The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  So he approached the car with this in mind. He was going to knock on the window and reprimand them—in a calm and kindly way—about the mud on his cheek.

  As he came toward the car, he could hear a boy saying, “Do it—do it,” and people giggling and whispering. The window rolled down just as he came up to it.

  He put his face into the window as a girl lifted her thin undershirt, and her breasts were an inch from his face. He could see snow falling down on those breasts, and his lips were near enough to kiss them. Everyone else roared and laughed.

  Alex turned and ran. He did not stop until he got back to the seminary.

  He thought of their mocking, and tried harder to pray. Then he saw himself praying in the mirror above his dresser, and throwing his boot, the mirror wobbled and fell, shattering. Two third-year boys ran in to look at him—and when he looked up at them, they backed away, for his face was now enraged. The day was gray, the mirror broken.

  They sent the young MacIlvoy boy in and he calmed Alex. For Young MacIlvoy might just be considered the one boy there who was not bothered by people’s sins. He was strong as a bear yet he never let on or cared that he was. He had been drafted by Montreal, and yet didn’t even play hockey here. He didn’t stay on the far left side of the old building where the hockey players were—the joke being that so many right wingers lived over on the left wing—the only ones not catching on to this double entendre were those hockey players themselves. But MacIlvoy stayed away from them, and had decided by reason of some miracle to lessen his life and disappear.

  MacIlvoy sat beside him for an hour, and Alex thought only of the boy’s intrusion and kept wishing he would go away. Or was it MacIlvoy’s intuition, about him? When he finally looked at MacIlvoy’s face, he realized the fellow was praying—and this bothered him even more.

  “Do you have doubts?” Alex asked finally.

  “About what?”

  “About this—about us doing this?”

  “A while ago I didn’t even believe—I called Christ and the Blessed Virgin down to the ground, I mocked them all the time—and so it came to me all of a sudden. I haven’t had time to doubt it yet.” He smiled. “I am sure I will someday—I am sure in some place in a far-off time I will hate my calling and say I have lived my life for nothing. But I will tell you this—that there is nothing in the world a man or woman can do where they won’t think this sooner or later about something—”

  “You are saying there is no better life than this?”

  “I am saying that no matter what life you choose, it will look at some point as if some other life is better.”

  Still, Alex knew that all his Lenten meals, his wonderful dialogue with God, and the sky, gave him nothing like that one brief moment when the woman lifted her shirt. And he wanted more moments like that. And each time he closed his eyes, in the warm classrooms, speaking of small ideas, the brief moment when Minnie’s dress blew upward made him weak. He knew now, this is what Canadian poets were writing about, and he would bring these poetry books to his room, and try to read in them the essence of how he felt. But no matter how explicit these poems were, and probably because they were explicit, they did not corner the vast celebration of desire and human kindness that he felt for every woman he saw.

  He read Saint Mark, and this calmed him, so often he would grit his teeth and keep going. Thinking of his mother, his old aunt—and even his uncle turning to smile at him and patting his shoulder. What would they say if he told them he had doubts? He went often to visit the ancient nuns who at one time had cared for the last lepers in Canada. And he was filled with gratitude while there, sitting in a small kitchen with sun coming through the small window, in a place so remote and barren that the furniture seemed alien. The nuns would smile at him, bring cookies and tea to his chair. But after he left, doubts would resurface. They would resurface because of the manufactured sympathy of priests he saw about him. He knew some of these priests were unholy and were kept here, out of sight, so they would not embarrass the diocese.

  Still, he had been warned much about these doubts, and there was little you could do about them but pray. But of course it was not his relatives he thought about leaving him—walking away along a lane in spring a few years before. It was Minnie—it was her alone. And each day she was getting further away from him—becoming a speck so far away that the dazzling heavens made her disappear.

  It was just at this time that a strange request came from Leo Bourque. He was getting married and hoped Alex would be his best man. The request came indirectly, from old Poppy Bourque, who came to see him and brought him blueberry cake. Alex said he would be best man, if that is what Leo wanted. And Poppy went away. But when the day came—when it came, Alex was at rehearsal for his Play of the Redemption and forgot all about it. The day wore on, and then the next day came before he thought about it. He found out that the wedding went on without him, that they waited an hour for him and Poppy acted as best man.

  “Well, I am glad,” Alex said. But he had told people that Doreen LeBlanc was making a mistake in marrying someone like him.

  “He will abuse her,” he said, with a sniff.

  He once again disliked himself for saying what he still believed should be said, that women should not fall for people like Leo or Sam.

  —

  ONE DAY A MONTH OR SO LATER, IN EARLY MAY, WHEN HE got back from class, there was a letter waiting for him from Minnie Tucker. At first he was stunned. Then he suddenly felt vindicated and believed she wanted him back. And then once again this inconsistency of human nature: If she wanted him back, did he really need to go? For if she wanted him back, did it not mean that he had conquered her better than going back to her would? He was troubled by this determining, and decided not to open the letter. So it sat on the dresser in its white envelope on the far side of the room for over a week. One side of it had been twisted, and he could see a small tear in the top. For days he left it where it was, even though he felt pulled toward it every time he looked at it. Then, finally, he went to examine that tear. Sitting in the chair at his desk he hastily opened it.

  It was Minnie at her simplest and most kindly. Telling him that, he was to be the first to know, she was expecting. And she wanted him to consider being the godfather.

  “It would please my heart greatly,” she wrote.

  She did not want him to hear this news from anyone else. For certainly others would make much of the fact that she was not yet married. Sam was away with Alex’s uncle, and she had not told him as yet. She wanted Alex to think kindly of her.

  “I will marry him,” she wrote, “but not until things are settled, and we have some money.” Then she continued: “I do not know why I never married him yet. I think I was waiting for you to realize that you still wanted me. But that is over now, and I was childish to try to take you from your duty and your first love. I am sorry for this, and want to reconcile with you.”

  She didn’t know if she could finish her secretarial course at the college. But she knew that Sam was a decent and good man.

  Alex put the letter down, and he was shaking, and his body was cold.

  “It is not up to me,” he said. “She should have told me sooner!”

  But as he sat there shaking, he thought, Why has God done this? He realized that not only did he still love her but he was torn apart by jealousy.

  He thought for days what to do. I am sure she doesn’t want to marry Sam Patch, he thought. And: Sam Patch is not for her.

  And then this line, which he remembered: “I want to reconcile with you.”

  He thought long and hard about what this could mean.

  To him it could only mean one thing, and one thing only: she wanted him, not Sam.

  And why did he open the letter—so he could be tormented? He hated himself for thinking that she had in some way waited for him. And the more he thought of this, the more it plagued him, and the more he tried to reconstruct the letter and what it actually said.

  And slowly
he felt this: he must have opened the letter to act upon the letter. And she was hoping he would, and wanting him to reconcile with her. But how would he act? He thought, What does she want me to do? There was only one thing. And it was this: the idea of her having a child that wasn’t his child was crucifying him and her. He suddenly believed that this is why she wrote, and why the word “reconcile” was used. That night he did not go down to supper, told everyone he was sick and locked himself away. He could hear an old priest in the other room, coughing and pleading with one of the younger priests that he was in pain. And the younger priest saying: “Yes, Father, I know—we are doing what we can—be brave—” And he heard the rosary being said.

  Christ, is this what he wanted for himself?

  That night he thought of what he was going to do for the rest of his life if he became a priest. He would take the vow of poverty—and he thought oppressively of how poor his side of the family had been. (That is why little Rosa had gone to live with his great-aunt and -uncle.) How this had always been brought up to him by his uncle. If he had been rich once like Saint Francis, this self-castigation might not be so bad, this seeking the cross might at times seem more natural—but he himself had never been rich. He disliked it here, too: the French students were superior and just as ignorant. Worse, everyone loved hockey, which he himself hated, and he had to stand in a cold arena and pretend to cheer for his brothers. Sometimes the convent girls would come over to watch and he would stare at their uniforms and think of Minnie. Think only of her.

  The secret was, he had promised his mother he would do good. She had begged him to be a lawyer. And why shouldn’t he? He had been dirt poor, and an orphan. She had been put out of his uncle’s house after she became pregnant, and in a way everything he did was done in memory of this. But really it was done in anger. His father had not loved him, and when his French friends in Quebec rejected him he had jumped to his death.

  Alex pondered this for another day—and thought, much like Sartre’s character, of a “thing” growing inside Minnie with every passing moment, and she had written to him hoping he would help her. Each time he reread the letter it became more certain to him that Minnie wanted him to take action. This is what was crucifying him. Finally, he went out to the main highway and used the pay phone there. He asked his aunt how long Sam and his uncle would be away. Another five days, she thought. They were settling accounts and hiring a man who was going to haul wood for them, off Christmas Mountain.

  Alex demanded that his great-aunt give him money. Baffled, she told him she hadn’t the amount he wanted, for Old Chapman controlled it. But if Alex came home at Easter, she would have a present for him. She said this as if he were a little boy and acting impatient. Then she laughed and said: “Sometimes you remind me so much of your father, taking my books from my library and not giving them back!”

  This infuriated him: “You old bat, you have never given me a thing,” he said, hanging up. He turned and walked back down the cold dreary road, cursing at himself. He thought of all the deer and moose he had helped his uncle quarter—the salmon he had cleaned—the bear that was caught in a trap. Yet his uncle believed himself a good man.

  So Alex would help Minnie do this one thing, as a form of reconciliation, and be no worse. And he knew what he was thinking. In fact, he knew he had to think it. That millions of educated men thought the same buoyed him now. Many millions today believed that being compliant was taking a moral stand, and refusing to take a stand on anything alleviated them the burden of self, which is what he believed Catholics were seeking in the first place. He was also relieved to understand that the Catholic church was a mess, and had been for some time. So this one thing was not so bad.

  In the silence of the Holy Cross, all he could see was her—no vision of Christ, but only her. Though there was still ice in the ditches after the hard winter, the sky was warming and the birds had found homes in the eves. Those birds he had once wanted to sculpt. It was best to be outside. Here, the priest-ridden hallways, where he was supposed to learn, smelled of watered-down soup. Some of the old men looked to him like pedophiles, living out their days in sanctuary far away from their awful crimes.

  The next morning, after mid-morning class when students were standing inside the foyer between those high-ceilinged classrooms, the Monsignor with his ample belly tucked round by a tied black shirt handed him money in a communion envelope, to deposit. He handed it to him saying: “Take this along to the credit union.”

  Young Chapman thought nothing of it as he went toward the small credit union up the highway. But halfway there he looked inside the envelope and realized it came to the exact amount he wanted: $700. That surely had to be a sign. It was money the whole residence had been saving for the missionary work the French priest with the lively face was doing in Guatemala. They had earned this money by the hockey games they played, their team called the Flying Brothers.

  He got to the credit union, one of those little square brick buildings, with two or three skinny shrubs, that tried to look modern in the middle of nowhere, a kind of secular thinking business, with its few potted plants in the corner. It was also, this credit union, socialist enough to have the left wing of the church believe in it. And the church was becoming more left wing among the teachers and scholars if not among the practitioners. Many new leftist priests did not want to comment on productivity or the idea of when conception began, for they were driven by the current understandings.

  But in the small credit union, in all of this he saw dreary, agonizing sterility. He refused to go in, but stood there long enough that people noticed him.

  Then in a daze, still trying to look natural, he turned and headed back along the highway—and just where the French signs became English once again, both of them having been at one time or another torn out of the ground, he made his way toward the dark seminary with its vacant-looking windows, its ancient stones that were once the ballast of ships coming from Ireland or France.

  That night, as the late evening sun was reclining, they had to go and bless the herring fleet, and he saw Leo Bourque on Eugene Gallant’s boat, the Samantha Rose. (This was his mother’s name. It inflamed in Alex the idea that he could still say he was First Nations if he chose.) Bourque and Eugene were fishing together. Wind blew as priests standing in their masculine robes batted the censor up and down, as men stood civilly in the crosshairs of a world now changing. Holy water fell against his face, and onto the hands of Leo Bourque, who was waving to him.

  Later, Alex went to his small cubby room and put the stolen money under his mattress. He didn’t even look inside the envelope. He would use this money to help Minnie, just as he believed her letter wanted him to, and then replace it before anyone found out. He would ask his uncle to replace it—he would have to—and say it was for Guatemala, which it was, and that he would work it off in the summer. That is, laying in bed, he underwent a fundamental change—one that came of a sudden and expurgated his former ideas of sacred duty. In fact, in sync with the times, the one true crown jewel of these liberal times started to become paramount, and this feeling would more or less rule his life from here on. It was the feeling all youth have, and feel blessed by: the feeling of cynicism.

  “Who am I to think I could help the world far away, when I might help Minnie here,” was the first volley in a war of will against himself that would continue unabated for years. Still, he had to try hard and long to convince himself that he wasn’t doing this for himself but for her. This reconciliation that she wanted, and dreamed of, and he agreed to, for her. If he could stop the pregnancy, he could stop her humiliation. For it was the same humiliation his mother had suffered in 1959 with him, and she should have had the same option! (However, he did not consider that he was himself alive and so able to think this, and that the option he was pretending to want would have prevented his thinking it was a noble one.)

  If she would do this, then Minnie wouldn’t have to marry Sam Patch. If she did this, he would tell her he was
leaving the priesthood, and she would come back to him. He was consumed by its rationale. That is, he should have held her on the church lane, but now was not too late! The rationale was also rational—this act would be a sacrifice for both him and her, and he would have to leave the priesthood by doing something against the church’s ordinance. Therefore, they would both sacrifice something implicit and then be together forever. Just, he thought, as the radical Jesuit Barrigan brothers had done. For the Jesuits were forward-thinking, and so too was he. He decided he would become a lay preacher, and a benefactor to others here and now.

  That wet night he snuck from his room, through the window, left the lower highway and walked many miles in the all-weather coat he had worn when he first arrived almost two years before. It was new then. Now, it showed him to be once again an orphan.

  When he passed the phone booth he had a terrible feeling someone was going to call, and he began to run. Yet he was the only one on the highway. For miles, he and the sky shared nothing else but each other. The breezes, however, were warm.

  He came to the house in the dark and waited until he was sure she was alone before he entered.

  Minnie was startled to see him, and he felt she was a little ashamed to see him as well. This was not the case. She was happy, thinking in some way he would be pleased with her. That is, she was still innocent, though carrying within her something that others believed made her guilty. But, to her distress, Alex did not come to tell her he would be godfather to her child. There and then, he tried to convince her to go away, to the doctor he had heard about in Toronto, and abort what she carried. He said it within the first ten minutes he arrived, so the tea she had made him hadn’t yet steeped.

  “This is not as serious as you think—the baby hasn’t even started—we must realize it is nothing—not even a little acorn,” he told her. “As soon as you do this, I will leave the seminary and we can marry—we were meant to be together—that is, you will give up something, and I will too.”