The Lost Highway (9 page)

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.”

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.”