AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That was just like him, to call it “chapel” after everyone else had been converted to calling it morning meeting.
“Whatever he’s going to do, we should try to stop him,” Dan told me. “He shouldn’t do anything that might make it worse—he’s got to concentrate on getting into college and getting a scholarship. I’m sure that Gravesend High School will give him a diploma—but he shouldn’t do anything crazy.”
Naturally, we still couldn’t locate him. Mr. Meany said he was “in Durham”; Hester said she didn’t know where he was—she thought he was doing some job for his father because he had been driving the big truck, not the pickup, and he was carrying a lot of equipment on the flatbed.
“What sort of equipment?” I asked her.
“How would I know?” she said. “It was just a lot of heavy-looking stuff.”
“Jesus Christ!” said Dan. “He’s probably going to dynamite the headmaster’s house!”
We drove all around the town and the campus, but there was no sign of him or the big truck. We drove in and out of town a couple of times—and up Maiden Hill, to the quarries, just to see if the hauler was safely back at home; it wasn’t. We drove around all night.
“Think!” Dan instructed me. “What will he do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We were coming back into town, passing the gas station next to St. Michael’s School. The predawn light had a flattering effect on the shabby, parochial playground; the early light bathed the ruts in the ruptured macadam and made the surface of the playground appear as smooth as the surface of a lake unruffled by any wind. The house where the nuns lived was completely dark, and then the sun rose—a pink sliver of light lay flat upon the playground; and the newly whitewashed stone archway that sheltered the statue of the sainted Mary Magdalene reflected the pink light brightly back to me. The only problem was, the holy goalie was not in her goal.
“Stop the car,” I said to Dan. He stopped; he turned around. We drove into the parking lot behind St. Michael’s, and Dan inched the car out onto the rutted surface of the playground; he drove right up to the empty stone archway.
Owen had done a very neat job. At the time, I wasn’t sure of the equipment he would have used—maybe those funny little chisels and spreaders, the things he called wedges and feathers; but the tap-tap-tap of metal on stone would have awakened the ever-vigilant nuns. Maybe he used one of those special granite saws; the blade is diamond-studded; I’m sure it would have done a faultless job of taking Mary Magdalene clean off her feet—actually, he’d taken her feet clean off her pedestal. It’s even possible that he used a touch of dynamite—artfully placed, of course. I wouldn’t put it past him to have devised a way to blast the sainted Mary Magdalene off her pedestal—I’m sure he could have muffled the explosion so skillfully that the nuns would have slept right through it. Later, when I asked him how he did it, he would give me his usual answer.
“FAITH AND PRAYER. FAITH AND PRAYER—THEY WORK, THEY REALLY DO.”
“That statue’s got to weigh three or four hundred pounds!” Dan Needham said.
Surely the heavy equipment that Hester had seen would have included some kind of hydraulic hoist or crane, although that wouldn’t have helped him get Mary Magdalene up the long staircase in the Main Academy Building—or up on the stage of The Great Hall. He would have had to use a hand dolly for that; and it wouldn’t have been easy.
“I’VE MOVED HEAVIER GRAVESTONES,” he would say, later; but I don’t imagine he was in the habit of moving gravestones upstairs.
When Dan and I got to the Main Academy Building and climbed to The Great Hall, the janitor was already sitting on one of the front-row benches, just staring up at the saintly figure; it was as if the janitor thought that Mary Magdalene would speak to him, if he would be patient enough—even though Dan and I immediately noticed that Mary was not her usual self.
“It’s him who did it—that little fella they threw out, don’t you suppose?” the janitor asked Dan, who was speechless.
We sat beside the janitor on the front-row bench in the early light. As always, with Owen Meany, there was the necessary consideration of the symbols involved. He had removed Mary Magdalene’s arms, above the el
bows, so that her gesture of beseeching the assembled audience would seem all the more an act of supplication—and all the more helpless. Dan and I both knew that Owen suffered an obsession with armlessness—this was Watahantowet’s familiar totem, this was what Owen had done to my armadillo. My mother’s dressmaker’s dummy was armless, too.
But neither Dan nor I was prepared for Mary Magdalene being headless—for her head was cleanly sawed or chiseled or blasted off. Because my mother’s dummy was also headless, I thought that Mary Magdalene bore her a stony three- or four-hundred-pound resemblance; my mother had the better figure, but Mary Magdalene was taller. She was also taller than the headmaster, even without her head; compared to Randy White, the decapitated Mary Magdalene was a little bigger than life-sized—her shoulders and the stump of her neck stood taller above the podium onstage than the headmaster would. And Owen had placed the holy goalie on no pedestal. He had bolted her to the stage floor. And he had strapped her with those same steel bands the quarrymen used to hold the granite slabs on the flatbed; he had bound her to the podium and fastened her to the floor, making quite certain that she would not be as easily removed from the stage as Dr. Dolder’s Volkswagen.
“I suppose,” Dan said to the janitor, “that those metal bands are pretty securely attached.”
“Yup!” the janitor said.
“I suppose those bolts go right through the podium, and right through the stage,” Dan said, “and I’ll bet he put those nuts on pretty tight.”
“Nope!” the janitor said. “He welded everything together.”
“That’s pretty tight,” said Dan Needham.
“Yup!” the janitor said.
I had forgotten: Owen had learned welding—Mr. Meany had wanted at least one of his quarrymen to be a welder, and Owen, who was such a natural at learning, had been the one to learn.
“Have you told the headmaster?” Dan asked the janitor.
“Nope!” the janitor said. “I ain’t goin’ to, either,” he said—“not this time.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t do any good for him to know, anyway,” Dan said.
