The Lost Highway (8 page)

He wanted the comfort of snowfall in the late autumn and picking out the decorations for Christmas celebrations at his little church. This is what he thought about. And so, in those moments, she did not matter.

But one thing plagued him. He was angered by something he had been angered by before—just one thing, and it was this: his own false obsequiousness, the kind he had seen when his uncle met the nuns. He talked to MacIlvoy, a young man, a fine hockey player, who was studying for the church too, who simply said: “Give all these matters up—for there are other matters in the world far more important.”

This was from a man who was drafted by the Montreal Canadiens and didn’t accept because of his calling.

Then he received another postcard from Leo Bourque.

Dear Alex—I have read a book on Balzac. I remember you once saying that about Balzac he was very good as a righter as any England person, and I am sure you will be able to tell me other books I would like to get now. I am going with Doreen LeBlanc and she is very popular and I am sure to make a fool of myself, but if you got some news to me about other books I could read—your friend Leo Bourque.

He thought of answering it, but the address was obscured by a stain. And he didn’t want to remember how he had been tormented by Leo. But there was something else: it was the basic instinct of pleasure he had at knowing Leo was trying to emulate him after once having tormented him and thinking, That’ll never happen again.

He laughed at the fact that Bourque was short and lifted weights. It all seemed so ordinary to him.

“It’s good he saw the error of his ways.” He smiled, folding the letter up. He imagined as time went on how Leo would come to him, ask forgiveness, or do him unsolicited favors. And he felt special when he thought of how he would refuse all of this, all of the favors Leo would want to do for him.

He plunged into Saint Augustine and Thomas Merton, into the liturgy of the church, into masses and saints and fasts and feast days and calendars. To him, Saint Augustine was brilliant but obscure. So Alex thought Merton a man to emulate and a very great man. Yet what bothered him about
The Seven Storey Mountain
was Merton’s mocking of physical love. If Merton, who Alex considered a great man, was wrong (as Alex believed he was) in this salient point, then might not other things be wrong?

He therefore now and then began to think of Minnie, and to wonder what she was doing at any given time during the long day—and if she ever thought of him. Twice, three times, he thought of phoning her—but did not, even though he walked to the phone booth on the highway. And then one day, out of the blue, he was struck by something. Rage. It just overcame him when he was in the field helping with the haying.

He was very jealous of her when he thought of what she might be doing. And he could not remain pure in his thoughts or deeds, as he lied continually to himself, saying he was. And just as he thought this, he knew others there were lying as well, just by their look, and he knew this grave falsehood followed them. That night he helped put the horse into the stall, and fed it oats, and walked toward the chapel to pray. He believed prayer to be the only thing that could combat what he was feeling. But that night something peculiar happened. All those young men were rushing up the road, some of them hobbling between a walk and a run, just as the sun was going down. They passed through some shafts of light falling through the trees and onto the dusty road as they ran to see the new Corvette that Mr. Cid Fouy had bought. Though they were supposed to be in chapel they had all rushed to see it, for someone told them Cid was giving people rides, and there were only two Corvettes on the whole river.

He could see them as they hobbled up the road, catching up to one another, shouting whispers. He was stunned by this covetousness, and stunned too by the naïveté of those young men, some born in poverty along the coast, who would rush out to see a car.

He went back to his room to be by himself, angered that they did not follow him. He realized it was very easy for them to agree with him when they had nothing else to do, but at any other time they were worse than the kids on the school bus.

Then, after a time, when he could not get Minnie out of his mind, Alex began to think that he would go to serve in some remote place in the north, among the Inuit, and not be seen here again. He was both kind and supportive of the native kids here, and he realized this might be for the best. Then in some manner—saving a village from the plague, a child from some plight—his name would drift over the hillocks of warm snow, south toward her. This daydream occurred in a necessary way, because of the feeble yet inextinguishable lamp lighted in some recess of his brain for Minnie Tucker. He heard too that she and Sam Patch had given up the idea of getting married, and that they saw each other only every couple of weeks.

But this strangely did not make him consider leaving his study. However, it made him feel pleased.

Yes, she would be a cause for concern as long as he lived—so best not to live on the Arron side of the great Bartibog. Hopefully if away, never a concern to be concerned about—however, he was still human. (He said this as if to anoint himself with the common ground without believing that it really applied to him.)

But there were two incidents back to back that came after he had been in seminary a year and a half.

The first was this: He had to go down to the reserve with a box of communion envelopes. There, the strangest thing happened to him. It was not reported about, no one found out, and in the annals of history it was perhaps never recorded. Coming out of the small church in the late afternoon, with drizzle in the air, he came face to face with a black bear suffering mange. Worse, her cub came toward him. The mother, famished from winter, gangly and cross, rushed toward him also. As he backed up he screamed, and tried to run. But just then a native boy about ten years of age, at the church preparing for his confirmation, jumped between the bear and him, and grabbing rocks from the dirt began throwing them. Two hit the mother in the head, stopping her up. She grunted and snorted but the youngster kept throwing. He kept throwing and throwing and would not give up. Each time the bear pressed forward the little boy, his hands bleeding, found more rocks in the frozen earth to dig up and throw. All this time Alex stood frozen to the wall of the church.

Finally, the bear turned sideways, collected her cub with a swat, and headed back into the woods.

“There you go, Fadder,” the boy said cheerfully and breathing heavily, his black hair flat against his head. “That old bear’s gone back home, there you go—no need to worry anymore.”

The boy moved off and Alex stood in the wet with his cross, his legs still trembling. This moment would stick with him for years. The child would have given his life for him, and yet—what could he have done?

He went into the reserve and found the boy’s house, saw where he lived and especially how he lived. But though he was going to help this child, and promised himself he would, he never got around to it. After a while he deliberately avoided the small lane where the boy lived. Yet without that little boy, Alex might never have lived to later teach his course on ethics.

The second incident might have been worse. A few weeks later, when he was sent out by Monsignor Plante to the store, he met a crowd of young men and women piled into one car going off to a party. There had been a thaw, the car was covered in streaks of dirt and salt, and now it was snowing mildly, with the gray sky almost meeting the ground, so he blinked incessantly as he made his way toward the village. As always when the weather turns warm, the young here dress like those in movies from the California south, wearing things unfit for our weather in order to belong to somewhere they never were and perhaps would never be.

The car revved its engine as Alex approached. It backfired, and then the driver revved it again, put it in gear, and squealed forward, so that mud came up against Alex’s face.

He had already walked three miles and he was sweating and tired, and now mud spotted his cheeks and chin. He had always feared these boys in their cars, for they were the kind who had little or no use for him. And this might be a reason he had gone to the seminary—so he would not have to face them until he wore a collar. That would make it easier, and safer. He knew this secretly. And he knew why. Still, if he could not overcome this aversion to their swearing and nonsense, how could he later on preach to them?

So he approached the car with this in mind. He was going to knock on the window and reprimand them—in a calm and kindly way—about the mud on his cheek.

As he came toward the car, he could hear a boy saying, “Do it—do it,” and people giggling and whispering. The window rolled down just as he came up to it.

He put his face into the window as a girl lifted her thin undershirt, and her breasts were an inch from his face. He could see snow falling down on those breasts, and his lips were near enough to kiss them. Everyone else roared and laughed.

Alex turned and ran. He did not stop until he got back to the seminary.

He thought of their mocking, and tried harder to pray. Then he saw himself praying in the mirror above his dresser, and throwing his boot, the mirror wobbled and fell, shattering. Two third-year boys ran in to look at him—and when he looked up at them, they backed away, for his face was now enraged. The day was gray, the mirror broken.

They sent the young MacIlvoy boy in and he calmed Alex. For Young MacIlvoy might just be considered the one boy there who was not bothered by people’s sins. He was strong as a bear yet he never let on or cared that he was. He had been drafted by Montreal, and yet didn’t even play hockey here. He didn’t stay on the far left side of the old building where the hockey players were—the joke being that so many right wingers lived over on the left wing—the only ones not catching on to this double entendre were those hockey players themselves. But MacIlvoy stayed away from them, and had decided by reason of some miracle to lessen his life and disappear.

MacIlvoy sat beside him for an hour, and Alex thought only of the boy’s intrusion and kept wishing he would go away. Or was it MacIlvoy’s intuition, about him? When he finally looked at MacIlvoy’s face, he realized the fellow was praying—and this bothered him even more.

“Do you have doubts?” Alex asked finally.

“About what?”

“About this—about us doing this?”

“A while ago I didn’t even believe—I called Christ and the Blessed Virgin down to the ground, I mocked them all the time—and so it came to me all of a sudden. I haven’t had time to doubt it yet.” He smiled. “I am sure I will someday—I am sure in some place in a far-off time I will hate my calling and say I have lived my life for nothing. But I will tell you this—that there is nothing in the world a man or woman can do where they won’t think this sooner or later about something—”

“You are saying there is no better life than this?”

“I am saying that no matter what life you choose, it will look at some point as if some other life is better.”

Still, Alex knew that all his Lenten meals, his wonderful dialogue with God, and the sky, gave him nothing like that one brief moment when the woman lifted her shirt. And he wanted more moments like that. And each time he closed his eyes, in the warm classrooms, speaking of small ideas, the brief moment when Minnie’s dress blew upward made him weak. He knew now, this is what Canadian poets were writing about, and he would bring these poetry books to his room, and try to read in them the essence of how he felt. But no matter how explicit these poems were, and probably because they were explicit, they did not corner the vast celebration of desire and human kindness that he felt for every woman he saw.

He read Saint Mark, and this calmed him, so often he would grit his teeth and keep going. Thinking of his mother, his old aunt—and even his uncle turning to smile at him and patting his shoulder. What would they say if he told them he had doubts? He went often to visit the ancient nuns who at one time had cared for the last lepers in Canada. And he was filled with gratitude while there, sitting in a small kitchen with sun coming through the small window, in a place so remote and barren that the furniture seemed alien. The nuns would smile at him, bring cookies and tea to his chair. But after he left, doubts would resurface. They would resurface because of the manufactured sympathy of priests he saw about him. He knew some of these priests were unholy and were kept here, out of sight, so they would not embarrass the diocese.

Still, he had been warned much about these doubts, and there was little you could do about them but pray. But of course it was not his relatives he thought about leaving him—walking away along a lane in spring a few years before. It was Minnie—it was her alone. And each day she was getting further away from him—becoming a speck so far away that the dazzling heavens made her disappear.

It was just at this time that a strange request came from Leo Bourque. He was getting married and hoped Alex would be his best man. The request came indirectly, from old Poppy Bourque, who came to see him and brought him blueberry cake. Alex said he would be best man, if that is what Leo wanted. And Poppy went away. But when the day came—when it came, Alex was at rehearsal for his Play of the Redemption and forgot all about it. The day wore on, and then the next day came before he thought about it. He found out that the wedding went on without him, that they waited an hour for him and Poppy acted as best man.

“Well, I am glad,” Alex said. But he had told people that Doreen LeBlanc was making a mistake in marrying someone like him.

“He will abuse her,” he said, with a sniff.

He once again disliked himself for saying what he still believed should be said, that women should not fall for people like Leo or Sam.

—

O
NE DAY A MONTH OR SO LATER, IN EARLY
M
AY, WHEN HE
got back from class, there was a letter waiting for him from Minnie Tucker. At first he was stunned. Then he suddenly felt vindicated and believed she wanted him back. And then once again this inconsistency of human nature: If she wanted him back, did he really need to go? For if she wanted him back, did it not mean that he had conquered her better than going back to her would? He was troubled by this determining, and decided not to open the letter. So it sat on the dresser in its white envelope on the far side of the room for over a week. One side of it had been twisted, and he could see a small tear in the top. For days he left it where it was, even though he felt pulled toward it every time he looked at it. Then, finally, he went to examine that tear. Sitting in the chair at his desk he hastily opened it.