The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  So it was not Stardust, not at all!

  On that day, when Fanny fell asleep, Amy placed the brake on the chair and went into the woods to see who it was. And then, after fifty or so yards she came to a gentle slope and a turn, where the path went down along the brook to Glidden’s pool, and sunlight fell through the branches and glowed on some flat stones. At the bottom it was darker and more quiet. She saw a sparrow flit on a branch.

  “Rory,” she laughed.

  No answer.

  “Who are you?” she asked. But when she did the wind picked up and a few twigs rustled, and the branches moved. She thought she heard someone moving off, but she couldn’t be certain.

  “Who is there?” she pleaded. All about, the green leaves hampered what she could see, and left her alone. “Is that you, Mr. Chapman—Alex?” she asked.

  “Go away!” she said, “You go away right now!”

  Then she heard Fanny calling her.

  “What are you doing?” Fanny said in her shriek garble. “What are you up to?”

  The young girl turned, went back to the road, and took Fanny home. She locked the doors and drew the drapes tight, but this did not make her feel safe. In fact, it caused just the opposite sensation. She took a nail and hammered the bathroom window shut.

  That evening the wind blew, and she could smell smoke from chimneys in the air. When she lay down on the cot near the kitchen, the wind made pitiful sounds, and it was so cold it was like autumn, and some of the bird nests had fallen from the trees.

  “Tomorrow Mrs. Hanson comes. In two days Mommie goes—in five days Daddy is home—you wait and see if he lets anything ever happen to me!”

  There was only one problem. For the very first time this summer she would be left alone with the old woman. Minnie only a stone’s throw away would be gone, and Mrs. Hanson would on that one day be going down to pick her mommy and daddy up. For five or six hours in the evening, she and Fanny would be alone.

  “I will make the best of it—” she decided, still thinking that she was mistaken, that she had to be—for things like this did not happen at all; at least not with men like Alex.

  —

  IT WAS NOW THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER AND THE SHADOWS were colder, and the fishing boats in the bay distant, with the water dark. Markus visited the hospital and spoke to John Proud. He knew that men went insane on methamphetamine. But he wanted to believe that Proud, who’d had so much trouble in his life, had not done so. He wanted to protect him, protect the reputation of his cousin, as shaky as that reputation at the moment might be. His family had once been a great family, and Markus knew it could be again. Markus knew that in time, someday, if there was any justice, the First Nations would find their way again. He knew they were as brave as any men and women alive.

  “What did I do?” John asked him, his left arm with the intravenous tube inserted near his wrist, his head still bandaged, and a small hose in his left ear.

  “I don’t think you’ve done anything,” Markus whispered. “Except try to steal a lamp.”

  “But others do? The chief came in, saying I did.”

  “Our chief,” Markus asked in Micmac, “or mine?”

  “Ours—so half the boys on the reserve think I did it. Besides, I stole from most of them. So they all stand about the bed grinning. I told people I killed Poppy Bourque—I told them I cut him up in pieces. Well I was bragging a bit and the story kind of got away from me.”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  “Sometimes now I think I must have.”

  “Yes, many do—all the officers do. But I don’t. First of all, where was the blood—the bit of blood near the hunting camp wasn’t his. But Bauer said you are the prime suspect because you insisted on being one.”

  “Well,” John Proud said with some understanding of the plight he had placed his cousin in, “that leaves you in a tight spot.”

  “Yes,” Markus said, “it does—but of course I have been in tight spots before.”

  “Well I can tell you this—I don’t remember anything—”

  “Do you remember confessing?”

  “No—” Johnny smiled. “Except I do remember a story I told—which as I say seemed pretty good at the time I told it.”

  Markus went back to his apartment. He showered and lay down on the couch and listened to the sound of wind in the autumn leaves. He was sure he had them—almost sure—and now it was all slipping away. Where would they go from here? If only there was a witness. But if there was a witness, perhaps he or she would be paid off—as horrible as that might be.

  He fell asleep, into his deepest sleep in days. When he woke it was growing dark under the cold venetian blinds.

  A lot of money, he thought, sitting up and going over his notebook with all the possibilities written in detail and then scratched away—except one possible thing, except one—which he had circled: “lotto.”

  To him it was terribly silly, and proved that he had lost his mind.

  —

  AS YET THE PRIEST, WALKING BACK AND FORTH IN HIS STUDY at the top of his house, listening to the first of the autumn rain rail against the roof, still leaned to the possibility of a mistake in all his and Markus Paul’s assessments—arrived at independently of one another over the last two weeks. That is, the priest too had had a strange feeling when he watched Alex at the funeral. Something wasn’t right. Now Paul wanted to see him, just to speak to him about his neighbor who he was investigating. Since Paul was a policeman, and Alex was a freethinking man, Father MacIlvoy thought it may be about marijuana or something—and did not want to give anyone up on that.

  Still, something strange was happening. And strange, too, had been his life. So strange he sometimes wondered how he came to be Father—what had happened to him, the boy once drafted by Montreal?

  “If you want God to laugh, tell him of your plans,” he told himself once.

  He had gone to fight a forest fire at Lean-to Creek. He thought of this as the turning point in all his dreams and ambitions, that one stream had plugged up and another had started with what he was sure would be clearer, more vibrant water.

  He had been a tough, charismatic kid the likes of which a Leo Bourque would never go against. You looked at MacIlvoy’s face from one particular angle and you knew he was as tough as nails. He took a job in the woods that summer, and by chance there was a fire. Three crews from the government garage he worked at went in—he went in as a pump man for one of the hoses, and set up at Lean-to Creek on a windy day in July, twenty years ago now. What was strange about it all was how quickly it happened. The wind turned the fire back into an area that hadn’t initially burned, about four hundred yards from the brook where he was running the pump. They began trying to save the old Roach place, and cut the fire off from jumping the highway.

  At five in the afternoon he heard a boy, who had been operating a hose, yelling. He heard an older man shout. He went to investigate, walked to the top of a hill through some black spruce, and could see a wall of fire that had leveled Roach’s house and barn coming directly toward him. He could reach neither the boy nor the man. It was too late for them, so he turned to go back to the water but found he had already been overtaken. He was silly enough to climb a tree to try to get above the smoke. The fire burned under and about him for two more hours, and the trees beside him went up in flame. Below him the grasses withered and burned too, and he felt the sting of embers on his back, while the bottom of the tree he had climbed and his own feet were licked but did not burn. He placed his shirt over his face and thought he would die.

  For the first time in his life he prayed, and in his prayers, heard by no one else in the world, said, “Keep me safe and I will give my life to you.” That is, like so many, many millions and millions, in the end one’s self was the only thing he could offer.

  What was strange is he did not die.

  So what could he do now but do what he promised? He didn’t have to—so many people prayed, and then forgot the promises made immediate
ly. And he was one of the toughest boys on the river. No one would give a thought to him not doing it. No one would even know. Besides, he had been drafted by Montreal.

  Yet MacIlvoy did not join his team that fall. It was a long and painful winter, made more so by the number of requests he received from friends to go out with them to try to shake this imaginary debt. He did not speak of this debt, of course, but many knew something had happened to him there. Some internal metaphysics that had changed the registry of his clock. Some said he met the ghost of an old Micmac guide who led him out. Others said he became a coward and was now afraid.

  “A gutless puke,” as some said.

  A great despondency overcame his house, and all that was in it. The girl he loved slowly drifted away, and began dating again. The snowbanks at the end of the lane sat in mysterious darkness, the street lights flickered on the ice. He stayed in his room, his broad sloping shoulders and quick powerful arms in quiet agony, and became in his very anatomy a question mark.

  Vandermere, the center on his line in Junior, the man he looked up to, spoke loudest against him. His younger siblings spoke to him cautiously, trying their best to humor him, and then finally out of pain and frustration ignored him. It was true that that March his father brought a psychiatrist to the house, under the guise of friendship. But to no avail.

  He entered Holy Cross a few years before Alex. For a long, long time the burden of having a perfectly healthy son, once as tough as nails, who had a great God-given talent he refused to use because he had climbed a tree, was almost worse than if the fire had taken him. After a time, he was forgotten. The world moved on. He took the job at this church—an out-of-the-way Catholic church along the battered highway almost no one in the world would know. It was (and he did not know this) the church Alex Chapman had dreamed of having.

  Over the long years only heartbroken people, desperate and in need, were driven to seek his help. The ones who could not make it on the earth, yet as soon as they could they would disappear again, some to actually mock him for his help. Some he saw later, and they were embarrassed they had ever spoken to him when weak. And priests too were weak, and in weakness, with pale eyes and trembling hands, confessed things to him he had to keep in secret.

  Many nights he wondered himself what he was doing. Lately, the little girl Amy had been coming to see him. It was after the course he had given on Saint Mark and not in time yet for the course on Saint John. When she spoke, she spoke so quietly that he couldn’t catch what she said. But still and all it was her coming to him that kept his faith alive, if just barely. For his heart went out to her and her kind, loving face. People told him it was about a boy named Rory who Amy liked. That it was puppy love. So he spoke to her about love, and said that she should not worry, that her love would come, and she would be happy, and the man she fell in love with would treat her well. She nodded, looked timid, and left the church by the side door. In fact, by the end of the summer if she did drown herself in Glidden’s pool, he wouldn’t be surprised.

  —

  ON THE TWELFTH DAY AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE, THE DAY after he visited Alex and took paint from the truck (he did this so he could get a warrant and do a Luminol test on the truck’s interior), Markus Paul visited the priest. He had not at all forgotten about the maggot, and he wondered if someone hadn’t had to move a body. This is what he was thinking of as he went to MacIlvoy.

  They had known each other before, and MacIlvoy had coached him one year in peewee. Now Markus told him what he thought. There was a smell of autumn in the air, the wide white boards of the room they sat in were once used on a fisherman’s shed.

  “I think they have something to do with the disappearance of Poppy Bourque,” Paul said. “I think it is over something—money, perhaps even a lotto ticket. I am not so sure.” He asked the priest, opening his notebook with the eagle on the front, moving the picture of his sister to the back, if he could tell him anything unusual that was happening.

  This was a strange, strange thing. All of his life, MacIlvoy had been torn about what he had done, whether he had sensed in the scalding wind on the day of the forest fire that his life was spared by some miracle. So he had followed this miracle to here—he had followed it away from the Montreal Forum and into this back-lane church. Here is where he came face to face with his soul. Here he saw disillusionment, crime, and hypocrisy within his own church and among his own priesthood. Over the tedious years, Alex had become more verbose against him and the little church. But then, why did this happen? There must be some mistake?

  “Can you tell me anything—outside of a confession?” Paul asked.

  But both knew that actions were very much like confessions.

  Father MacIlvoy remembered one thing. He told Markus Paul what he had seen, had occasioned to witness, at the end of his drive, by the tall hemlock, early the previous Tuesday morning when he had come out after saying mass. It was a disturbance on Alex’s property.

  “What kind of disturbance?”

  MacIlvoy recounted that he looked over and saw in the rather splendid morning fog a man chasing Alex from the garden, Alex running with a cucumber in his hand. Then Alex put his hands up over his head as if he were about to be hit, and MacIlvoy was prepared to rush over and enter the fray. The man chasing Alex stopped, and grabbed him by the arm, and started speaking to him. Alex calmed down somewhat.

  “And who was this man?”

  “The man was Leo Bourque.”

  “Did you hear what they were speaking about?”

  “No—nothing—except one shout, and then they walked to the porch—and I had an appointment at the hospital.”

  “They have turned on each other,” Markus said.

  “If that is the case, can you pick them up?”

  “No one believes they are responsible but me—”

  MacIlvoy folded his arms and stared out the window.

  “And we don’t have the body.”

  “Ah—”

  “And we have John Proud, who has already confessed to it—but he is so wild in the head he would confess to sainthood.”

  “Ah.”

  “So you see, I am in a bind.”

  “Yes,” MacIlvoy said.

  “Alex has done something he is trying to hide—and he did not know he would ever do it. So he is hiding it from himself. So, too, is Leo—but Leo is tougher and smarter, and has had a harder life—he is the one keeping them going.”

  “When,” MacIlvoy stated, “will they come to their senses.”

  “I am not sure when! Nor am I sure if this is the end of it, or if we can prevent whatever will happen before they do. I am wondering if you could keep an eye on Alex for me—just for a few days.”

  “I could,” MacIlvoy said, “but I am back and forth every day here, upriver and down.”

  They spoke about the milk route the priests were now on, the wee amount of priests there were left in the world to do what they believed was God’s business on earth. Like a policeman sent somewhere at the last moment to stop the riot that had already ripped the town asunder, some of the very policemen sent entering happily and fiendishly on the side of discord.

  “To find messes and fix a rioting of conscience,” Father MacIlvoy now said. And what a dreary thing it was, to have come over to this life and given up the Montreal Forum on what his father had said was “a goddamn crazy whim!” His father had died alone, switched to the United Church, and refused MacIlvoy at the funeral. And still he was here. To hypothesize on your own about Saint Mark, or any other, to young and old, as if you had a direct line to the Vatican or some other special favor.

  He had taken to asking himself this: I am now forty-one, so why am I here, and why can’t I just go? Have I become like a skip man in a mine who has to be there every day to lift people up from the bowels of hell? And he thought, What will I see that will allow me to leave? And in the last week or so he had rested on this idea: he had seen Amy light a candle at the grotto one evening. He said to himself, If t
he candle goes out before I have to leave to go to the Church of our Lady of Perpetual Help, I will be released of my duty and will pack and leave. I will work in the oil patch and get some money—and, who knows, I might even marry. But he had said all of this off the cuff and did not respond to it as he went about putting out the candles with a candle snuffer after mass.

  Immediately he began to ask himself why he had made this vow. So each morning he rose for mass, and each morning, the air cooler and sharper, he noticed the thin flame of the candle still burning.

  “Surely it must go out before tomorrow,” he said.

  Yet the next day the wick still burned. He began to think then that God was certainly making fun of him. And now it was raining intermittently, and still the little candle burned. He had a heavy heart thinking he had made this pledge.

  “Mother, let the wick burn, and let me go to the church in Millerton tomorrow and give old Cyril Corey communion.”

  Now he was pleading to remain in the arms of his stupid little church. How could a grown man be so naive? How, as Dylan Thomas once asked, could he not? He walked Markus Paul to the car and glanced again at the wick. The wick told him that nothing is really dependent on man. Certainly by now it should have burned its way out—and yet, like a spark, it glowed silently.

  Father MacIlvoy let out a sigh, but said no more when Markus looked his way.

  —

  THE RESERVE RAN EAST TO WEST ALONG THE MIRAMICHI bay to the south and the caribou barrens to the north. From the back of the reserve a man could see on clear summer days the houses of the French village beyond, along the road that led down to the Acadian coast, with a mirage of puddles and mists rising from the asphalt until noon hour.

  Years ago they hunted caribou for the tourists that came here, American and German and Dutch, who all wanted the experience of killing something grand, and often grander than themselves. The Micmac were given tips by these men and women, and had their pictures taken in clothes and attitude not even looking like First Nations men anymore but poor cousins of the Enfield carrying hunters.