Canon Campbell's- God Rest His Soul. In the entire service, only the psalm struck me as true, and properly shamed me. It was the Thirty-seventh Psalm, and the choir appeared to sing it directly to me:
Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure:
fret not thyself, else shall thou be moved to do evil. Yes, it's true: I should 'leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure.' What good is anger? I have been angry before. I have been 'moved to do evil,' too-as you shall see. THE
LITTLE LORD JESUS
THE FIRST CHRISTMAS following my mother's death was the first Christmas I didn't spend in Sawyer Depot. My grandmother told Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred that if the family were all together, my mother's absence would be too apparent. If Dan and Grandmother and I were alone in Gravesend, and if the Eastmans were alone in Sawyer Depot, my grandmother argued that we would all miss each other; then, she reasoned, we wouldn't miss my mother so much. Ever since the Christmas of ', have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving-Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home. Dividing my time between my grandmother's house on Front Street and the abandoned dormitory where Dan had his small apartment also gave me my first impressions of Graves-end Academy at Christmas, when all the boarders had gone home. The bleak brick and stone, the ivy frosted with snow, the dormitories and classroom buildings with their windows all closed-with a penitentiary sameness-gave the campus the aura of a prison enduring a hunger strike; and without the students hurrying on the quadrangle paths, the bare, bone-colored birches stood out in black-and-white against the snow, like charcoal drawings of themselves, or skeletons of the alumni. The ringing of the chapel bell, and the bell for class hours, was suspended; and so my mother's absence was underlined by the absence of Gravesend's most routine music, the academy chimes I'd taken for granted-until I couldn't hear them. There was only the solemn, hourly bonging of the great clock in the bell tower of Kurd's Church; especially on the most brittle-cold days of December, and against the landscape of old snow-thawed and refrozen to the dull, silver-gray sheen of pewter-the clock-bell of Kurd's Church tolled the time like a death knell.
'Twas not the season to be jolly-although dear Dan Needham tried. Dan drank too much, and he filled the empty, echoing dormitory with his strident caroling; his rendition of the Christmas carols was quite painfully a far cry from my mother's singing. And whenever Owen would join Dan for a verse of' 'God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,' or-worse-' 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,' the old stone stairwells of Dan's dorm resounded with a dirgeful music that was not at all Christmasy but strictly mournful; they were the voices of the ghosts of those Gravesend boys unable to go home for Christmas, singing to their faraway families. The Gravesend dormitories were named after the long-ago, dead-and-buried faculty and headmasters of the school: Abbot, Amen, Bancroft, Dunbar, Oilman, Gorham, Hooper, Lambert, Perkins, Porter, Quincy, Scott. Dan Needham lived in Water-house Hall, so named for some deceased curmudgeon of a classicist, a Latin teacher named Amos Waterhouse, whose rendering of Christmas carols in Latin-I was sure-could not have been worse than the gloomy muddle made of them by Dan and Owen Meany. Grandmother's response to my mother being dead for Christmas was to refuse to participate in the seasonal decoration of Front Street; the wreaths were nailed too low on the doors, and the bottom half of the Christmas tree was overhung with tinsel and ornaments-the result of Lydia applying her heavy-handed touch at wheelchair level.
'We'd all have been better off in Sawyer Depot,' Dan Needham announced, in his cups. Owen sighed. 'I GUESS I'LL NEVER GET TO GO TO SAWYER DEPOT,' he said morosely. Where Owen and I went instead was into every room of every boy who'd gone home for Christmas from Waterhouse
Hall; Dan Needham had a master key. Almost every afternoon, Dan rehearsed The Gravesend Players for their annual version of A Christmas Carol; it was becoming old hat for many of the players, but-to freshen their performances-Dan made them change roles from one Christmas to the next. Hence, Mr. Fish, who one year had been Marley's Ghost-and another year, the Ghost of Christmas Past-was now Scrooge himself. After years of using conventionally adorable children who muffed their lines, Dan had begged Owen to be Tiny Tim, but Owen said that everyone would laugh at him-if not on sight, at least when he first spoke-and besides: Mrs. Walker was playing Tiny Tim's mother. That, Owen, claimed, would give him THE SHIVERS. It was bad enough, Owen maintained, that he was subject to seasonal ridicule for the role he played in the Christ Church Christmas Pageant. 'JUST YOU WAIT,' he said darkly to me. 'THE WIGGINS ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE ME THE STUPID ANGEL AGAIN!'
It would be my first Christmas pageant, since I was usually in Sawyer Depot for the last Sunday before Christmas; but Owen repeatedly complained that he was always cast as the Announcing Angel-a role forced upon him by the Rev. Captain Wiggin and his stewardess wife, Barbara, who maintained that there was 'no one cuter' for the part than Owen, whose chore it was to descend-in a' 'pillar of light'' (with the substantial assistance of a cranelike apparatus to which he was attached, with wires, like a puppet). Owen was supposed to announce the wondrous new presence that lay in the manger in Bethlehem, all the while flapping his arms (to draw attention to the giant wings glued to his choir robe, and to attempt to quiet the giggles of the congregation). Every year, a grim group of shepherds huddled at the communion railing and displayed their cowardice to God's Holy Messenger; a motley crew, they tripped on their robes and knocked off each other's turbans and false beards with their staffs and shepherding crooks. Barb Wiggin had difficulty locating them in the 'pillar of light,' while simultaneously illuminating the Descending Angel, Owen Meany. Reading from Luke, the rector
