The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  She looked at him, her face so alarmed it alarmed him. When she poured the tea, the spout shook the cup, and tea spilled.

  But he continued on (for he had to). He had the schedule and money for the train ticket and “everything else.” He took it out and pushed it across the table toward her, in an official, irritable manner.

  “My mother was in the same boat as you and her life was terrible. Sam could even run off just like my father did. Who’s to say he wouldn’t? Then where will you be? I promised myself that if I could help it no one would suffer like my mother did. I promised myself that when I was a little boy. Your boyfriend will be away until next week,” he continued. “He will get back and you will not be pregnant—it will be like it never happened. Then you can tell him that you have thought it over and do not want to marry. Then, after a time, I will start to see you. Not right away, but after a few months.”

  Now and again he would see her eyes drift sideways to catch a glimpse of him. She still wore her immaculately white blouse, her hair brooch gleaming under the kitchen light.

  Then he said: “You know I love you.”

  When she looked at him, tears were in her eyes. He realized she was not thinking like he was, and became adamant to convince her. He began to talk against the church. He was filled at this moment with another great blessing the young have. How ironic it all was, and he delighted in the irony of broken church doctrine, by bishops and cardinals. That was irony for you.

  “I will leave the church—I will leave it now!”

  But finally he talked himself out, and she spoke: “But you did not come to the shore at Arron’s, and when I asked you if you were going to be a priest, you hurt me to my soul with your answer. Well, I am not doing this because of the church, I am not doing this because of Sam, I’m doing this because of the child—it is not an acorn, it is a child. I wrote to you about a child, because I did not want you to think badly of me when you heard. It is a child.”

  He had convinced himself she had written him for exactly the opposite reason. “No,” he said, confused. “I mean, we can stop it from becoming a child.”

  But she said: “When can we stop it from becoming a child? I could have stopped it from becoming a child, if I had not allowed Sam. But it did happen. So how did this child come about? Do you think that children are unplanned for? Who do you think plans for children like Burton? Or children like you—do you think you were unplanned for? What happened when your own father found out, that Mr. Roach? And would you give up one moment of your life, as hard as it is, for someone else’s decision concerning your life? It was not my sister June who planned Burton’s life. She only planned to run away.

  “Long ago I waited for you—until my feet were blue—and at the last moment, when I was leaving to go home, Sammy comes with a sled filled with wood he had cut for your uncle—for your uncle always gives him the harshest work. You see, and I will tell you—Sam had to do work you will never have to do, because he had no one in his family but him to bring home money. So old Jim Chapman knows this, and uses him. So he comes up the back way, near Jameson landing—why was that? He could have turned and crossed the road much nearer the bridge, but on that one and only day he didn’t. I was so cold, and he put his hands all over to warm me up, and who was I to tell him not to, I was freezing. So he acted like a boyfriend even then. Put me on the sled and brought me back to the Gum Road. Why weren’t you there—my father spoke that night about a boy he had scared, and I thought it must have been you. You began to ignore me. You wouldn’t speak to me at all. I have come to realize that the child is to be born because Sam, and not you, met me where you planned to that day—so it is not a jest but a gift of God.”

  “I suppose you still believe in the virgin birth,” he said, shocking himself when he said it. But it was something that had bothered him since he had read Thomas Merton—this fiendish denial of physical love as a part of Catholic devotion. So he waited for her to answer with a lighthearted smile on his face. And her answer was surprising.

  “Yes, and so do you—and let me tell you why and how—for the very opposite reason that you suppose. For if you think I have no child inside me, where do you think this child will come from—do you think that it doesn’t grow or exist but is only human when it reveals itself fully formed from beneath my skin, when its head finally appears between my legs? Is that the only way you and the new world can deal with it as human? Then that is most miraculous—from thin air we come, from vapors we are formed—what angel would not come to us in the night and create our virgin births!”

  He couldn’t believe she had said this, with so much conviction and force. At that moment he was stunned by her passion and sudden brilliance. He was stunned that God, whoever it was or whatever form it took, would want her to have a child by Sammy Patch, who cut wood on the woodlot near the river, and not by him. It was a mistake all intellectuals make sooner or later: that God would naturally love them, and consider them more worthy than others. Few university degrees have ever expelled that sanctimony.

  Still, he believed more than ever that he was doing all of this for the sake of his own mother.

  Then, suddenly, another idea spawned. It was as a knife in his heart. Since God had decided this terrible trial for him, and her, he decided at that moment there must be no God. He hated Minnie at that moment, and hated the whole world because of it.

  He stood, took the money, and left without another word.

  As he walked back toward the seminary, a sliver of fine ice all along the highway that looked as if angels had made beds in the asphalt, and its trenches filled with weeds broken free from under the snow, he thought of what a great trick this God business was. Never again! Never, never again! He was enraged that this had happened to him. So often it happens that what God is perceived to have done creates denial of God. As he passed the phone booth, once again he hurried, and then and there, by some great chance, it started to ring.

  He returned to the seminary and went to put the money back. When he opened the lock on the office door, with a calendar of Saint Jude hanging across the window, a hand touched his shoulder.

  “Where is our money, Alex?” the Monsignor asked kindly. The manager of the credit union had phoned to tell them of his strange behavior the day before.

  However, that same night in the rough weather, the herring fleet lost seven men out in the bay. So this story was the most important. They were looking for Leo Bourque, and the priest stayed with his family. Mr. Gallant, who Alex once thought of as his father, and who Leo went fishing with after he got married, had been lost. And Alex thought two things: the blessing of the fleet did nothing, and good men died in spite of what they prayed. That was irony for you.

  Leo was found by the coast guard clinging to a board, and to life. He said that Mr. Gallant had given his life for him.

  It took another two weeks for Alex to leave the seminary. He was asked to stay, to reconsider his vocation, but he couldn’t. He was now ashamed in front of everyone.

  Alex went home. His uncle—who had abandoned his trips into the woods to kill out of season, and Fanny Groat as well—now turned to him, and his face was livid with sad, overbearing anger. He stood in the back shed and blew his nose, and wiping it roughly shouted: “Hypocrite!”

  When winter came, and just at the time he had no money, Alex was put out of the house during what can only be described as a heated exchange at supper. When winter came, he slept at the old icehouse. There he brooded, and turned colder against the world. For some months people did not see him. He tried to live off the land, and almost starved. This was also to his shame, for once having thought he was Micmac, now to realize who he was. Not that many, Micmac or no, would have done any better where he was.

  Then one night, after being splashed on the road with slush from the wheel of one of his uncle’s trucks, he in a kind of blinding and enraged epiphany decided to get back at his uncle and at Minnie Tucker. In the cold backroom of the icehouse he burned his religiou
s books, at first hesitantly, peevishly, and then with renewed vigor. Going outside to throw them on a pyre, he stared off in the direction of his uncle’s house, and cursed.

  “I guarantee I will put you through hell,” he whispered.

  The next day he began to say and do things that he felt were necessary for a freethinking man. Anything that before was taboo was now no longer so. It did not come little by little. It came all at once, just like he wanted his sainthood to. All at once he wanted to destroy everyone who had hurt him, including Minnie. He remembered a woman Sam had when he was drunk one summer night, and so wrote Minnie about this.

  “Yes, Minnie, it is not only you he’s had.”

  He waited for Minnie to leave her man and come to him, and say she was sorry. She did not.

  Alex lived like a hermit at Glidden’s cove. He no longer spoke about the depth of the world; but believing he was free, he now spoke of how shallow it was. Belief in anything was given away to the cynicism so prevalent in this day. Not one man or woman given the chance would remain faithful. Everyone had been lied to, and so a new truth would have to emerge.

  One day Alex watched Sam climb upon the catwalk in the snow and ice. He stared at him, in a kind of agony, because he knew the boy was exhausted, yet he knew the catwalk moved tenuously in the wind—and Alex was thinking: If he falls I am free.

  In deep late December, the child, Amy, was born. He did not become godfather, and he refused to see the child even after he was invited to the christening. What did it matter to him, except to show his displeasure.

  Old Muriel kept him fed and clothed, and endured the ranting of the old man, who blamed the great-nephew’s failings on her. But the old man, even in his anger, could not in truth abandon the boy, and let Muriel have money for him, though he pretended he did not. A dollar, a five, or a ten would be on the table some bleak cold mornings when he left for work or mass.

  One day Muriel, delivering this money, asked Alex why he and his uncle could not try to get along. “He is growing old now, and he is ill.”

  He turned and in a thoughtless moment said: “I’ll tell you why if you are so eager to know! Did you ever hear about Fanny Groat and Uncle Jim—they have been together many times—when you are off being a slave of the church—that’s what God thinks of you—God is acting on their behalf, a pimp, so they can have sex while you pray.”

  He saw in a brief moment of clarity the enormity of her suffering, and what his words had managed to do. There was something in her eyes that was wounded, not only because of what he said but because of who said it. He left the room shaking, but then came back in.

  “Well you shouldn’t cry about it,” he said. “It’s not that bad, is it? I mean, even if you left him—so what? Find another man—and see how he likes it.”

  But he could not believe he had said something so callow. Yet this only enraged him more, leading him to say more callow things. He became resourceful at saying things that would draw attention to himself, by saying things outrageous. Then he would try to take back what he said, and find he was unable to.

  Then he did something which keeping it secret would preclude him from the adulation he wanted. On a cold March night, coming across a windswept field he went into the back of the feed shed, to keep warm. He had gone out to see if he had a string of rabbits, and was hungry and humiliated by his lack of expertise in the world of hunting and fishing. It was during this feeling of undeniable humiliation that he spied his great-uncle’s black manifesto. The tyrant’s “four-poster,” people called it, because they said he verily carried his four-poster about in order to fuck you. It listed what people along the lost highway owed the tyrant for animal feed and hay and construction work. To touch it was anathema to good standing with the tyrant, but what did that matter now. Alex took it and in the cold, glassy, windswept field, lighted it afire. Because of the wind, it blew up in his hand and left a permanent scar. He saw it yawl and tumble in the wind, across the glassy ice toward Arron Brook, and disappear forever amid the windy trees.

  The old man looked for his book for a week, and went to Alex’s shed and asked Alex if he had it. He was perplexed and sad, and could not come to grips with the numbers in his head, and the many people who owed him. He tore and ranted and tore again, and ranted over it like a man lost at sea.

  “This is almost $26,000 owed me this year—!”

  “The last time I saw it, it was in your feedlot, where Sam Patch put it,” Alex told him. That was almost not a lie, but it did instill the first vague uneasiness about Sam with the old man, whose tobacco-stained hands trembled as he went out the yard, seeking what he could not find.

  Satisfied with this civil disobedience, he recounted it to two or three along the highway, who were most appreciative that the four-poster was gone.

  “You never did it, Sam Patch did,” they said. “You never done a fuckin’ thing for us and never will. Why, your old uncle does ten times as much a service to us as yous do, and that is your trouble.”

  So what he counted on never came, his highway’s acceptance of him and his reintroduction to them as a benefactor. What he did not count on came, that some (though, of course, not all) hearing of the old dictator losing his book, and knowing, tyrant though he was, how he’d helped them in lean times, took to estimating their debt and paying it off swifter.

  Then, in the summer, came the first mention of Alex in the press. It did not start in earnest or even out of some lost desire, or the pungent scent of betrayal of one race over another and long ago negation of common decency, as the press indicated it had. It started only as a party on the shelled and drifted sand on the east side of his uncle’s island. It started out as a joke, some Micmac men to go over for a party, and in fact only lasted for a week or so. But Alex rowed over on a small scow, asked by his uncle to see what those “chaps are doing” and ended up joining them, telling them he knew much about their suffering and had come to address it, and that ownership of land was theft.

  It was not an exaggeration to say that once he was present, some papers in the region became interested in the plight of the First Peoples, so in the end it might have been a good moment and thing to do. For Alex, however, it became his sudden realization that agitation drew the press like blowflies to a moose gone down.

  Alex had his picture taken with the natives on the shore, near their flat-bottomed skiff with a row of twenty-five salmon taken from the north cape of the island. He had another taken with seventeen-year-old Peggy Paul, who had come over in traditional dress to join the men. This was the picture that found its way into the papers.

  Although vague and distant now in memory, this takeover and sit-in caused more of a rift between uncle and boy, who could just make out each other’s heavy voices across the waves, the sound ebbing like the moment of the tide as the red sun danced and played on the black evening waves.

  “Goddamnit, boy, you come back here!” the tyrant said, yelling though his throat was sore from yelling. “You get over here now, the press will pigeon you for a fool, if not today then tomorrow!”

  “I will bring you a petition signed by everyone!” Alex shouted, though he had no petition, but he had a scribbler from the local paper writing everything down. He stared across to his uncle that late afternoon, and saw the old man fumble about on the shore, up to his knees in seaweed moving and undulating in the gray northern waves.

  His uncle tried to stop them single-handedly two nights later and was driven back by stones. Alex could say he did not throw any. Yet like some defiant and forlorn Jewish settlement facing a roman division of AD 66, facing Vespasian in the sun.

  Another day and Sam Patch was then sent over in a dory and spoke to the men, politic with an offer to pave the lower road on the reserve.

  “It should have been paved a long time ago,” Sam was instructed to tell them. “And we will get it done!”

  “They don’t want it,” Alex spoke on their behalf.

  Sam returned to a gloomy man sitting out on a pi
tch of dry earth, on a stool bent back, waiting for his man to approach, his eyes narrow upon him, as if he were just another enemy, or as if bringing back bad news he became the messenger one must blame. The tyrant’s green tie was loosened and limp against his blue shirt, having come from a meeting in town, his neck chaffed and his nose and cheeks the color of browned-out maple bark.

  “Will they take the paving deal?”

  “I think they might if we can get Alex away from them.”

  Old Chapman said nothing as he spit his snuff.

  “I’ll give it one more week—and they’ll tire of where they are,” Jim told him.

  In fact, he was absolutely prophetic. A week and a half later, the men from the reserve tired of Alex and in a squabble left the improvised encampment of birch and rocks, which to this day was still visible from the shore. They took as treasure Alex’s scow, and he was left alone to swim back if he could. He could not swim.

  Still, Alex said he would stay on the island, and tried to construct a shelter. He thought of his name in the paper, his martyrdom secure. Yet he lasted only another three days. Finally, stranded there during two days of withering rains, he called over to Sam Patch to come and bring him home. All one morning, half the neighbors could hear him call.

  The paving was done, just as Jim had said. It was also said that Jim had secretly paid some of the families to get their men to come off.

  Still, over the years people pointed to this as the second act of the Chapman downfall.

  “The First Nations have suffered, that’s for sure,” Kevin Dulse’s girl said, and she of course was right.

  —

  ALEX MOVED AWAY. HE TOOK UP RESIDENCE AT THE university.

  He became a protégé of one of the professors, Dr. Doug Cavanaugh. The man, not to be outdone by nostalgia or precedent, dressed in tweed and smoked a pipe, and you could see its smoke almost blue in the winter sky, and he balanced his courses on semantics with his love affair with a former colleague’s wife, Fiona. For a while Alex was in their circle and believed in their circle more than any other. He loved their kind and bookish house like he loved paradise. There was no religious calendar to evoke shame, no base Christ on the wall, no bible in the corner—except an ancient one picked up at an auction. They spoke of politics and the inherent power shift that must come.