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Chapter 1: The Foul Ball
Summary
John Wheelwright, the narrator of the story, writes that he will always remember Owen Meany--not because of Owen's loud voice or his tiny body, or even because he was the instrument of John's mother's death, but because Owen Meany is the reason that John believes in God. John describes his history of religious faith, his conversion from Congregationalism to Episcopalianism and from Episcopalianism to Anglicanism. He says that he is not exactly a devout Christian, but he is a regular churchgoer and reads his prayer book often--more often, in fact, than he reads his Bible. He says that when he dies, he will attempt to be buried in New Hampshire next to his mother, though it will be difficult to have his body returned to the United States from Canada, where he now lives. He says that he has a "church-rummage" religious faith--one that needs patching up every Sunday. But he owes the faith he has to Owen Meany.
John remembers the way he and his friends used to torment Owen in Sunday school class. Owen had an unbelievably tiny body and undeveloped vocal cords, so that the only way he could be heard was to shout through his nose. In Sunday school, the teacher, Mrs. Walker, often walks out of the class--ostensibly to leave the students to think about their lessons, though John suspects that she simply needs a smoke--and when she does, the other students lift Owen up above their heads and pass him around the room. They love Owen--the girls call him a "little doll"--but they are too fascinated by his tininess to leave him alone. As he passes over their heads, he loses the change from his pockets and his baseball cards. Owen loves baseball cards, even though he is never allowed to swing at a pitch in Little League--his strike zone is so small, he is always forced to walk. When the teacher returns to class and blames Owen for the disarray, Owen never complains; John remembers that even when he was hung up from his locker at school and left dangling, he simply called out "NOT FUNNY!" in his ethereal nasal voice until someone took him down.
John writes that he grew up in the town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, where his family, the Wheelwrights, occupy a position of aristocratic prestige. In Gravesend during John's childhood, his maternal grandmother, Harriet Wheelwright, was the matriarch of the town, descended from John Adams and wielding the Wheelwright name with expert authority. John describes his ancestors' role in the founding of Gravesend--an earlier John Wheelwright, in 1638, bought the location from an Indian sagamore; this earlier John Wheelwright became a Puritan in England and was later expelled from Massachusetts for his unorthodox religious beliefs. John feels that much of his own religious confusion stems from his ancestor's legacy. John writes that Watahantowet, the Indian sagamore who sold the town site to the first Wheelwright, could not write, so he signed his name with his totem, an image of an armless man.
Of John's parents, his mother was the Wheelwright, not his father; but John's mother kept her maiden name and John was raised as a Wheelwright, never even knowing who his father was. John's mother occasionally referred to John's father as her "little fling." John's mother died when he was eleven, before ever telling him about his father. John remembers that once, as the two of them sat throwing rocks into the Squamscott River, Owen prophecized that John will learn about his father one day. Owen's little arms cannot pitch the rocks all the way into the water, but he tells John that even if his father does not come forward, God will reveal his presence to John. As he says this, he hurls a pebble all the way out into the water, surprising both John and himself. John says that with this stroke, Owen "began his lengthy contribution to my belief in God."
John talks a bit about the history of Gravesend, whose first great industry was lumber. John's grandmother always preferred trees to rocks, so that she was proud of the lumber trade and contemptuous of the Meany family, which ran a granite quarry. John remembers Owen telling him about the quality of granite required to make a gravestone, and remembers that he wondered why Owen wasn't deaf; there was something wrong with his size and his voice, but, despite the noise of the granite quarry, his ears were healthy. Owen also introduced John to Wall's History of Gravesend, a book that John refers to often in his own narrative.
John relates the story of his mother's pregnancy, during which time she never divulged the details of her affair, saying only that she met a man on the railroad that took her to Boston for singing lessons. Only her sister, John's Aunt Martha, was resentful; everyone else accepted her behavior as they always accepted her behavior, because she was beautiful and affectionate. John says that the only hurtful action she was incapable of making amends for was dying.
John remembers a scene from his childhood during which Owen loses his way in the dark passageway of his grandmother's mansion. Owen's nasal screams disturbed John's grandmother, who told John that Owen's voice could make dead mice come back to life. (He says that his grandmother was not an unkind woman--when her maid Lydia lost her leg, Mrs. Wheelwright hired another maid just to take care of Lydia.) Another time, when swimming in the quarry lake--an almost unfathomably deep body of water--Owen unties the rope the children used to anchor themselves to shore and hides in a rock crevice, making the other children believe that he was drowning. When none of them leap in after him, an enraged Owen appears on shore, screaming that his friends have chosen to let him die.
When John begins attending Episcopalian Sunday school, he does so because his mother has married an Episcopalian man who becomes like a father to him; when Owen begins to attend Episcopalian Sunday school, he does so because, as he says, the Catholic Church has insulted his father and mother. John does not know what this "insult" was. Owen and John discuss religion, and John realizes that Owen has very specific and passionately held convictions.
There are two schools in Gravesend--the prestigious academy and the public high school. Owen intends to attend the high school, but John's mother wants Owen to go to the academy, because he is a brilliant student. Owen refuses, saying that public schools are for people like him.
One day Owen tells John that his mother went to the Meanys' house to bring up the subject of the academy with Owen's parents. Owen knows this because he recognized John's mother's perfume in the living room; he has a terrible crush on John's mother, as do all of John's friends. Then John remembers the last Little League season he and Owen spent together, when they were eleven. In one game, in the last inning, Owen Meany is allowed to swing at a pitch for the first time. He hits a hard foul ball over the fence; John's mother, who is waiting to take John and Owen home, is struck in the head. John's mother is dead almost as soon as she hits the ground. In the chaos that follows, someone throws a coat over John's head, and the chief of police argues with the Little League coach about the ball. Owen is gone; John suspects that he took the ball with him.
Chapter 2: The Armadillo
Summary
John remembers his mother, whose name was Tabitha, but who was almost always called Tabby. He describes her manner of dressing, which accentuated her good looks without showing them off, and her touchability. Everyone wanted to touch her, he says, and she was catlike about being touched, either freezing, ducking, or luxuriating in the contact. He does not remember her flirting with men, but imagines that she must have done so on the Boston and Maine railway line, which took her into Boston for her singing lessons. It was on this line that she met John's father, and on this line that she met the man she married, Dan Needham, the man for whom she took John away from the Congregationalist Church and to the Episcopalian.
John remembers the night when his mother told the family about Dan Needham. John is six; it is 1948. John's mother simply announces, at dinner, that she has met another man on "the good old Boston and Maine." After reassuring Mrs. Wheelwright that she is not pregnant again, and telling John that the man is not his father, she tells them that he is a drama teacher who is applying for a job at Gravesend Academy; he is also a Harvard graduate, a fact that John's grandmother finds impressive. Suddenly, the doorbell rings, and Dan Needham appears in the foyer. A rumpled, red-headed, young-looking man, he is very different from the attractive young men John's mother usually dates. Where most of those men are awkward and diffident around John, Dan Needham gives him a mysterious paper bag. He tells John not to open it, but to alert him if it moves. As the adults talk in the living room, John is unable to resist the temptation, and opens the bag. He sees a horrible monster, and screams. Dan laughingly tells John's mother, "I told you he'd open the bag!"
The monster, it turns out, is merely a stuffed armadillo, a prop Dan was using in his lecture at Gravesend Academy. He has just been hired as a history professor, focusing on the way drama and performance distinguish different historical epochs. He gives the armadillo to John to keep, and John cherishes it. Owen also loves it, and the two of them create a game in which one of them hides it in the John's grandmother's attic, and the other has to find it.
John remembers his childhood visits to his mother's sister Martha and her husband Alfred Eastman in the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire. On the train, he always eats too many tea sandwiches, and is forced to use the terrifying restroom--simply a hole cut out in the bottom of the car--before they reach Sawyer Depot. John is simultaneously mesmerized and frightened by his three cousins, Noah (three years older than John), Simon (two years older), and Hester (less than a year older), who are used to a far rougher and more athletic life than John is. He goes skiing with them, but where they are expert skiers, he is a novice, constantly falling down. Hester, who is obsessed with the idea of sex, warns him that he will make himself sterile if he isn't careful.
John remembers waterskiing with his cousins on Loveless Lake, and playing King of the Mountain with them on great sawdust piles in Uncle Alfred's lumberyards; but he says that what really made the contests thrilling was the presexual tension he associated with Hester. Confronted with a burly, rich, masculine father and a gentle and feminine mother, constantly beaten in contests by her older brothers, Hester's only recourse, when she was slightly older, seems to have been "to intimidate every girlfriend either of them ever had and to fuck the brains out of every boy they ever knew." John thinks that Hester was the product of her environment, while Noah and Simon argue that she was born that way. Still, John says that the deck was stacked against her from the start, even before adolescence. He remembers being forced to kiss Hester as a penalty for losing games; the first time, they had to tie Hester to the bed, and later, John began losing the game on purpose.
Owen is always jealous when John goes to visit his cousins. He insists that John not take the armadillo to Sawyer Depot, and says that he should get to take it home with him while John is gone. When he carries it home, Owen brings a box stuffed with cotton to carry the armadillo home in--a box used to transport monuments by Owen's father, part of whose granite business is the selling of granite gravestones. One Thanksgiving, John's cousins come to his grandmother's house in Gravesend--80 Front Street is the address--and John tentatively introduces them to Owen Meany, fearful of what they might do to him.
Contrary to his expectations, they are awestruck by Owen's bizarre appearance and unearthly voice. They play a game in which Hester hides in the closet of John's grandmother's attic, and the others attempt to find her; the rule is that if Hester can grab the searcher's "doink" before he finds her, she wins. When Owen finds Hester, she tickles him instead of grabbing his penis, but she frightens him and he wets his pants. Humiliated, he flees the house, and John and his mother have to chase after him in the car. At last Owen agrees to return--provided that he can take a bath and wash his clothes--and they play a new game, in which Hester hides Owen and the others try to find him. Owen tells John that he thinks his cousins are not terribly wild--he says that they have simply lacked direction.
Later, after Owen's foul ball kills his mother, John remembers that day as he lies in bed trying to sleep. The morning after the accident, John wakes up to see the Meany Granite Quarry truck outside on the driveway. Owen gets out from the passenger door and leaves a large package on the doorstep of 80 Front Street, where John has spent the night rather than in his bed in the apartment his mother shared with Dan Needham. The boxes contain all of Owen's baseball cards, his most prized possessions. But now everything has changed for Owen and John about the game of baseball. John asks Dan Needham what Owen wants him to do with the cards, and Dan replies, "He wants you to give them back." John does so, and on Dan's advice, he also gives Owen the armadillo, to show him that he still loves him.
Dan says that if a thing he gave John could have such a special purpose, he would be very proud, and that is the first time John considers the idea of a designated fate--a "special purpose" in life. John remembers a recent day--January 25, 1987--when he thought of Owen Meany while celebrating the Anglican holiday of the conversion of St. Paul. He identifies with the idea of conversion, he says, because Owen Meany converted him.
After keeping it for two nights, Owen returns the armadillo, just as John returned the baseball cards. But John is outraged to find that Owen has removed the armadillo's claws; with its claws amputated, it cannot stand upright. Dan Needham explains, surprised, that Owen must be making a comment on what has happened--John, Dan, and Owen are all like the armadillo; they have all lost a part of themselves. Later, John thinks that Owen was also referring to the armless totem of Watahantowet, which represented the idea that, to Watahantowet, losing the land that became Gravesend was like losing his arms: everything has a price. According to John, what Owen intended to say with the armadillo was this: "GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT." In other words, Owen was saying that he was appointed by God to carry out a specific purpose.
As John writes his narrative--on January 30, 1987--it is snowing in Toronto, where he lives. The snow makes Toronto seem like a small New England town, almost like Gravesend. John says that he recently read a copy of Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address, which disgusted him; he describes Reaganism as having "numbed America." When Owen and John were seniors at Gravesend Academy in the '60s, Reagan was merely a politician in California, and did not understand anything about the Vietnam War, according to John. Owen, however, did understand, and he and John followed the conduct of the war very carefully. Owen understood everything, and criticized the American presence in Vietnam from the start. By 1971, John had retreated to Canada and applied for Canadian citizenship. Without explaining what he means, he says that it was Owen who enabled him to evade serving in Vietnam; he writes that Owen gave him far more than he ever took from him, "even when you consider that he took my mother."
Chapter 3: The Angel
Summary
John relates another memory from childhood, from before his mother's death. His mother keeps a dressmaker's dummy next to her bed, which is always dressed in tasteful clothes. John's mother is an expert seamstress, and has a habit of taking clothes out from expensive stores in Boston, then copying them herself and returning them. The dummy wears the clothes while she sews. At night, John and Dan Needham occasionally mistake the dummy for John's mother. John and Owen like to dress the dummy up, and occasionally Owen invents an outfit that John's mother actually wears. But no one can convince her to wear the one red dress in her closet--it is a beautiful dress, but it is the only garment she owns that is not white or black. The only time she ever wore the red dress was during a production of Angel Street by the Gravesend Players, which Dan resurrected after moving to town; she played the role of a wife driven insane by her evil husband, and Dan played the evil husband. Mrs. Walker played the flirtatious maid, and Mr. Fish--a neighbor of Mrs. Wheelwright who was at the time in mourning over the death of his dog Sagamore, who was killed by a diaper truck--played the hero. Owen and John watched every production; it was the only time John's mother ever acted with the Gravesend Players.
One night, Owen spends the night at John's, and wakes up with a fever. When he goes to tell John's mother, he stops short, and hurries back to John's room, crying that he has seen an angel by the bed. John creeps back to the room with him and sees the silhouette of the dummy; he assumes that Owen has mistaken it for an angel, but Owen insists that the angel was on the other side of the bed. John feels Owen's fever and thinks that he hallucinated the angel, but Owen is adamant. Later, after Owen's baseball kills John's mother, Owen will become vocal about his belief in predestination, the idea that every action and every person serves a specific purpose and that every deed is fated. He believes that, when he saw the angel in John's mother's room, he disturbed it, and therefore interfered with the scheme of fate. After the baseball kills John's mother, Owen refers to it as "fated," and John realizes that he believed the angel was not a guardian angel--it was the Angel of Death, and he deterred it from its work.
On the night in question, Owen sleeps with John's mother, and remains vigilant in case the angel should come back. Hours later, Mrs. Wheelwright (John's grandmother) bursts into the room to scold her daughter for leaving the tap running--though it was actually John's mistake--and Owen, believing her to be an apparition, screams hideously, waking half the neighborhood. For years after that, John writes, Owen insisted that John's grandmother had wailed "like a banshee." John had always thought the description ludicrous--after all, Owen made the most noise--but one day Dan Needham looked the word up, and found that a banshee is literally a premonition of a loved one's death. Perhaps, John says, Owen was not so preposterous after all.
John remembers a time when his grandmother actually consented to act in a play directed by Dan Needham; she played an English matriarch in Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife. She performed marvelously, and brought the house down. But despite the acceptance Dan found in the Wheelwright family and in the academic community of Gravesend Academy, it was four years before he and Tabby were married. John speculates about why they waited so long, but ultimately cannot settle on an answer. Perhaps his mother was overly proper, since she was so reckless with the fling that produced him, or perhaps Dan demanded to know more about John's father and John's mother would not tell him.
Whatever it was, it was not the disapproval of the couple's two religious communities; the Episcopalians and the Congregationalists practically competed to win the couple over. John vastly preferred the Congregationalists, whose pastor, Reverend Louis Merrill, was a serious, doubtful, educated man, to the Episcopalians, whose rector, Reverend Dudley Wiggin, was a Bible-thumping ex-pilot. Owen is not impressed with Rev. Merrill; he says that a preacher should not have so much intellectual doubt. But the Wheelwrights, and most of the Gravesend community, love him; he is a frequent speaker at the Academy. They also pity him for his family: his wife, a California girl, wilted in New Hampshire, and their children were sickly. The Rev. Wiggin's wife was a brash redhead called Barb, and his children were oafish athletes. Nevertheless, Dan and Tabby chose to join the Episcopalians, and John began his long tenure of attending Sunday school class with Owen Meany. However, the wedding was held at Hurd's Church, the nondenominational chapel at Gravesend Academy, and the ceremony was conducted by both Rev. Merrill and Rev. Wiggin. A year later, John's mother's funeral was held in the same church.
At the wedding, both ministers shared their thoughts on love with the congregation. Afterward, the wedding party retired to a reception at Mrs. Wheelwright's house at 80 Front Street. Here, Simon commented on Owen's dark suit, saying that he looked like he was attending a funeral. Hester angrily defended Owen. During the party, Hester went into the bushes to pee because she wanted to avoid the long line at the ladies' room, and she handed Owen her panties, which he embarrassedly stuffed into his jacket pocket. Owen's wedding present for Dan and John's mother was a granite marker that he made at his father's tombstone factory, reading "JULY 1952," the month of the wedding. As the couple prepared to drive away for their honeymoon, a sudden storm arose, and it began to hail. Owen rode away with the newlyweds, who agreed to drop him off at his house. Unbeknownst to everyone but Hester, Owen escaped with her panties still in his pocket. Her thin yellow dress soaked and clinging to her, her plight was visible to everyone, and she bolted for the house.
John writes that Mr. Chickering, the Little League coach who ordered Owen to swing at the ball that killed John's mother, is now wasting away with Alzheimer's disease. John remembers that Mr. Chickering wept at his mother's funeral, feeling responsible for her death. John thinks about Harry Hoyt, who was walked before Owen batted--had he been the last out, Owen would have never gone to the plate. Harry was later killed in Vietnam, and his mother became a war protester in Gravesend. Buzzy Thurston, who reached base on an error before Owen batted, did not attend the funeral. Later, he evaded Vietnam through drug use--he was declared psychologically unfit to serve--but he was killed in a car accident caused by his drinking.
The graveyard in Gravesend was near the high school, and at the burial of Tabby, Rev. Merrill's voice was interrupted by the sound of a high school baseball practice. Many of the mourners cover their ears with their hands, and Owen repeats "I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY!" Afterward, John narrates, his Aunt Martha, Mrs. Wheelwright, and Dan each tell John that he is welcome to live with them; he elects to spend some of his time with Dan--who legally adopted him when he married Tabby--and some with his grandmother at 80 Front Street. He takes a walk with Hester, who tells him that Owen feels even worse than he does. They walk to the cemetery, where they find Owen praying over the grave, his father waiting in the Granite Company truck nearby. Owen says that they must go to the apartment and take the dummy, or Dan will stare at it and make himself miserable. They retrieve it from an uncomplaining Dan, and Owen decides that he should keep the dummy himself. The dummy is wearing the red dress.
As he writes his story, on February 1, 1987, in Toronto, John says that he has come to believe in angels. He says that this belief has not much helped him--he was not even elected to a parish office during the last council session at church, though he has held many offices in the past. He says that he was irritated by the service, too, which emphasized the beatitudes of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. He does not like the new canon, either. But the psalm rang true: "Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure: / fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil." John says that he himself has felt wrath, and been moved to do evil--as we shall see.
Chapter 4: The Little Lord Jesus
Summary
The Christmas of 1953, the first Christmas since John's mother died, is a gloomy holiday. For the first time in John's memory, he does not go to Sawyer Depot, because his grandmother believes that that would make them all too lonely for John's mother. Instead, eleven-year-old John and Owen root around in the Gravesend Academy dormitories (Dan has a master key), while Dan works on the Gravesend Players' production of A Christmas Carol, starring Mr. Fish as Mr. Scrooge. Owen and John are to act in the church Christmas pageant; Owen is adamant that he not be forced to play the Announcing Angel, a role he has felt humiliated by for the past several Christmases.
Rev. Wiggin and Barb have a unique approach to a Christmas pageant: they dress the littlest children in absurd turtledove costumes, let the prettiest girl play Mary, and keep a huge supply of infants backstage in case the Christ Child begins to bawl. Over the Christmas holiday, as Owen and John snoop through the empty rooms of vacationing boys, they learn where to look for pornography--and when they discover it, it inevitably lowers Owen's opinion of the room's occupant. The experience is depressing, the numbing sameness of each boy's belongings, each boy's sense of homesickness, contributing to Owen's belief that dormitories are "EVIL." In one boy's room, they discover condoms, which Owen gleefully announces are banned by the Catholic Church. They take turns putting one on their "tiny penises," which John sees for Owen as an act of religious rebellion--one more proof that he has escaped the Catholic Church, one more repayment for the unknown insult the church dealt his mother and father.
At the meeting to cast parts for the Christmas pageant, Owen sternly declares to Barb Wiggin that he will under no circumstances play the Announcing (or Descending) Angel. John is cast as Joseph, but no one will step forward to be the angel. Suddenly, a fat boy named Harold Crosby tips over backward and falls out of his chair--an accident mistaken by the rector for volunteering. Harold protests that he is afraid of heights, but the rector is unflinching: Harold will play the angel. Owen convinces the group that he should be allowed to play the Christ Child, to eliminate the need for droves of babies being passed about backstage. In this way, Owen Meany is chosen to play the Baby Jesus.
Using a textual argument based on the carol "Away in a Manger," Owen successfully lobbies to have the crib removed from the manger scene ("...no crib for a bed..."), and constructs himself a regal nest amid the hay. Mary Beth Baird, the Virgin Mary, desperately wants to be able to show her affection for the Baby Jesus, and Owen suggests that she could bow to him. She does, and the rector decides to keep this in the pageant.
Writing in 1987, John says that he prefers to go to his current church, Grace Church, for services on the weekdays, when there are no sermons and no families with children. He describes the usual experience of sitting behind a family with children dragged to church against their will. Again, he criticizes the clergy at his church--one of them is a racist, one of them wears faded clothes. He says that he does not go to the Christmas pageants at Grace Church because the Christmas pageant of 1953 was all the Nativity he needed: he has already witnessed the miracle.
In 1953, Dan's production of A Christmas Carol is stymied by poor performances by the amateur actors; the Scrooge of the show, Mr. Fish, frequently drops by to complain. John writes that though Mr. Fish lived next door to 80 Front Street, he never knew Mr. Fish's occupation--to John, he was all neighbors, everyone who rakes their lawn and plays fetch with their dog nearby. John remembers the day Mr. Fish's dog, Sagamore, died; Mr. Fish likes to lure John and Owen over to play football, and one day Owen succeeds in kicking a punt a very long way. Sagamore runs after the ball, and collides with a diaper truck bringing a delivery to a young family on the street. Sagamore is buried in Mrs. Wheelwright's rosebushes; Owen presides over the ceremony, providing the little group of mourners with sorrowful candles. The Rev. Merrill appears, but he stutters and cannot say anything, so Owen recites the "I am the resurrection and the life" verse. This was before John's mother's death, and she takes Owen's hand.
In 1953, John visits Owen's peculiar house only rarely, though he notices the tortured Nativity scene on the mantle: the Virgin Mary has a mutilated face, and the Baby Jesus is actually missing. John lets it slip to Owen's parents that Owen is playing the Christ Child in the pageant, and they seem stunned. Mrs. Meany even tells John that she is sorry for his mother's death--it is the first time the laconic woman has ever spoken to him. John's mother's dummy is still in Owen's room, and John sees Mrs. Meany scrutinizing it closely. John and Owen pass under a railway bridge just as a blazing fast train--the Flying Yankee--passes over it. John thinks it is a lucky coincidence, but Owen does not believe in coincidence, only in the rigid machinations of destiny.
One night at dinner, John announces to his grandmother--in the company of Lydia, Ethel (Lydia's replacement), and Germaine (the clumsy maid hired to care for Lydia)--that Owen does not intend to visit the Boston singing teacher to try to change his voice. He believes that his voice comes from God, and is intended to serve a special purpose. Mrs. Wheelwright contemptuously replies that it does not come from God, it comes from his having breathed too much granite dust as a baby, which also stunted his growth.
One day, Owen and John are exploring the rooms at Waterhouse Hall when they hear another master key turn in the lock, and the Brinker-Smiths enter. The Brinker-Smiths are a young faculty couple with a new set of twins, and Ginger Brinker-Smith is a legendary object of lust among Gravesend Academy students. Owen and John hide, and the Brinker-Smiths proceed to have sex gleefully on the dormitory bed, enjoying their mischievous retreat from their children. Owen and John are shocked, and Owen is almost offended. "SEX," he says, "MAKES PEOPLE CRAZY."
Owen continues to orchestrate events, just as he has done for the Christmas pageant. When the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come quits the Gravesend Players' show, Owen convinces Dan to let him play the part. At rehearsal, he terrifies the other cast members--no one laughs once, and Mr. Fish actually forgets his lines. When Owen next comes to 80 Front Street, even Mrs. Wheelwright is respectful of him. After all, Owen is now the Lord Jesus and the Ghost of the Future, all in one.
Summary
John Wheelwright, the narrator of the story, writes that he will always remember Owen Meany--not because of Owen's loud voice or his tiny body, or even because he was the instrument of John's mother's death, but because Owen Meany is the reason that John believes in God. John describes his history of religious faith, his conversion from Congregationalism to Episcopalianism and from Episcopalianism to Anglicanism. He says that he is not exactly a devout Christian, but he is a regular churchgoer and reads his prayer book often--more often, in fact, than he reads his Bible. He says that when he dies, he will attempt to be buried in New Hampshire next to his mother, though it will be difficult to have his body returned to the United States from Canada, where he now lives. He says that he has a "church-rummage" religious faith--one that needs patching up every Sunday. But he owes the faith he has to Owen Meany.
John remembers the way he and his friends used to torment Owen in Sunday school class. Owen had an unbelievably tiny body and undeveloped vocal cords, so that the only way he could be heard was to shout through his nose. In Sunday school, the teacher, Mrs. Walker, often walks out of the class--ostensibly to leave the students to think about their lessons, though John suspects that she simply needs a smoke--and when she does, the other students lift Owen up above their heads and pass him around the room. They love Owen--the girls call him a "little doll"--but they are too fascinated by his tininess to leave him alone. As he passes over their heads, he loses the change from his pockets and his baseball cards. Owen loves baseball cards, even though he is never allowed to swing at a pitch in Little League--his strike zone is so small, he is always forced to walk. When the teacher returns to class and blames Owen for the disarray, Owen never complains; John remembers that even when he was hung up from his locker at school and left dangling, he simply called out "NOT FUNNY!" in his ethereal nasal voice until someone took him down.
John writes that he grew up in the town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, where his family, the Wheelwrights, occupy a position of aristocratic prestige. In Gravesend during John's childhood, his maternal grandmother, Harriet Wheelwright, was the matriarch of the town, descended from John Adams and wielding the Wheelwright name with expert authority. John describes his ancestors' role in the founding of Gravesend--an earlier John Wheelwright, in 1638, bought the location from an Indian sagamore; this earlier John Wheelwright became a Puritan in England and was later expelled from Massachusetts for his unorthodox religious beliefs. John feels that much of his own religious confusion stems from his ancestor's legacy. John writes that Watahantowet, the Indian sagamore who sold the town site to the first Wheelwright, could not write, so he signed his name with his totem, an image of an armless man.
Of John's parents, his mother was the Wheelwright, not his father; but John's mother kept her maiden name and John was raised as a Wheelwright, never even knowing who his father was. John's mother occasionally referred to John's father as her "little fling." John's mother died when he was eleven, before ever telling him about his father. John remembers that once, as the two of them sat throwing rocks into the Squamscott River, Owen prophecized that John will learn about his father one day. Owen's little arms cannot pitch the rocks all the way into the water, but he tells John that even if his father does not come forward, God will reveal his presence to John. As he says this, he hurls a pebble all the way out into the water, surprising both John and himself. John says that with this stroke, Owen "began his lengthy contribution to my belief in God."
John talks a bit about the history of Gravesend, whose first great industry was lumber. John's grandmother always preferred trees to rocks, so that she was proud of the lumber trade and contemptuous of the Meany family, which ran a granite quarry. John remembers Owen telling him about the quality of granite required to make a gravestone, and remembers that he wondered why Owen wasn't deaf; there was something wrong with his size and his voice, but, despite the noise of the granite quarry, his ears were healthy. Owen also introduced John to Wall's History of Gravesend, a book that John refers to often in his own narrative.
John relates the story of his mother's pregnancy, during which time she never divulged the details of her affair, saying only that she met a man on the railroad that took her to Boston for singing lessons. Only her sister, John's Aunt Martha, was resentful; everyone else accepted her behavior as they always accepted her behavior, because she was beautiful and affectionate. John says that the only hurtful action she was incapable of making amends for was dying.
John remembers a scene from his childhood during which Owen loses his way in the dark passageway of his grandmother's mansion. Owen's nasal screams disturbed John's grandmother, who told John that Owen's voice could make dead mice come back to life. (He says that his grandmother was not an unkind woman--when her maid Lydia lost her leg, Mrs. Wheelwright hired another maid just to take care of Lydia.) Another time, when swimming in the quarry lake--an almost unfathomably deep body of water--Owen unties the rope the children used to anchor themselves to shore and hides in a rock crevice, making the other children believe that he was drowning. When none of them leap in after him, an enraged Owen appears on shore, screaming that his friends have chosen to let him die.
When John begins attending Episcopalian Sunday school, he does so because his mother has married an Episcopalian man who becomes like a father to him; when Owen begins to attend Episcopalian Sunday school, he does so because, as he says, the Catholic Church has insulted his father and mother. John does not know what this "insult" was. Owen and John discuss religion, and John realizes that Owen has very specific and passionately held convictions.
There are two schools in Gravesend--the prestigious academy and the public high school. Owen intends to attend the high school, but John's mother wants Owen to go to the academy, because he is a brilliant student. Owen refuses, saying that public schools are for people like him.
One day Owen tells John that his mother went to the Meanys' house to bring up the subject of the academy with Owen's parents. Owen knows this because he recognized John's mother's perfume in the living room; he has a terrible crush on John's mother, as do all of John's friends. Then John remembers the last Little League season he and Owen spent together, when they were eleven. In one game, in the last inning, Owen Meany is allowed to swing at a pitch for the first time. He hits a hard foul ball over the fence; John's mother, who is waiting to take John and Owen home, is struck in the head. John's mother is dead almost as soon as she hits the ground. In the chaos that follows, someone throws a coat over John's head, and the chief of police argues with the Little League coach about the ball. Owen is gone; John suspects that he took the ball with him.
Chapter 2: The Armadillo
Summary
John remembers his mother, whose name was Tabitha, but who was almost always called Tabby. He describes her manner of dressing, which accentuated her good looks without showing them off, and her touchability. Everyone wanted to touch her, he says, and she was catlike about being touched, either freezing, ducking, or luxuriating in the contact. He does not remember her flirting with men, but imagines that she must have done so on the Boston and Maine railway line, which took her into Boston for her singing lessons. It was on this line that she met John's father, and on this line that she met the man she married, Dan Needham, the man for whom she took John away from the Congregationalist Church and to the Episcopalian.
John remembers the night when his mother told the family about Dan Needham. John is six; it is 1948. John's mother simply announces, at dinner, that she has met another man on "the good old Boston and Maine." After reassuring Mrs. Wheelwright that she is not pregnant again, and telling John that the man is not his father, she tells them that he is a drama teacher who is applying for a job at Gravesend Academy; he is also a Harvard graduate, a fact that John's grandmother finds impressive. Suddenly, the doorbell rings, and Dan Needham appears in the foyer. A rumpled, red-headed, young-looking man, he is very different from the attractive young men John's mother usually dates. Where most of those men are awkward and diffident around John, Dan Needham gives him a mysterious paper bag. He tells John not to open it, but to alert him if it moves. As the adults talk in the living room, John is unable to resist the temptation, and opens the bag. He sees a horrible monster, and screams. Dan laughingly tells John's mother, "I told you he'd open the bag!"
The monster, it turns out, is merely a stuffed armadillo, a prop Dan was using in his lecture at Gravesend Academy. He has just been hired as a history professor, focusing on the way drama and performance distinguish different historical epochs. He gives the armadillo to John to keep, and John cherishes it. Owen also loves it, and the two of them create a game in which one of them hides it in the John's grandmother's attic, and the other has to find it.
John remembers his childhood visits to his mother's sister Martha and her husband Alfred Eastman in the White Mountains in northern New Hampshire. On the train, he always eats too many tea sandwiches, and is forced to use the terrifying restroom--simply a hole cut out in the bottom of the car--before they reach Sawyer Depot. John is simultaneously mesmerized and frightened by his three cousins, Noah (three years older than John), Simon (two years older), and Hester (less than a year older), who are used to a far rougher and more athletic life than John is. He goes skiing with them, but where they are expert skiers, he is a novice, constantly falling down. Hester, who is obsessed with the idea of sex, warns him that he will make himself sterile if he isn't careful.
John remembers waterskiing with his cousins on Loveless Lake, and playing King of the Mountain with them on great sawdust piles in Uncle Alfred's lumberyards; but he says that what really made the contests thrilling was the presexual tension he associated with Hester. Confronted with a burly, rich, masculine father and a gentle and feminine mother, constantly beaten in contests by her older brothers, Hester's only recourse, when she was slightly older, seems to have been "to intimidate every girlfriend either of them ever had and to fuck the brains out of every boy they ever knew." John thinks that Hester was the product of her environment, while Noah and Simon argue that she was born that way. Still, John says that the deck was stacked against her from the start, even before adolescence. He remembers being forced to kiss Hester as a penalty for losing games; the first time, they had to tie Hester to the bed, and later, John began losing the game on purpose.
Owen is always jealous when John goes to visit his cousins. He insists that John not take the armadillo to Sawyer Depot, and says that he should get to take it home with him while John is gone. When he carries it home, Owen brings a box stuffed with cotton to carry the armadillo home in--a box used to transport monuments by Owen's father, part of whose granite business is the selling of granite gravestones. One Thanksgiving, John's cousins come to his grandmother's house in Gravesend--80 Front Street is the address--and John tentatively introduces them to Owen Meany, fearful of what they might do to him.
Contrary to his expectations, they are awestruck by Owen's bizarre appearance and unearthly voice. They play a game in which Hester hides in the closet of John's grandmother's attic, and the others attempt to find her; the rule is that if Hester can grab the searcher's "doink" before he finds her, she wins. When Owen finds Hester, she tickles him instead of grabbing his penis, but she frightens him and he wets his pants. Humiliated, he flees the house, and John and his mother have to chase after him in the car. At last Owen agrees to return--provided that he can take a bath and wash his clothes--and they play a new game, in which Hester hides Owen and the others try to find him. Owen tells John that he thinks his cousins are not terribly wild--he says that they have simply lacked direction.
Later, after Owen's foul ball kills his mother, John remembers that day as he lies in bed trying to sleep. The morning after the accident, John wakes up to see the Meany Granite Quarry truck outside on the driveway. Owen gets out from the passenger door and leaves a large package on the doorstep of 80 Front Street, where John has spent the night rather than in his bed in the apartment his mother shared with Dan Needham. The boxes contain all of Owen's baseball cards, his most prized possessions. But now everything has changed for Owen and John about the game of baseball. John asks Dan Needham what Owen wants him to do with the cards, and Dan replies, "He wants you to give them back." John does so, and on Dan's advice, he also gives Owen the armadillo, to show him that he still loves him.
Dan says that if a thing he gave John could have such a special purpose, he would be very proud, and that is the first time John considers the idea of a designated fate--a "special purpose" in life. John remembers a recent day--January 25, 1987--when he thought of Owen Meany while celebrating the Anglican holiday of the conversion of St. Paul. He identifies with the idea of conversion, he says, because Owen Meany converted him.
After keeping it for two nights, Owen returns the armadillo, just as John returned the baseball cards. But John is outraged to find that Owen has removed the armadillo's claws; with its claws amputated, it cannot stand upright. Dan Needham explains, surprised, that Owen must be making a comment on what has happened--John, Dan, and Owen are all like the armadillo; they have all lost a part of themselves. Later, John thinks that Owen was also referring to the armless totem of Watahantowet, which represented the idea that, to Watahantowet, losing the land that became Gravesend was like losing his arms: everything has a price. According to John, what Owen intended to say with the armadillo was this: "GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT." In other words, Owen was saying that he was appointed by God to carry out a specific purpose.
As John writes his narrative--on January 30, 1987--it is snowing in Toronto, where he lives. The snow makes Toronto seem like a small New England town, almost like Gravesend. John says that he recently read a copy of Ronald Reagan's State of the Union address, which disgusted him; he describes Reaganism as having "numbed America." When Owen and John were seniors at Gravesend Academy in the '60s, Reagan was merely a politician in California, and did not understand anything about the Vietnam War, according to John. Owen, however, did understand, and he and John followed the conduct of the war very carefully. Owen understood everything, and criticized the American presence in Vietnam from the start. By 1971, John had retreated to Canada and applied for Canadian citizenship. Without explaining what he means, he says that it was Owen who enabled him to evade serving in Vietnam; he writes that Owen gave him far more than he ever took from him, "even when you consider that he took my mother."
Chapter 3: The Angel
Summary
John relates another memory from childhood, from before his mother's death. His mother keeps a dressmaker's dummy next to her bed, which is always dressed in tasteful clothes. John's mother is an expert seamstress, and has a habit of taking clothes out from expensive stores in Boston, then copying them herself and returning them. The dummy wears the clothes while she sews. At night, John and Dan Needham occasionally mistake the dummy for John's mother. John and Owen like to dress the dummy up, and occasionally Owen invents an outfit that John's mother actually wears. But no one can convince her to wear the one red dress in her closet--it is a beautiful dress, but it is the only garment she owns that is not white or black. The only time she ever wore the red dress was during a production of Angel Street by the Gravesend Players, which Dan resurrected after moving to town; she played the role of a wife driven insane by her evil husband, and Dan played the evil husband. Mrs. Walker played the flirtatious maid, and Mr. Fish--a neighbor of Mrs. Wheelwright who was at the time in mourning over the death of his dog Sagamore, who was killed by a diaper truck--played the hero. Owen and John watched every production; it was the only time John's mother ever acted with the Gravesend Players.
One night, Owen spends the night at John's, and wakes up with a fever. When he goes to tell John's mother, he stops short, and hurries back to John's room, crying that he has seen an angel by the bed. John creeps back to the room with him and sees the silhouette of the dummy; he assumes that Owen has mistaken it for an angel, but Owen insists that the angel was on the other side of the bed. John feels Owen's fever and thinks that he hallucinated the angel, but Owen is adamant. Later, after Owen's baseball kills John's mother, Owen will become vocal about his belief in predestination, the idea that every action and every person serves a specific purpose and that every deed is fated. He believes that, when he saw the angel in John's mother's room, he disturbed it, and therefore interfered with the scheme of fate. After the baseball kills John's mother, Owen refers to it as "fated," and John realizes that he believed the angel was not a guardian angel--it was the Angel of Death, and he deterred it from its work.
On the night in question, Owen sleeps with John's mother, and remains vigilant in case the angel should come back. Hours later, Mrs. Wheelwright (John's grandmother) bursts into the room to scold her daughter for leaving the tap running--though it was actually John's mistake--and Owen, believing her to be an apparition, screams hideously, waking half the neighborhood. For years after that, John writes, Owen insisted that John's grandmother had wailed "like a banshee." John had always thought the description ludicrous--after all, Owen made the most noise--but one day Dan Needham looked the word up, and found that a banshee is literally a premonition of a loved one's death. Perhaps, John says, Owen was not so preposterous after all.
John remembers a time when his grandmother actually consented to act in a play directed by Dan Needham; she played an English matriarch in Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife. She performed marvelously, and brought the house down. But despite the acceptance Dan found in the Wheelwright family and in the academic community of Gravesend Academy, it was four years before he and Tabby were married. John speculates about why they waited so long, but ultimately cannot settle on an answer. Perhaps his mother was overly proper, since she was so reckless with the fling that produced him, or perhaps Dan demanded to know more about John's father and John's mother would not tell him.
Whatever it was, it was not the disapproval of the couple's two religious communities; the Episcopalians and the Congregationalists practically competed to win the couple over. John vastly preferred the Congregationalists, whose pastor, Reverend Louis Merrill, was a serious, doubtful, educated man, to the Episcopalians, whose rector, Reverend Dudley Wiggin, was a Bible-thumping ex-pilot. Owen is not impressed with Rev. Merrill; he says that a preacher should not have so much intellectual doubt. But the Wheelwrights, and most of the Gravesend community, love him; he is a frequent speaker at the Academy. They also pity him for his family: his wife, a California girl, wilted in New Hampshire, and their children were sickly. The Rev. Wiggin's wife was a brash redhead called Barb, and his children were oafish athletes. Nevertheless, Dan and Tabby chose to join the Episcopalians, and John began his long tenure of attending Sunday school class with Owen Meany. However, the wedding was held at Hurd's Church, the nondenominational chapel at Gravesend Academy, and the ceremony was conducted by both Rev. Merrill and Rev. Wiggin. A year later, John's mother's funeral was held in the same church.
At the wedding, both ministers shared their thoughts on love with the congregation. Afterward, the wedding party retired to a reception at Mrs. Wheelwright's house at 80 Front Street. Here, Simon commented on Owen's dark suit, saying that he looked like he was attending a funeral. Hester angrily defended Owen. During the party, Hester went into the bushes to pee because she wanted to avoid the long line at the ladies' room, and she handed Owen her panties, which he embarrassedly stuffed into his jacket pocket. Owen's wedding present for Dan and John's mother was a granite marker that he made at his father's tombstone factory, reading "JULY 1952," the month of the wedding. As the couple prepared to drive away for their honeymoon, a sudden storm arose, and it began to hail. Owen rode away with the newlyweds, who agreed to drop him off at his house. Unbeknownst to everyone but Hester, Owen escaped with her panties still in his pocket. Her thin yellow dress soaked and clinging to her, her plight was visible to everyone, and she bolted for the house.
John writes that Mr. Chickering, the Little League coach who ordered Owen to swing at the ball that killed John's mother, is now wasting away with Alzheimer's disease. John remembers that Mr. Chickering wept at his mother's funeral, feeling responsible for her death. John thinks about Harry Hoyt, who was walked before Owen batted--had he been the last out, Owen would have never gone to the plate. Harry was later killed in Vietnam, and his mother became a war protester in Gravesend. Buzzy Thurston, who reached base on an error before Owen batted, did not attend the funeral. Later, he evaded Vietnam through drug use--he was declared psychologically unfit to serve--but he was killed in a car accident caused by his drinking.
The graveyard in Gravesend was near the high school, and at the burial of Tabby, Rev. Merrill's voice was interrupted by the sound of a high school baseball practice. Many of the mourners cover their ears with their hands, and Owen repeats "I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY!" Afterward, John narrates, his Aunt Martha, Mrs. Wheelwright, and Dan each tell John that he is welcome to live with them; he elects to spend some of his time with Dan--who legally adopted him when he married Tabby--and some with his grandmother at 80 Front Street. He takes a walk with Hester, who tells him that Owen feels even worse than he does. They walk to the cemetery, where they find Owen praying over the grave, his father waiting in the Granite Company truck nearby. Owen says that they must go to the apartment and take the dummy, or Dan will stare at it and make himself miserable. They retrieve it from an uncomplaining Dan, and Owen decides that he should keep the dummy himself. The dummy is wearing the red dress.
As he writes his story, on February 1, 1987, in Toronto, John says that he has come to believe in angels. He says that this belief has not much helped him--he was not even elected to a parish office during the last council session at church, though he has held many offices in the past. He says that he was irritated by the service, too, which emphasized the beatitudes of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. He does not like the new canon, either. But the psalm rang true: "Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure: / fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil." John says that he himself has felt wrath, and been moved to do evil--as we shall see.
Chapter 4: The Little Lord Jesus
Summary
The Christmas of 1953, the first Christmas since John's mother died, is a gloomy holiday. For the first time in John's memory, he does not go to Sawyer Depot, because his grandmother believes that that would make them all too lonely for John's mother. Instead, eleven-year-old John and Owen root around in the Gravesend Academy dormitories (Dan has a master key), while Dan works on the Gravesend Players' production of A Christmas Carol, starring Mr. Fish as Mr. Scrooge. Owen and John are to act in the church Christmas pageant; Owen is adamant that he not be forced to play the Announcing Angel, a role he has felt humiliated by for the past several Christmases.
Rev. Wiggin and Barb have a unique approach to a Christmas pageant: they dress the littlest children in absurd turtledove costumes, let the prettiest girl play Mary, and keep a huge supply of infants backstage in case the Christ Child begins to bawl. Over the Christmas holiday, as Owen and John snoop through the empty rooms of vacationing boys, they learn where to look for pornography--and when they discover it, it inevitably lowers Owen's opinion of the room's occupant. The experience is depressing, the numbing sameness of each boy's belongings, each boy's sense of homesickness, contributing to Owen's belief that dormitories are "EVIL." In one boy's room, they discover condoms, which Owen gleefully announces are banned by the Catholic Church. They take turns putting one on their "tiny penises," which John sees for Owen as an act of religious rebellion--one more proof that he has escaped the Catholic Church, one more repayment for the unknown insult the church dealt his mother and father.
At the meeting to cast parts for the Christmas pageant, Owen sternly declares to Barb Wiggin that he will under no circumstances play the Announcing (or Descending) Angel. John is cast as Joseph, but no one will step forward to be the angel. Suddenly, a fat boy named Harold Crosby tips over backward and falls out of his chair--an accident mistaken by the rector for volunteering. Harold protests that he is afraid of heights, but the rector is unflinching: Harold will play the angel. Owen convinces the group that he should be allowed to play the Christ Child, to eliminate the need for droves of babies being passed about backstage. In this way, Owen Meany is chosen to play the Baby Jesus.
Using a textual argument based on the carol "Away in a Manger," Owen successfully lobbies to have the crib removed from the manger scene ("...no crib for a bed..."), and constructs himself a regal nest amid the hay. Mary Beth Baird, the Virgin Mary, desperately wants to be able to show her affection for the Baby Jesus, and Owen suggests that she could bow to him. She does, and the rector decides to keep this in the pageant.
Writing in 1987, John says that he prefers to go to his current church, Grace Church, for services on the weekdays, when there are no sermons and no families with children. He describes the usual experience of sitting behind a family with children dragged to church against their will. Again, he criticizes the clergy at his church--one of them is a racist, one of them wears faded clothes. He says that he does not go to the Christmas pageants at Grace Church because the Christmas pageant of 1953 was all the Nativity he needed: he has already witnessed the miracle.
In 1953, Dan's production of A Christmas Carol is stymied by poor performances by the amateur actors; the Scrooge of the show, Mr. Fish, frequently drops by to complain. John writes that though Mr. Fish lived next door to 80 Front Street, he never knew Mr. Fish's occupation--to John, he was all neighbors, everyone who rakes their lawn and plays fetch with their dog nearby. John remembers the day Mr. Fish's dog, Sagamore, died; Mr. Fish likes to lure John and Owen over to play football, and one day Owen succeeds in kicking a punt a very long way. Sagamore runs after the ball, and collides with a diaper truck bringing a delivery to a young family on the street. Sagamore is buried in Mrs. Wheelwright's rosebushes; Owen presides over the ceremony, providing the little group of mourners with sorrowful candles. The Rev. Merrill appears, but he stutters and cannot say anything, so Owen recites the "I am the resurrection and the life" verse. This was before John's mother's death, and she takes Owen's hand.
In 1953, John visits Owen's peculiar house only rarely, though he notices the tortured Nativity scene on the mantle: the Virgin Mary has a mutilated face, and the Baby Jesus is actually missing. John lets it slip to Owen's parents that Owen is playing the Christ Child in the pageant, and they seem stunned. Mrs. Meany even tells John that she is sorry for his mother's death--it is the first time the laconic woman has ever spoken to him. John's mother's dummy is still in Owen's room, and John sees Mrs. Meany scrutinizing it closely. John and Owen pass under a railway bridge just as a blazing fast train--the Flying Yankee--passes over it. John thinks it is a lucky coincidence, but Owen does not believe in coincidence, only in the rigid machinations of destiny.
One night at dinner, John announces to his grandmother--in the company of Lydia, Ethel (Lydia's replacement), and Germaine (the clumsy maid hired to care for Lydia)--that Owen does not intend to visit the Boston singing teacher to try to change his voice. He believes that his voice comes from God, and is intended to serve a special purpose. Mrs. Wheelwright contemptuously replies that it does not come from God, it comes from his having breathed too much granite dust as a baby, which also stunted his growth.
One day, Owen and John are exploring the rooms at Waterhouse Hall when they hear another master key turn in the lock, and the Brinker-Smiths enter. The Brinker-Smiths are a young faculty couple with a new set of twins, and Ginger Brinker-Smith is a legendary object of lust among Gravesend Academy students. Owen and John hide, and the Brinker-Smiths proceed to have sex gleefully on the dormitory bed, enjoying their mischievous retreat from their children. Owen and John are shocked, and Owen is almost offended. "SEX," he says, "MAKES PEOPLE CRAZY."
Owen continues to orchestrate events, just as he has done for the Christmas pageant. When the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come quits the Gravesend Players' show, Owen convinces Dan to let him play the part. At rehearsal, he terrifies the other cast members--no one laughs once, and Mr. Fish actually forgets his lines. When Owen next comes to 80 Front Street, even Mrs. Wheelwright is respectful of him. After all, Owen is now the Lord Jesus and the Ghost of the Future, all in one.