The Lost Highway (19 page)

As he turned he saw the quote from Khrushchev on the wall above his books, a quote he had put there proudly when he came back to the river: “Get rid of the devil and priests will have nothing to do.”

He wanted people to see that quote when they came into the house. Just after he made the grotto for the church, Father MacIlvoy came to his house one afternoon, to talk about old times and pay him for the statue.

Alex childishly said, “There is no devil in here—” and pointed to Khrushchev’s words.

“I didn’t expect there to be,” MacIlvoy said humbly.

“I have nothing to confess,” Alex said.

“Live long enough and you will,” MacIlvoy answered merrily.

Money. Goddamn money.

He remembered his father, Mr. Roach, again, riddling her with guilt over money she was trying to get him.

“I will get it,” she would say, closing her raw hands in determination, “just you wait and see.” And she would nod with determination as rain fell over the greasy window of Lester’s Coffee Shop. Roach would be annoyed, tell her to sit up straight, not to sniff.

“I’m sorry,” she would answer, “I haven’t been feeling so well.”

“There are other girls in the office, Rosa,” he would say. “There are other girls, they have outlooks—you don’t have an outlook. They have plans—you don’t have plans. They are interesting to be around.”

“It must be nice for them,” Rosa answered.

Later, when she tried to say that she did not have this money, it provoked a fight over him. Alex would listen to them, his face quiet and serene, hoping the arguing would stop. It never did.

He remembered how once, after an argument, Roach went out to his Christmas party and he and his mother stayed alone. Very late at night he came in singing, stumbling. He got angry when he saw Alex sleeping in the bed with his mom.

“Get him out of there!” he said. “Jesus Christ!”

He told Rosa there was a girl named Diane—and was she ever nice.

Alex would watch for the derelict, who always smiled at Alex when he saw him.

He decided this morning he would give Minnie money if she left Sam Patch. This was not as inexcusable as one might think. For Sam Patch, to his way of thinking, had deceived Minnie—and left her alone. Just like Mr. Roach had his mother. Simply speaking, why couldn’t Sam have provided a better life for Minnie than he had, if he really loved her?

He gives her nothing, Alex thought in a practical way, and left her alone with that little child.

Of course Alex sent Sam away as much as anyone, and it was he who was worried Sam would come back to the lost highway with a lot of money as people from the oil patch were now doing.

How could he convince her, then, if he didn’t find the ticket?

—

T
HERE WAS NO SIGHT OR SOUND FROM THE
C
HAPMAN
house. A pale, thin cloud moved across the otherwise cloudless sky. On the radio, which sat on the counter inside Alex’s own little house, he heard of the “two glorious weeks of summer left.”

When he was very little he used to rush out and try to catch the first snowflake on his tongue. He would persuade his mother to come out and be with him, and watch as they melted away in Saint John’s darker south end streets. It wasn’t the Saint John of today with its fresh sidewalks and cafés and lights draped across pleasant walkways. It was the old postwar Saint John with its waterfront closed in by fog and battered timber, and streets twisting away in the fog. And how he loved it there. And now he thought of how young his mother had been when she died at twenty-nine, and how he was now much older than her, and how she lived with him alone, cut off from the inheritance because of this Roach man she had followed there, who was physically adverse to her, who disliked her in a visceral way once the money was not forthcoming.

When Old Jim found out she was pregnant, he said, “You marry no Protestant or you’ll get not a sniff from me.”

So she followed her man to Saint John, he already twenty-six years old. A manager of some warehouse of some small company. They waited for her uncle to change his mind. He, this man, thought she was rich. Why wouldn’t he think this? Now he didn’t even hide the fact that he blamed her for not being so. That is, he could not believe he had made such a disastrous mistake, a bad calculation from such a calculating man.

Roach had lived to the north of the highway, and he said he was always cut out of things by Chapman, who accused his family of being squatters.

He had learned to hate Chapman, and fear him.

And so he set his eyes on her! Her with her little bit of money and her music lessons!

He kept suggesting that she must be able to cash in some trust fund, would she not? At first she was surprised, then deeply empty, and would sit in Lester’s Coffee Shop waiting for him after work, with Alex in the old iron stroller.

“I will get it,” she said dreamily, “I promise I will.”

“Because if you do, we live much better—that’s all I am saying—I am saying nothing but that. I want a life for both of us.”

“I know,” she said dreamily, “yes.”

Sometimes at nineteen she would pretend to be going to the post office for the money. But she would simply push Alex in his stroller about King’s Square in the wind and rain, not knowing how to come home and tell Roach.

Alex went to first year elementary thinking, all three feet of him, of an inheritance that his mother would hand to him. By that time her man had gone.

Alex would walk up from St. Patrick’s and St. Michael’s, with his pants itching his legs, and his new bookbag, and each day it got a little colder. He remembered now the snap of the apple in his teeth, and the warm corner store where he bought his bag of chips. He remembered one year, at the first snow, she didn’t want to go out because she couldn’t find her pink scarf, and they searched everywhere for it, and he kept saying: “Come, Mom, or the snow will be gone.”

There was a smell of tin and diesel in the air when they went out, along the black iron fence where cartons and paper cups were caught, and the snow came down in the alleyway, and his mother held him up to catch the first flake on his tongue.

What had happened, from those days until now? And why had it? And how had his life gone? And who was to blame? Or why did he think he had to blame anyone? Certainly he couldn’t even blame Mr. Roach, caught in the same turmoil as everyone believing half-truths in order to blame other people.

Every year when the first snow fell, he thought more and more about his mother—and why she had done certain things. He remembered her one night drinking a whole bottle of wine, alone, and then laughing and singing and telling him all kinds of stories.

For a moment when thinking of her each day, he no longer wanted to rely upon approval or disapproval. He only wanted to love and to forgive.

—

H
E DID NOT KNOW DURING THAT LONG AGO CHILDHOOD
time that she was having problems with another man at work (this was a year or so after his father, Roach, had left them), a businessman of a certain class who managed the store in his gray suit and flush face, who touched his female employees’ breasts just slightly when he squeezed by them as they worked, or what was far worse, laughed at injury to others with a loud laugh, just as he did at anyone who held in his hand the gift of knowledge. He asked her out when he found out she was alone with a child. And that was it, wasn’t it? Alex became a trump card for virile men who wanted to fuck her. His mother rebuffed this boss, with his paycheck and his loud suit, for she was waiting for her Mr. Roach to come back, because in her dreams she belonged to him, like those be-bop-a-lula songs he could sing into his microphone at the high school dances. So her boss then turned his attentions to Alex’s mother’s friend Pearl.

As far as Pearl believed, this boss was going to leave his wife and children and marry her. Alex’s mother tried to dissuade this woman without telling her of the proposition she herself had had from that same plump boss, but to no avail. Alex saw this gentleman once at the apartment. He had come in, with his short legs and mustache, abrasively speaking of someone who he had “got the better of.” Seeing a painting that Miller Britain had given Alex’s mother out of some deep kindness one day at Lester’s Coffee Shop, the man had said, “He don’t see the world like I do if you ask me,” and guffawed.

His mother, with her little painting, the only one she had, was left little by this remark. She smiled plaintively, and it was the only kind of smile she had left.

“I like the painting,” Alex said, standing up for his mother as he had done for no one else. He had met Mr. Britain, the day his mother was given that painting.

But his mother’s boss hooted at the painters in Saint John, like Humphrey and Britain—and poets like Nowlan—those men who had, above all, visions of greatness and tramped the streets unknown. And of course, that was it—they were exposed to the elements of scandal and mocking, and this man who managed the south end Steadman’s store knew if anything how to mock, titter, and be dismissive of greatness in his midst, for that was the way to herd together in this country—and Alex saw this later on in the seminary, among the “nose-picking boys” as he called them, and just as much, in the secularly conscious universities of the cluttered Maritimes, with women he once embraced as being independent, who said and did only what their friends said and did, and took that as freedom. It was all nonsense, he knew. So he must find the ticket.

“I could tell you lots about Miller Britain,” the boss had sniffed. “Insane and everything else, if you ask me! Yells at the top of his lungs, if you ask me. Was up at the nuthouse there and wanted to jump off the reversing falls, and my cousin who’s the custodian there says so for a fact! And don’t even take care of his daughter!”

Perhaps it was then that Alex began to hate this kind of man, the BOSS, and then men, and took it upon himself to decide who was and was not that man. Who he could approve and disapprove of. But in his fury he could never decide well enough what kind of man he himself should be. He took ethics, studied hard, so he could see who was and who was not that kind of man. And now it came down to this: Sam Patch, good, kindly Sam Patch, was that kind of man. And he must save Minnie from him—for she at some point would still come to him.

His mother rebuffed this boss in hope her friend would see him for who he was, and he with proud moral effrontery began to talk about her behind her back to other employees in the store. She thought she came from a rich family but was just a Miramichi twat, and who were they but French-speaking and Irish rejects that were kicked out of Saint John—who should be cut off from the rest of the great province of New Brunswick. She had a man who left her too, just as she should be! She better be careful if she wanted to hang on to her job!

“That’s why we is backwards like Maine, if you ask me!”

And she would arrive in the dreary damp of a Saint John morning, and hear against her the insignificant tattling of lonely, stupid women, one of whom was her friend Pearl, and guffawing, obedient men. Of course they were obedient, like schoolteachers and university professors; none of them in their lives had rebelled against anything or anyone that they weren’t taught to.

Why did this insignificant life now matter so much to Alex, and why did he think of his mother? That she was at all those moments, in the harsh glare of this unsympathetic and pathetic life, dying. That each day she got up for work, waiting for the call from Roach who was going to take her away. She and their son, Alexander. And oh how happy they would be.

She was in fact the only one to ever call him Alexander. After she died, his name was hacked away, until in some ways he lost his name and who he was. And so after a while he could be First Nations if he wanted, and write the historical novel about “his people.” Which is what he had been trying to do secretly for years.

“Alexander,” his mother whispered, and clutched his hand. “Tomorrow—you go over to Lester’s Coffee Shop—you sit at a table and order whatever you want.” She tucked $10 into his jeans. He lay down with her, and when he woke late the next morning her body was cold.

“Love and forgiveness,” he whispered now.

What had happened to the Miller Britain painting, which might now be worth tens of thousands? He did not know; he never saw it again. He had tried to find it among the Britain paintings at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery one summer day, but could not. There in the still and broad-ceilinged rooms he walked about, with the gallery almost empty and the Salvador Dali painting taking up one wall, and everything to him at the moment seemed elusive and just out of reach. And what he realized was that it was his talent, his own talent that was now out of reach.

It, and his great-aunt’s love of art, had propelled him to take up a blowtorch and hammer and chisel something out of his life. And once, once he knew, he could have been great. Perhaps not as great as Britain, but then again, perhaps, ah just perhaps greater. And so he made if nothing else the grotto for the local church—and suddenly he realized it was his great-aunt who had asked, and maybe paid, for his grotto to be made.

Tears in his eyes, a flood of half-forgotten memories resurfaced. On those days long ago he went to the rink with his mother, and she would tie his skates, and he would flounder on the ice. She wanted him to play hockey. But he did not understand the camaraderie of children playing. His mother could not get him to play, and now he understood something—that he had rebelled against Canada and its hockey all his life. He had scorned those who played it or liked it, had cheered for the Soviets against Canada to get back at those childhood boys, heroes to so many girls, to show independence. He hated and mocked Canadian hockey players. And along the way, he missed the entire country’s essential grace and beauty, its magnificent poetic dance—for both men and women, a dance so captivating that not a ballerina in the world could ever match it.

Now, in his darkness, he was beginning to see he knew nothing of his country, much like those baseball-lauding academics whose friendships he’d once cultivated at the university so he could be called cerebral and obtuse.