Free A prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving Page A

skills, can enhance our understanding of not only the characters on a stage but
of a specific time and place as well. And for this session with the drama
students, Dan Needham was saying, he always brought along a certain
"prop"-something interesting, either to hold or focus the students'
attention, or to distract them from what he would, finally, make them see. He
was rather long-winded, I thought.
    "What props?" my grandmother asked.
    "Yes, what props ?" Lydia said. And Dan Needham said
that a "prop" could be anything; once he'd used a tennis ball-and
once a live bird in a cage. That was it! I thought, feeling that whatever it
was in the bag was hard and lifeless and unmoving-and a birdcage would be all
that. The bird, of course, I couldn't touch. Still, I wanted to see it, and
with trepidation-and as silently as possible, so that the bores in the living
room would not hear the paper crinkling of the two bags-I opened just a little
bit of the bag within the bag. The face that stared intently into mine was not
a bird's face, and no cage prevented this creature from leaping out at me-and
the creature appeared not only poised to leap out at me, but eager to do so.
Its expression was fierce; its snout, as narrow as the nose of a fox, was
pointed at my face like a gun; its wild, bright eyes winked with hatred and
fearlessness, and the claws of its forepaws, which were reaching toward me,
were long and prehistoric. It looked like a weasel in a shell-like a ferret
with scales. I screamed. I also forgot I was sitting under the telephone table,
because I leaped up, knocking over the table and tangling my feet in the phone
cord. I couldn't get away; and when I lunged out of the hall and into the
living room, the telephone, and the phone table, and the beast in the bag were
all dragged-with considerable clamor-after me. And so I screamed again.
    "Goodness gracious!" my grandmother cried. But Dan
Needham said cheerfully to my mother: "I told you he'd open the bag."
    At first I had thought Dan Needham was a fool like all the
others, and that he didn't know the first thing about six-year-olds-that to
tell a six-year-old not to open a bag was an invitation to open it. But he knew
very well what a six-year-old was like; to his credit, Dan Needham was always a
little bit of a six-year-old himself.
    "What in heaven's name is in the bag?" my grandmother
asked, as I finally freed myself from the phone cord and went crawling to my
mother.
    "My prop!" Dan Needham said. It was some
"prop," all right, for in the bag was a stuffed armadillo. To a boy
from New Hampshire, an armadillo resembled a small dinosaur-for who in New
Hampshire ever heard of a two-foot-long rat with a shell on its back, and claws
as distinguished as an anteater's? Armadillos eat insects and earthworms and
spiders and land snails, but I had no way of knowing that. It looked at least
willing, if not able, to eat me. Dan Needham gave it to me. It was the first
present any of my mother's "beaus" gave me that I kept. For
years-long after its claws were gone, and its tail fell off, and its stuffing
came out, and its sides collapsed, and its nose broke in half, and its glass
eyes were lost-I kept the bony plates from the sheD of its back. I loved the
armadillo, of course, and Owen Meany also loved it. We would be playing in the
attic, abusing my grandmother's ancient sewing machine, or dressing up in my
dead grandfather's clothes, and Owen would say, out of nowhere, "LET'S GO
GET THE ARMADILLO. LET'S BRING IT UP HERE AND HIDE IT IN THE CLOSET."
    The closet that housed my dead grandfather's clothes was vast
and mysterious, full of angles and overhead shelves, and rows upon rows of
shoes. We would hide in the armpit of an old tuxedo; we would hide it in the
leg of an old pair of waders, or under a derby hat; we would hang it from a
pair of suspenders. One of us would hide it and the other one would have to
find it in the dark closet