridge, and they'd had to tar the road where Buzzy's smashed Plymouth had gouged up the surface. There was the usual light left on in the Meanys' kitchen; it was the light they'd routinely left on for Owen. Mr. Meany was a long time answering my knock on the door. I'd never seen him in pajamas before; he looked oddly childish-or like a big clown dressed in children's clothes. 'Why it's Johnny Wheelwright!' he said automatically.
'I want the dummy,' I told him.
'Well, sure!' he said cheerfully. 'I thought you'd want it.'
It was not heavy, but it was awkward-trying to fit it in my Volkswagen Beetle-because it wouldn't bend. I remembered how awkwardly, in his swaddling clothes, Owen Meany had fitted in the cab of the big granite truck, that day his mother and father had driven him home from the Christmas Pageant; how Hester and Owen and I had ridden on the flatbed of the big truck, that night Mr. Meany drove us-and the dummy-to the beach at Little Boar's Head.
'You can borrow the pickup, if it's easier,' Mr. Meany suggested. But that wasn't necessary; with Mr. Meany's help, I managed to fit
