A Prayer for Owen Meany

John recalls that his mother, Tabby, was an attractive woman who captured the attention of men and women alike. She met her husband, Dan Needham, on the same train on which she met John’s father, while traveling to and from Boston for singing lessons. Dan, she explains, was traveling to Gravesend to interview for a teaching position at Gravesend Academy.

No sooner has Tabby explained this than Dan appears at the door. He greets John with a brown paper bag, instructing him to look after it but not open it. While the adults talk, John sneaks to where the bag has been placed, eventually opening it. It contains a taxidermized armadillo, which Dan gifts to John. John recalls how, in the years to come, he and Owen make a game of hiding the armadillo for the other to find.

Before Tabby’s death, John and Tabby often traveled by train to northern New Hampshire to visit Tabby’s sister, Martha, and her family. There they spent winters skiing and summers boating. John’s cousins—Noah, Simon, and Hester—are wild and boisterous, their company both terrifying and exciting to John. On one occasion, the boys force John to kiss Hester after John loses a competition. Owen is jealous of the time John spends with his cousins and begs to be allowed to travel with John to their house. John, fearful of the physical harm the cousins would likely cause to Owen, agrees to a compromise: Owen will meet the cousins when they come to John’s home on the next Thanksgiving holiday and will also keep the armadillo at his home to keep it safe from harm by the cousins.

The day after Thanksgiving, Owen arrives while John and the cousins are roughhousing in the attic. John is surprised when the cousins are polite to Owen. They agree on a game in which Hester will hide in the dark closet and attempt to attack one of the boys when he enters the closet before he can attack her. When Owen’s turn comes, Hester attempts to tickle him, and Owen wets himself. Owen immediately bikes home, but John and Tabby catch up to him in the car and convince him to return. There, Owen bathes while his clothes are laundered. He then devises a new game in which one of the others hides him for the others to find. When Hester’s turn comes, she hides Owen so effectively that he is never found, and the others give up. John badgers Owen to reveal the hiding place, but he refuses.

Later, on the day after Tabby is killed, Owen gives all his baseball cards to John. John consults Dan for advice, uncertain whether Owen wants John to keep them or destroy them. Dan says Owen, in truth, wants John to give them back, and so they return the boxes of baseball cards to the Meany home. Further, John gives Owen the armadillo and, as Dan predicts, two days later Owen returns it. The claws, however, are missing from the animal.

As an adult, John lives in Toronto, Canada and notes that it was Owen who helped him avoid serving in the Vietnam War.

Tabby, an excellent seamstress, makes her own clothing by copying items she would purchase in Boston and then return. All her clothing is either black or white, except for a red dress that Tabby despises. This dress she wears only once—when acting in one of Dan’s plays. Tabby uses a dressmaker’s dummy, which she keeps in her bedroom, and Owen enjoys dressing the dummy in various clothing combinations.

One night, Owen awakens with a fever, and John sends him to Tabby’s room. In the dark, Owen is certain he sees an angel. John presumes Owen confuses the dummy with an angel, but Owen insists the angel appeared opposite the dummy. He falls asleep in Tabby’s bed and is later wakes with a start when he sees John’s grandmother. Owen is convinced she is a banshee who has come to announce a death. Later, John thinks of how fortuitous it was that Owen predicted Tabby’s death.

John recalls that Tabby and Dan waited four years before marrying, though there was never a doubt that they were in love. They are married at Hurd Church, the nondenominational place of worship on Gravesend Academy’s campus. A reception follows at John’s grandmother’s house. The event is well-attended and Hester, not willing to wait in line for the restroom, requests that the boys stand guard while she urinates outside. She gives her panties to Owen to hold, and he taunts her with them for the rest of the party, unwilling to return them. Owen and his father gift the couple a large piece of granite on which Owen has engraved the month and year of their wedding. John notes that the granite slab resembles a headstone.

As an adult, John sometimes visits Mr. Chickering, the former Little League coach, who now has Alzheimer’s and lives in a facility for the elderly. John recalls Mr. Chickering’s grief when Tabby died, noting that many teammates attended the funeral as well. Among them was Harry Hoyt, who would later die in Vietnam, though not in combat, and Buzzy Thurston, who would avoid the draft only to be killed in a drunk driving accident. During the service, Owen sings loudly. In the cemetery outside, as Tabby’s casket is placed in the grave, a baseball game can be heard on the school diamond nearby, and several of the mourners cover their ears in an attempt to drown out the sound.

Afterward, Dan and John discuss the option of John alternating between Dan’s dormitory apartment and John’s grandmother’s house. At the end of the night, Hester accompanies John on a walk to the cemetery where they find Owen at Tabby’s grave.

Owen feels it is not right that the dressmaker’s dummy is still in Dan’s dining room, so the three go to retrieve it. They ride with the dummy—driven by Mr. Meany—to Little Boar’s Head beach. Owen wades into the water, carrying the dummy, insisting he should keep it.