What could Mrs. Walker teach us about the Bible if she was stupid enough to think that Owen Meany had put himself up in the air? Owen was always dignified about it. He never said, 'THEY DID IT! THEY ALWAYS DO IT! THEY PICK ME UP AND LOSE MY MONEY AND MESS UP MY BASEBALL CARDS-AND THEY NEVER PUT ME DOWN WHEN I ASK THEM TO! WHAT DO YOU THINK, THAT I FLEW WHERE?'
But although Owen would complain to us, he would never complain about us. If he was occasionally capable of being a stoic in the air, he was always a stoic when Mrs. Walker accused him of childish behavior. He would never accuse us. Owen was no rat. As vividly as any number of the stories in the Bible, Owen Meany showed us what a martyr was. It appeared there were no hard feelings. Although we saved our most ritualized attacks on him for Sunday school, we also lifted him up at other times-more spontaneously. Once someone hooked him by bis collar to a coat tree in the elementary school auditorium; even then, even there, Owen didn't struggle. He dangled silently, and waited for someone to unhook him and put him down. And after gym class, someone hung him in his locker and shut the door. 'NOT FUNNY! NOT FUNNY!' he called, and called, until someone must have agreed with him and freed him from the company of his jockstrap-the size of a slingshot. How could I have known that Owen was a hero? Let me say at the outset that I was a Wheelwright-that was the family name that counted in our town: the Wheelwrights. And Wheelwrights were not inclined toward sympathy to Meanys. We were a matriarchal family because my grandfather died when he was a young man and left my grandmother to carry on, which she managed rather grandly. I am descended from John Adams on my grandmother's side (her maiden name was Bates, and her family came to America on the Mayflower); yet, in our town, it was my grandfather's name that had the clout, and my grandmother wielded her married name with such a sure sense of self-possession that she might as well have been a Wheelwright and an Adams and a Bates. Her Christian name was Harriet, but she was Mrs. Wheelwright to almost everyone-certainly to everyone in Owen Meany's family. I think that Grandmother's final vision of anyone named Meany would have been George Meany-the labor man, the cigar smoker. The combination of unions and cigars did not sit well with Harriet Wheelwright. (To my knowledge, George Meany is not related to the Meany family from my town.) I grew up in Gravesend, New Hampshire; we didn't have any unions there-a few cigar smokers, but no union men. The town where I was born was purchased from an Indian sagamore in by the Rev. John Wheelwright, after whom I was named. In New England, the Indian chiefs and higher-ups were called sagamores; although, by the time I was a boy, die only sagamore I knew was a neighbor's dog-a male Labrador retriever named Sagamore (not, I think, for his Indian ancestry but because of his owner's ignorance). Sagamore's owner, our neighbor, Mr. Fish, always told me that his dog was named for a lake where he spent his summers swimming-'when I was a youth,' Mr. Fish would say. Poor Mr. Fish: he didn't know that the lake was named after Indian chiefs and higher-ups-and that naming a stupid Labrador retriever 'Sagamore' was certain to cause some unholy offense. As you shall see, it did. But Americans are not great historians, and so, for years-educated by my neighbor-I thought that sagamore was an Indian word for lake. The canine Sagamore was killed by a diaper truck, and I now believe that the gods of those troubled waters of that much-abused lake were responsible. It would be a better story, I think, if Mr. Fish had been killed by the diaper truck-but every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent. (This is a part of my particular faith that meets with opposition from my Congregationalist and Episcopalian and Anglican friends.) As for my ancestor John Wheelwright, he landed in Boston in , only two years before he bought our town. He was from Lincolnshire, England-the hamlet of Saleby-and nobody knows why he named our town Gravesend. He had no known contact with the British Gravesend, although that is surely where the name of our town came from. Wheelwright was a Cambridge graduate; he'd played football with Oliver Cromwell-whose estimation of Wheelwright (as a football player) was both worshipful and paranoid. Oliver Cromwell believed that Wheelwright was a vicious, even a dirty player, who had perfected the art of tripping his opponents and then falling on them. Gravesend (the British Gravesend) is in Kent-a fair distance from Wheelwright's stamping ground. Perhaps he had a friend from there-maybe it was a friend who had wanted to make the trip to America with Wheelwright, but who hadn't been able to leave England, or had died on the voyage. According to Wall's History ofGravesend, N.H., the Rev. John Wheelwright had been a good minister of the English church until he began to 'question the authority of certain dogmas''; he became a Puritan, and was thereafter 'silenced by the ecclesiastical powers, for nonconformity.' I feel that my own religious confusion, and stubbornness, owe much to my ancestor, who suffered not only the criticisms of the English church before he left for the new world; once he arrived, he ran afoul of his fellow Puritans hi Boston. Together with the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for disturbing' 'the civil peace''; in truth, he did nothing more seditious than offer some heterodox opinions regarding the location of the Holy Ghost-but Massachusetts judged him harshly. He was deprived of his weapons; and with his family and several of his bravest adherents, he sailed north from Boston to Great Bay, where he must have passed by two earlier New Hampshire outposts-what was then called Strawbery Banke, at the mouth of the Pascataqua (now Portsmouth), and the settlement in Dover. Wheelwright followed the Squamscott River out of Great Bay; he went as far as the falls where the freshwater river met the saltwater river. The forest would have been dense then; the Indians would have showed him how good the fishing was. According to Wall's History of Gravesend, there were 'tracts of natural meadow' and 'marshes bordering upon the tidewater.'
The local sagamore's name was Watahantowet; instead of his signature, he made his mark upon the deed in the form of his totem-an armless man. Later, there was some dispute -not very interesting-regarding the Indian deed, and more interesting speculation regarding why Watahantowet's totem was an armless man. Some said it was how it made the sagamore feel to give up all that land-to have his arms cut off-and others pointed out that earlier 'marks' made by Watahantowet revealed that the figure, although armless, held a feather in his mouth; this was said to indicate the sagamore's frustration at being unable to write. But in several other versions of the totem ascribed to Watahantowet, the figure has a tomahawk in its mouth and looks completely crazy-or else, he is making a gesture toward peace: no arms, tomahawk in mouth; together, perhaps, they are meant to signify that
