harshly for his role in reaching base and bringing Owen Meany up to bat (if judgment is what you believe it was). He was not Gravesend Academy material, either; yet he did a postgraduate year at the academy, because he was a fair athlete-your standard outdoor New England variety: a football, hockey, and baseball man. He did not always need to reach base on an error. He was not outstanding, not at anything, but he was good enough to go to the state university, and he lettered in three sports there. He missed a year of competition with a knee injury, and managed to finagle a fifth year of college- retaining his student draft deferment for the extra year. After that, he was 'draft material,' but he rather desperately strove to miss the trip to Vietnam by poisoning himself for his physical. He drank a fifth of bourbon a day for two weeks; he smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano; he started a fire in his parents' oven, baking peyote; he was hospitalized with a colon disorder, following an LSD experience wherein he became convinced that his own Hawaiian sports shirt was edible, and he consumed some of it-including the buttons and the contents of the pocket: a book of matches, a package of cigarette papers, and a paper clip. Given the provincialism of the Gravesend draft board, Buzzy was declared psychologically unfit to serve, which had been his crafty intention. Unfortunately, he had grown to like the bourbon, the marijuana, the peyote, and the LSD; in fact, he so worshiped their excesses that he was killed one night on the Maiden Hill Road by the steering column of his Plymouth, when he drove head-on into the abutment of the railroad bridge that was only a few hundred yards downhill from the Meany Granite Quarry. It was Mr. Meany who called the police. Owen and I knew that bridge well; it followed an especially sharp turn at the bottom of a steep downhill run-it called for caution, even on our bicycles. It was the ill-treated Mrs. Hoyt who observed that Buzzy Thurston was simply another victim of the Vietnam War; although no one listened to her, she maintained that the war was the cause of the many abuses Buzzy had practiced upon
himself-just as surely as the war had axed her Harry. To Mrs. Hoyt, these things were symptomatic of the Vietnam years: the excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the suicidally fast driving, and the whorehouses in Southeast Asia, where many American virgins were treated to their first and last sexual experiences- not to mention the Russell's vipers, waiting under the trees! Mr. Chickering should have wept-not only for the whimsy with which he'd instructed Owen Meany to 'Swing away!' Had he known everything that would follow, he would have bathed his chubby face in even more tears than he produced that day in Kurd's when he was grieving for and as a team. Naturally, Police Chief Pike sat apart; policemen like to sit by the door. And Chief Pike wasn't weeping. To him, my mother was still a 'case'; for him, the service was an opportunity to look over the suspects-because we were all suspects in Chief Pike's eyes. Among the mourners, Chief Pike suspected the ball-thief lurked. He was always 'by the door,' Chief Pike. When I dated his daughter, I always thought he would be bursting through a door-or a window-at any moment. It was doubtless a result of my anxiety concerning his sudden entrance that I once tangled my tower lip in his daughter's braces, retreating too quickly from her kiss-certain I had heard the chief's boots creaking in my near vicinity. That day at Kurd's, you could almost hear those boots creaking by the door, as if he expected the stolen baseball to loose itself from the culprit's pocket and roll across the dark crimson carpeting with incriminating authority. For Chief Pike, the theft of the ball that killed my mother was an offense of a far graver character than a mere misdemeanor; at the very least, it was the work of a felon. That my poor mother had been killed by the ball seemed not to concern Chief Pike; that poor Owen Meany had hit the ball was of slightly more interest to our chief of police-but only because it established a motive for Owen to possess the baseball in question. Therefore, it was not upon my mother's closed coffin that our chief of police fixed his stare; nor did Chief Pike pay particular attention to the formerly airborne Captain Wiggin-nor did he show much interest in the slight stutter of the shaken Pastor Merrill. Rather, the intent gaze of our chief of police bore into the back of the head of Owen Meany, who sat precariously upon six or seven copies of The Pilgrim Hymnal; Owen tottered on the stack of hymnals, as if the police chief's gaze unbalanced him. He sat as near to our family pews as possible; he sat where he'd sat for my mother's wedding-behind the Eastman family in general, and Uncle Alfred in particular. This time there would be no jokes from Simon about the inappropriateness of Owen's navy-blue Sunday school suit-such a little clone of the suit his father wore. The granitic Mr. Meany sat heavily beside Owen.
' 'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,' ' said the Rev. Dudley Wiggin. ' 'Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.' '
' 'O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered,' ' said the Rev. Lewis Merrill. ' 'Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Tabby, and grant her an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints.' '
In the dull light of Kurd's Church, only Lydia's wheelchair gleamed-in the aisle beside my grandmother's pew, where Harriet Wheelwright sat alone. Dan and I sat in the pew behind her. The Eastmans sat behind us. The Rev. Captain Wiggin called upon the Book of Revelation-'God shall wipe away all tears'-whereupon, Dan began to cry. The rector, eager as ever to represent belief as a battle, brought up Isaiah-'He will swallow up death in victory.' Now I heard my Aunt Martha join Dan; but the two of mem were no match for Mr. Chickering, who had started weeping even before the ministers began their readings of the Old and the New Testament. Pastor Merrill stuttered his way into Lamentations-'The Lord is good unto them that wait for him.'
Then we were led through the Twenty-third Psalm, as if there were a soul in Gravesend who didn't know it by heart: 'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want'-and so forth. When we got to the part that goes, 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,' that was when I began to hear Owen's voice above all the others. When the rector said, ' 'Give courage to those who are bereaved,' ' I was already dreading how loud Owen's voice would be during the final hymn; I knew it was one he liked. When the pastor said, ' 'Help
