The Lost Highway (7 page)

One morning Sam was backing up a truck and almost hit Young Chapman as he left the yard. In fact, if Alex had not stopped to pick up a colored piece of glass, as reddish orange as the rising sun, he would have been struck and killed. As strange as it was, stopping to pick this up had saved his life.

“I’m sorry,” Sam yelled, jumping down from the cab. “I didn’t see you—I’m sorry.”

The old man yelled from the office door: “Watch what in hell you’re doing—that’s me flesh and blood!”

Sam didn’t want to lose his job, because he was preparing to get married. This is what Alex had heard. Sam and Minnie were taking a three-month course at the church. The one hitch in everything was this. Each time he saw Sam, the same dazzling jealousy returned. And in truth he thought only of her.

“I’ll let him go if he came close to you—he’s been careless with the big shifters,” his uncle said that night at supper. “If I let him go he’ll never have a cent—and he’ll never afford to marry the Tucker girl.”

But the boy knew this would be appalling. He also knew it was in his power to help destroy the relationship, at this moment. He swallowed hard.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he told Jim. “It was an accident—and, in fact, I know it is not yet my time.”

(That is, he tried to sound wise, but he also believed it at that moment.)

That night, going to bed, masturbating, thinking of her dress lifting, he was overcome with shame. He could not go to communion the next day, and when he went to confession, having to confess what he had done, in the privacy of his room he was certain the priest knew who he was.

“I’ll not forget,” Sam whispered the next weekend. “You taking up for me. And either will Minnie.”

“Never mind it,” Alex said angrily.

For the first time, Alex saw how the world stood—Sammy Patch with Minnie and him alone. Sam Patch with nothing but this dirt job that he, Alex, could take from him if he wanted to. But he felt the only way he would win approval is by going forward with his vocation, even if there were moments when he felt it was a sham. But who did he want to win approval from?

Minnie Tucker.

Then there came a test. One was his uncle asking him emphatically if he would or would not be available to work in the fall. Alex knew that this meant his uncle was asking if he was prepared to someday take over the business. That though they had not often got along, his uncle still considered him to be the one who would some day succeed him. In fact, because of his uncle’s dislike for his father, he was always trying to make something up to Alex in the end.

“I don’t think so—thank you for all you have done for me,” Alex answered with insincerity, which he had already learned to evoke through piety.

The old man, however, caught unawares by this sudden compliment, had tears come to his eyes. He went over and patted Alex roughly on the shoulder (the only affection he ever showed) and walked away unsteadily.

But Minnie’s test was worse. For he knew what she was asking him, and he didn’t know she would. It was the unexpectedness of it that caused so much pain.

She met him one morning at church, and in the drizzle of a March storm walked up the church lane with him after mass. She spoke of non-essential things for a long time, and tried to rehabilitate her father to him just a little. He was, after all, a good soul. A man who had his moments of lively grace and humanity.

“I am sure he was,” Alex said too stiffly. Again, the stiffness was a posture—a collaboration between saintly betterment and moral high-handedness. He knew this, and so did Minnie. This was the start of something that Alex had not had before, his pretentiousness toward goodness—this, in fact, is what one did not need religious study for. In fact, the world so opposed to religious study had this terrible pretentiousness as well.

Then she asked, as they stopped along the wet road and she suddenly took his hand: “Is it true you are going to be a priest?”

This was the moment, under the low clouds and drizzles of snow, amid the long sloping snowdrifts that ran down to the water, that said: There will be no other moment like this again. Tell her you love her and you will steal her back from Sammy Patch—for she is asking you what to do with her life. She is asking you to let her love you. This is the question she is asking—what is she to do, with her life. For she is prepared to live her life with you. It is not easy for her to ask this. And she would have to break up with him, but she is prepared to do so now.

But the idea of an ecclesiastical abandon surfaced in him—and the idea that he did not need these temporal things overcame him. For it was what he wanted her to believe, even if he was uncertain.

He thought, What will I say, how can I say I want her with someone else? He even thought of the moment he came when masturbating. Still, in pretentious casualness, and suddenly misinformed about his own agony, he said: “Of course—I have decided to go into the seminary of the Holy Cross next summer.”

“You are—you will,” she whispered, tightening her grip on his hand.

Her face was completely open in its vulnerable gaze, saying, If I let go your hand I will let go forever. But he could not overcome the idea that he was wounding her with this, and that she had wounded him. This meanness of spirit he suddenly remembered in his father, and yet could not correct it in himself. It was not so terribly harsh, but it was terrible it was present.

“And you have a good life.” He smiled, but his lips trembled slightly. He would never understand why he spoke these words. But he was proof of Aristotle’s disagreement with Socrates about men who have knowledge saying inconsistent things.

It was as if something beyond him compelled him to say this, as if the words had been in his mouth for a hundred million years. Both of them were still children really, standing in the early morning air along the lost and broken highway. What was so distressing is when he remembered her soft skin when her skirt blew up, and the triangle of dark hair. It was a mystery, and there was nothing temporal in it but a wondrous spirit of life that beckoned to him. But there was this: if he let his guard down, would she want him the same way? That was the question he was too frightened to have answered. He was frightened to give himself over to her question, and let her then control what she said in return. In hindsight this was one of the most significant moments of his life, on a windswept lonely lane.

He was pleased she had looked hurt, for a second.

She let go of his hand, kindly, and left him there. She turned and walked along the far side of the lane, and disappeared toward her house, rushing in the morning air, her head down. He could not stand to watch her go. So he tried to call to her but no words came.

And so he looked at his small Timex watch that his aunt had bought him for his seventeenth birthday and hurried home as well.

He did not swear, smoke, or drink, and would look piously upon the world. But now his uncle’s former activities bothered him, and he took a moment to reprimand his uncle one evening. In fact, he had many of them written down.

“Do you know how many times you whipped me?” he said. “I was chased outside in my underwear in February and slept in the barn. I was kept from friends. I never had a party in my life. I don’t mind that—but there were other things. You tell me all the time how bad my mother was. And things I say which I know are true—and this is the most important thing: I know they are true—and I say them, and you tell me they aren’t true. You say I made things up, when I never—and it torments me. Then you just laugh. And then, why did you have to tell me about my father—this Roach who hurt my mother—he is nothing to me.”

The night was growing dark, and outside he heard the first robin of the spring twitter once in the trees. And so he spoke as if to the robin.

“Yes,” Jim said, almost peevishly, “I know. But I want you to know something. I paid for your dad’s funeral—I tried to put him to rest, and I didn’t have to!”

Alex thought this was a great catharsis, but later on Jim would not speak to him, and looked away many times after. He was hurt, as men are when faced with something they always felt was incomprehensible.

And Alex’s flaw was this: whenever he thought of Minnie he did something to harm himself, to end the body’s desire, so he would not masturbate again. Somewhat like Saint Rosa of Lima. He cut himself, and distributed these cuts, hidden.

And it worked for a while. But still, in his deepest heart he knew this could not be sanctified, this was not what Christ wanted. So he tried harder to put all prurient thoughts out of his mind. But how could these thoughts, which were natural and overcame him at all hours, be unnatural?

He decided he would impress them all, and disprove his own desire, by becoming a saint. His aunt said he might be a little naive in thinking this, but was nonetheless thrilled by the idea.

“Saint—well, don’t try it all at once.”

“But that’s what a saint does—tries it all at once,” Alex said. “Well, not Saint Augustine perhaps, but Saint Francis and Saint Joan of Arc, and so many others!”

A saint had armor against the arrows of the world by not recognizing them as arrows. The great saints could walk through them because they did not acknowledge them. But on occasion, one thought would creep back into his mind. He would think of the day the wind blew her skirt high above her panties in the yard, enough to make him weak, and Sammy had laughed as if he had already seen it. And he remembered that she never left the house to walk down the Gum Road unless her blouse was pure and white—even on those days when her father had taken her socks—and one day, in the afternoon light through the trees, he saw that beneath her blouse she had no bra on, because the few she owned were on the line, her nipples taut as raisins in the sun.

Still, what had started in bravado and pride—the idea to show her up, by becoming a priest—continued in feverish hope. After a while this desire, and obligation, became his entire life. It had to—and why, because of people who were watching him, waiting for the flaw that would take him down. So he could not go down, he must keep the faith in all weather, until people saw it was not a pretense. That is, if it was pretense he must disprove it even to himself. And so he gritted his teeth and bore it.

The day before he entered the seminary of Holy Cross to study theology and Saint Augustine, his great uncle had a party for him, and invited every one of the young people. It was subdued because of the calling he had, because there was no beer for them, and because most of them did not know him well. But Minnie, whom he waited for, longed to see, did not come. Besides, though the venue was outside it was raining.

He sat on a lawn chair by himself a little away from everyone, and waited for Minnie. He looked like a boy who can only appear in rural Canada: clumsy, coming to manhood half-sophisticated, understanding the rudiments of society yet lacking in much, and trying to hide it all with sayings and ideas gleaned from the fringes of the broader world, all of this making him look gangly, self-conscious, and overly suspicious. That is, he was like a boy from everywhere, but in some aspects like one seen only here.

His uncle, with his tall boyish walk and his mat of white hair, stood above all, and impressed the young, as he could always do, with tales of the woods and war. He was filled with the kind of contrived outrageousness people have when they have little chance of being challenged. And he exuded the bravery that older naive men do in front of kids. And he sang old lumbering songs and told jokes to liven the party up, and drank homemade wine from his stash in the barn, and gave some to two of the more rugged boys who he wanted to approve of him. They drank and smiled at the jokes he told, and ignored Alex for the most part. He thought of their lives and wondered what would become of them. The old man also flirted with one of the young girls who had come, who responded to him out of politeness he misunderstood, and this made Alex embarrassed.

He took out his photos and showed his medals and spoke of his doings, and Alex himself sat alone. His aunt came to him and said, “I’ve had many dreams lately about Minnie—”

“Oh, I haven’t,” he said, lying, to bolster his virtue, though he had masturbated that week thinking of her.

Muriel knew he liked to sculpt and asked him if he wouldn’t like to go to the School of Fine Arts in Halifax, she was sure she could make his uncle see the virtue of it. That he would someday be a fine sculptor. But he thought of the clay pieces he had done of those birds he once sketched, now lying in torment about the junkyard behind him, and said with perhaps as much naïveté as his uncle, “Well, we are all clay.”

—

W
HEN HE HAD BEEN IN THE SEMINARY A YEAR AND A HALF
, and wore a silver cross on his chest, and had passed through his first series of exams, went to mass every day, and said prayers from seven until nine at night, was silent in certain parts of the seminary, he believed that he was better for it, and that he himself one day, as his older brothers in Christ had, would lay prostrate on the altar in the hope of attaining the pleasure of Christ while snow fell on the dark ground. He wanted to be a young priest on the Bartibog and say his first mass where he had once served on the altar. He thought of pleasant afternoons in snow-laden February walking to small country houses to see the children—just as priests had done in the long ago. So many people his age wanted the same thing and sought so many ways to find it. But not he. He had already found it. He would return to it—to the idea of caring for the children’s souls by loving them as human beings. He would do this for the memory of his mother. He tried not to think of his father, that failed musician who had died some time ago.

Great men had come from the Bartibog and great healers as well, and in truth great priests, who were known and written about. Priests who gave their lives for others, and served in the wars—walking into battle unarmed, like Father Morrissey and Father Hickey and Father Murdock. He knew this, and loved the idea of that kind of pure understanding, especially when the world understood so little now. And it did understand so little. He could tell Minnie understood so little, about true love and happiness, that he was as always awash in sympathy for her. And it was only this spiritual sympathy that allowed him to love and not want her, he believed.