The Lost Highway (24 page)

As always people divide these journeys into sections, so did Amy. The long section was from the point of Old Chapman’s house down the steep grade to the church lane. Here, if she was late, she would leave the highway and walk through the junkyard, coming out on Chapman’s lane, then walking below Young Chapman’s cottage and along the windswept beach, up the steps, and into the church vestry, where chairs were set in a semicircle and a pot of tea was brewing. It saved about ten minutes.

This, in fact, was her last night, the course finally coming to an end.

Almost everyone at this study—from Irene McDurmot to Betty and Lorne Everette—were senior citizens, some nearly eighty, and Amy a fifteen-year-old girl sitting among them, wondering what she was doing here. She had come in here one night, to sit in a pew. It was mainly just to get out of the rain for a time. But people were sitting down in the vestry, and Father MacIlvoy beckoned loudly through the open door: “Well I’m glad some young people still think this is great fun.” And waved her in, before she had a chance to close the big church door and escape.

When she entered, the door closed with a thud behind her, and the smell of oak and burning candles encompassed her, and she was trapped. So she signed up for a course on Saint Mark, who she decided, now that it was all coming to an end, was the practical saint among the four gospel writers. Yet whose message to her was not one of the law, but one of the spirit of the law. And the priest MacIlvoy seemed to embody this as well. Well, she had a crush on MacIlvoy because he was so kind, and that’s why she couldn’t say no to the course. He had been a tough boy, a good hockey player, and at one time a delinquent—or so was said. But something had happened to him, and overnight he had changed. He became a priest, even when the priesthood was being ridiculed and scorned, and seemed to say to one and all: “If it is scorned by so many then it must have some value.”

He had come along the year after Father Porier had died, and made a few changes. One was to place the grotto of the Virgin at the front of the church—for it was said that it was to her he prayed after years of defiling her memory.

The way MacIlvoy spoke and what he thought important was not at all the law, even of the church, so much as the spirit of the law. The spirit of the law brokered all others, and made all law, in the end, insignificant. This is what so many parables, like the one about the good samaritan, stated, and the wind that came now and again reinforced it. That is, the nature of the law destroyed, and would always destroy, but the spirit of the law liberated you from all and everything. This is what she had learned from the course. To the secular world the law mattered very much—for everything was based on approval or disapproval. But there was, MacIlvoy said, another greater law.

And when she realized what the priest said, what Mark was saying, she was staggered by beauty. That a man would write this, and then for two thousand years this would be used against others, and he, that man Mark, and all his brothers would be ridiculed and what they said cheapened. If this was the case, the world was doomed. She saw the grand dance of the world very much before her eyes this night.

Saint Mark’s was of course a dangerous idea, a very bold one. Yet it was not thought about as bold or dangerous anymore, for those who promoted it seemed stymied and timid. Yet they had carried this message for two thousand years: That you could find freedom and ecstatic joy even when bound by a wheelchair.

This is what the spirit of the law not only allowed but requested people do. This is what MacIlvoy tried his best to instill in them. He was a very plain speaker, but one who was very comfortable with the things he said.

Tonight, listening to him, Amy’s idea of life was an inextinguishable lamp of joy, and inside, beyond all the confusion of her mother and father, who did not love each other enough, and all the problems with money, and the problems besides of all and everything, hers was an inexplicable love of life told to her from some living word. Word that was as true as water in the earth springing forth to quench her soul at the lower end of Glidden’s pool. As she listened to MacIlvoy read these words, she felt almost disembodied, and a part of the greater universe—but a universe not of form or substance but substantial and formless, vast as the creator.

Among old and young, when the recesses of the vestry were cast in dark and the walls were lighted far away with candles, the message of Mark, read by MacIlvoy, stirred in her this wonder of some great “other” meaning for herself and the rest of mankind, a meaning caught in erstwhile glimpse of a greater wonder than could ever be known. And she had not even known the course was going to take place until she had stumbled into the room to rest out of the spitting rain.

Now, she stared at Irene McDurmot’s hands, and realized the difficulty of the journey—for Irene’s journey was almost over, and yet still it was one that saw at moments the true and utter majesty of the world, even though now her head nodded, and she was asleep, and except for the wrinkles of her face like a child. One of the youngsters kicked Amy’s foot and winked when Irene’s head fell forward.

But Amy did not stir. Irene—to her, at this moment, and having known something of her life—was a great lady, and no kick would do for laughter. She was transfixed. The difficulty of the journey made it spellbinding, the glow along the old walls increased the message.

“Christ is with you,” MacIlvoy said, and he touched her forehead and made the sign of the cross.

That alone, she thought at this moment, was greater than every bomb and torture man had ever devised.

“Whenever two of you meet in my name, I am present with you,” MacIlvoy whispered.

Her heart beat as soft as the air. The place was serene and still, with worn daily mass missiles lying on the far table. For a long while after the session ended she sat where she was, as others moved about her.

She left and walked alone along the beach, a radiant joy in her eyes.

So often the young are given this great gift of the heart in the autumn wind, seen only as spindly-legged children walking home in the cold, but when catching them at a right moment, you see their turbulent faces filled with awe.

As Amy walked up the pathway from the rock-strewn beach, toward the lane, and stepped beyond the first row of small fir trees, toward Chapman’s lane, she heard two men arguing. It sounded strange and urgent, like a rustle of leaves—or “rats’ feet over glass in our dry cellar.” She slowed her walk and listened, curiously hoping for the telltale word, to make everything joyful once more.

“Look,” one said, “it is over, leave it go—and you’ll see how it all works out—and besides it weren’t my fault it was yours! It was your fault too!”

The other, shaking his head, simply was saying, “Oh oh, oh, oh.”

“I know, but still—nothing bad has happened at all—in fact, these things are unavoidable in cases like this.”

At this moment she stopped in her tracks, then started to back up without even knowing why. But fear welled up in her. As she stumbled, both looked her way. She fell to the ground, but stood immediately and started to brush her slacks off.

“Hello there,” Leo Bourque said.

She could just make out his eyes, as penetrating as a beam of light, glancing as he spoke. The other man turned, his own look somehow senile or deranged. He glanced back at her but for the first time did not nod.

“Hello Alex,” she said.

She walked by them quickly. Jim Chapman’s truck was sideways on the lane, as if its brakes had been jammed on, doors opened and engine running.

When she got to the corner she ran, for some strange reason plagued her heart. Along the highway she did not stop.

Alex saw and heard her as if in a dream. In fact, in the next few days he would not remember meeting her there, until Leo Bourque anxiously told him so. Told him they were looking for a truck. Told him she was the only one who knew.

—

T
EN MINUTES BEFORE
A
MY HAD LEFT HER HOUSE TO WALK
to the Saturday course on Saint Mark, old Jim Chapman’s truck moved slowly downriver, with Alex driving. It was a strange moment for Alex. He thought fleetingly about it. For all his worldly energy had come to this; the boy who once bullied him was going with him to this rendezvous with the uncle they hoped would help them claim a ticket they had not yet found. Although Bourque, sure of himself, said he would show Alex the ticket that night. They were in the truck of the uncle whom Alex had disowned, after stealing the keys from the house. So the sum total of Alex’s life had come to this, and he was the last person to think it would.

Alex Chapman believed that man was the creator of his own destiny. He dressed warmly because of it, made sure he took aspirin and vitamins and blood pressure pills. He had millions of intellectuals who agreed with him; the Canadian broadcast radio defined him and them every day as being the most rational and astute, and even the ones willing to save the world from itself. Politically correct thought abounded. Sanctity of the faith was almost always laughed at. He was devoted especially to the rights of women and the First Nations people. His many articles always said so. He was devoted especially to exposing social ills that others had created. He laughed at all religion as superstition. And if anyone called him on it he said, “I was a priest so I should know.” He mocked G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and applauded Dan Brown.

There was not a moment of grandeur in the common man that could not be turned against the common man for the benefit of some new idea. He had learned at university as much falsehood as anywhere else—and how to give up others at the drop of a hat for personal gain—yet people made thousands and thousands a year clinging to this falsehood. Worse, as a student he had done whatever he could to shock adults—and in some ways he still did. There were always people singled out for blame. And for a few years Alex helped orchestrate this blame. Like his uncle, who he used as a scapegoat a hundred times. At one time other professors were frightened of him, for he might blame them, and so sided with him against those who were too weak or too honorable to side with anyone. The power given to him in small rooms of study was surprising, even to himself.

Knowing Minnie would have heard about his power he could not stop. He loved the idea of being outrageous. Of harming reputations. If he decided they needed to be harmed. That was up to him. In secret he had tried very hard to find the lie in Father MacIlvoy, which would entertain his friends. He did not, but as he said, that meant nothing. MacIlvoy was a priest and therefore culpable. He had been dazzled by his own rise to power within the student activists. He was mesmerized by the idea that he would get a tenure-track job, all the while feigning disinterest, knowing that they couldn’t take it from him.

The same Alex who had attempted to disrupt the visit of the prime minister, over funding for the arts, was the Alex who wanted the poetry of a certain student banned for being too white and too male. He knew even as they tried to fire this student from the poetry journal, that the man was a fine and courageous writer. But the truth did not have to be present to pretend you were truthful. That was what masked truth at university. Alex became that man. The one who talked of Buddhism, but dismissed others with a calculating stare if they spoke of Christ. This was the same Alex who had sat in a circle and resigned his position; gave up his position on a point of honor, not knowing others would simply let him do so. That they wanted him gone just as he had distrusted them and wanted them gone. And that no other university in the cloistered Maritimes wanted him either. In fact, while traveling to those places seeking a job, he saw the safe, somewhat intellectually calculating faces he had left at his own, within the atmosphere of brick and brown and the studied aspect of the snow.

Always there were new ideas. It was an acquired taste promulgated at university, soured with cynicism and a feeling of superiority, a class consciousness based on the intellect, not much different in the final analysis than that of Leopold and Loeb. It was a vacuous condition of both men and women, certain of their entitlement. And it had brought him to exactly where he would have been if he had never finished grade 9. So he himself, over all this time, had no say in the matter. So he was not the master of his own fate he had set out to be. Thinking now of himself in his army jacket sitting in the mall, surrounded by his devotees and his protégés, he remembered his vast and rapacious ego, thinking the whole university would come down and his name be heralded. But he was turned on by his own group, betrayed by everyone including himself, and that’s why he needed the ticket.

——

Bourque himself had imagined Alex as a great man who went to university and whose name was in the paper because he wrote articles about the underprivileged. From the time Leo had gone away as a boy he had taken an interest in this fellow he had been on the bus with. But he thought he would never see him again, nor could ever conceive a time when they would be friends. (Though he liked to tell his wife that he knew him. In fact, there was a point when he tried desperately to sound like him.)

Then Alex came back—with the bid. To Bourque, seemingly the impossible happened. And he went and bragged to his wife that Alex Chapman (a man as important as that) needed him. Yet what happened? Leo’s life after that moment fell apart. Everything spiraled downhill for a variety of reasons, many of them having to do with the bid. And now this friendship seemed not as blessed as he thought it would be. And only the ticket seemed to him to be its saving grace.

The night was quiet and cooling, and small leaves were just beginning to be tinged with the faintest trace of gold—though Alex knew it would be another month before he would have to burn wood every evening, two months before the first uncertain snowfall, three months before the darkest days of winter. By that time, he decided, he would be in Greece and warm. No one would see him again—and he would bring to himself that quiet and peace he had longed for when he went to first communion with his mother. In those days, far away, in deep old Saint John, peace had seemed possible. What he tried not to think about was that he always remembered the church as being peaceful then, and his life of love and forgiveness, as naive as it was, better than his life of approval and disapproval.