The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Alex wrote back saying they would meet.

  Minnie was a convent girl, with a spotless white blouse and a skirt, and on that dark night in frigid weather he thought of her soul, like that white blouse she wore. He thought of this when he saw her one day walking through the old creamery lot, with its junked pipes and tattered blocks.

  She had black hair, and small crooked teeth, that he loved. She, too, at this time was in the Lenten crosshairs and fasted. The convent was in deep despair because it was closing, the nuns being sent elsewhere and the town being thrust forward into the secular age. But still fifteen students remained at the convent, and she was one.

  Then came the night when she told him her father had found out, and would not allow her to see him anymore. The sock hop was out of the question. It was reported that the old man had taken her socks.

  “Did he?” Alex asked infuriated.

  She hauled up her pants over her ankles to show her sockless boots.

  Alex said that when he saw her father, he would give him a piece of his mind. They walked along the Gum Road, in the freshly fallen snow, and he felt at home for the first time since his own mother’s death. He did what his uncle said without complaint, because he was thinking of her.

  Then he found out when her birthday was.

  “I will meet you Thursday at the forks of Arron Falls,” he said, “after four o’clock. I will have a gift for you. After school.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” she said. She was wearing a scarf and her eyes shone in the dooryard light, as a bit of snow fell out of the twilight and landed on the old sled path and fell more gloomy in the trees. All of this might seem or look depressing to one who did not know or revel in its great beauty as he did. The fields filled with snow, and acres and acres of lots stretching down the long highway into the void, with prip-props holding pulp wood extending into the night. There was nothing sweeter in the world, and if he traveled one million miles he would come back to its sparse and terrible beauty some day.

  “No—you have to,” he said. “I promise you I will be there.”

  “Then I promise you I will be,” she replied, squeezing his hand, and turning and running toward her house, her woolen coat flying behind her, snow flying about her bare ankles.

  He listened that night to what his uncle said about the state of their affairs, and what did he, an orphan like him, think he was going to get if he traipsed off with the daughter of a boozer.

  “Her face’ll get old and tired and you’ll be looking for a woman who has some class,” the old man said in fitful duty to some regulation. He jabbed at the bowl of his pipe with a pick, and looked quickly at his nephew. He had married a woman with some class, he said, and he expected as much from Alex.

  Alex did his chores in the warehouse (rolling a barrel from one end to the other, which he had just rolled to the other end the day before) and said nothing. Collected the rats from the traps in the back of the barn and threw them out. Some nights, his uncle might wake him. He would get up, under the flare of a lantern, to go out along the back hall and cross into the barn, where a moose was hanging from a tripod, or a deer stiffened in death hung upon a hook, and Alex would help his uncle take the hide off these animals with a three and a half–inch knife. It was a long, disgusting process to Alex, for his uncle did not need the meat or the money. Alex was always conscious of how these animals died.

  The meat was cut up and sold to people along the highway. His uncle tallied the earnings every year from this illegal enterprise, and bought things he needed for the barn or house. Most of the money he stored away. Alex could not stand the look of a rifle, and on those darkish days he became opposed to everything associated with them.

  Now and again, when his uncle lashed out at him, Alex would look up at the catwalk above that ran from the big warehouse to the small, and say, “I am going to walk that someday—prove that I can—then I will be able to leave this place forever.”

  When he finally was paid that winter he bought an album for Minnie, The Beatles’ collected hits. He moved sacks of grain that his uncle sold to nine farms, and had to take feed from bags the rats had gotten to and redistribute it before the buyers found out. He could see those farms in his mind’s eye up and down the lost highway, and how his uncle tried to squeeze the last cent from all of them, on occasion traveling along the road with one of the priests. Sometimes Alex would go along, lugging the sack into the barn.

  So then, for this work, Alex had this Beatles album as token of his love.

  Thursday after coming home from school he started up the road, in the evening air that smelled of smoke and soft glazed ice on the trees, with the album under his arm. He had his coat unzippered and the wind blew against his small but strong body, the smell of wood ash lingering along Fanny Groat’s ditch. Sometimes Fanny would call to him and invite him inside. There in the small room she would ask him about his aunt, with a particular light in her eyes, and Alex would think, I am glad she cares so much for Aunt Muriel.

  Fanny Groat with her large fake pearl necklace and her fake fur stole.

  He passed this dilapidated house now, and moved up the road. As he came to the corner of the tote road, where old Jameson used to carry his winter supplies up to the camps, a dark form appeared on the landscape and walked toward him along a row of poplar trees in the dusk. It was Minnie Tucker’s father, Harold, who was drunk—as he was every second day, and as he promised not to be every fourth day. He had beaten Minnie to keep her inside.

  “I’ve had one fuckin’ trollop, I won’t have no more,” he sniffed with self-righteous conformity.

  She was, he said, not to be mixed up with boys, but she had eluded him on this day, her seventeenth birthday, and had gotten out.

  Alex, now tried to go around Harold on the road, but he made the mistake of keeping his head down and trembling. The old man, filled with mischievous meanness—a coward when sober and a bother when drunk—grabbed the record from the boy’s gloved hand and looked at it, then waved it back and forth.

  “Eh—let’s see now, what have you got here—sompun’ for someone—”

  “A record,” Alex said.

  “A record, is it?”

  The man held the record up and looked at it, and with the certainty of the ignorant, said, “Them lads are com-mu-nists—don’t believe in God, is what I hear.”

  He smashed it over his knee, as if performing a service even Alex would approve of. Then, overcome by what he had done, he looked alarmed, his body reeking of wine. Alex tried to get the record back and go around him, but the man, seeing his prey was nervous and delighting in the fact that he had scared a young boy, kept pushing him back up the tote road in the dark. Each time Alex tried to push him back, enraged by this deliberate narrow-mindedness, or stepped to go around him, the man would raise his arms in front of him, fending the boy off, and smile, a slave to his own idea of power.

  Tears came to Alex’s eyes. “I’ll tell my uncle,” he said.

  Harold only laughed at this. “Jimmy Chapman don’t sceer me. If you think I don’t know about him screwing the box off that slut Fanny Groat—while his own wife a cripple—and he makes sure she and you goes off to church. Praying like the cunt he is, then he goes up and diddles Fanny, or gets me to help him lift moose out of the bog. Then pays me and Fanny to keep it all quiet. Don’t think we all don’t know.”

  Alex in a second knew this to be true. He knew why he always felt an outcast in the house. He knew why Fanny asked him about his aunt, with scheming eyes. He knew why he skinned animals in the night. He knew why his uncle did not want him traveling up to see Minnie. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by the idea of who his uncle was. That large yet small man.

  He could not go down to meet Minnie and turned to go home. Her father, who had so changed his day, had actually changed the direction of his daughter’s life. Harold followed the boy back up the road, shouting triumphantly, “Fanny Groat!” and swinging his arms in frantic jubilation, with the evening sun
on the back of his canvas winter jacket.

  If this had not happened, Alex was to think later, what destiny would Minnie and he have had?

  Alex went home and sat alone in the darkening parlor, with the cold mirrors and the pictures of geese on the wing, of his great uncle’s large old house, with the broken album in his hand. It had taken his savings to buy it. He shook for a day and a half, in anger but also in shame for his fear. When he finally spoke to his uncle about Harold breaking his album, Old Jimmy looked at it and said, “No need for records like this anyhow,” his cheeks emitting the scent of aftershave. And then he said this strange remark: “Some people can stand up to people and some can’t.”

  The revelation about this remark came later that afternoon. His uncle was at the big cabinet on the second floor, had just locked it with the key he kept in his vest, and he turned to Alex. He was tall, but his back was bending—and his height, which pleased him, did more to reveal his smallness of mind than anything. The moment they stared at each other, Alex knew that Jimmy Chapman had hired Harold Tucker with wine money to do what he had done, because he knew Alex would run away. This is how well he knew his nephew. However, the old man didn’t know that Harold Tucker, filled with wine and ashamed of betraying his own daughter, would tell about him and Fanny.

  “I will never let this happen to me again,” Alex said. “Never!”

  That Sunday they went to church, and Old Jim genuflected and said his prayers and blew his nose.

  —

  OVER TIME, ALEX DISCOVERED THAT MINNIE HAD GONE TO Arron Falls to wait, on that long ago frigid February afternoon, with the smell of snow and ash on the wind and without a sock on her foot, and had not met him. But she had met someone else. This, too, seemed preordained.

  She had met Sammy Patch at that very spot on that very moment Alex was supposed to meet her. Sam Patch, a boy with grade 7 education who had left school to help his mother and who worked for Alex’s uncle, paid next to nothing. Even as a boy he could pick up large timber and throw them about. Many times he and Old Jim were out on a scow at the far side of Chapman’s Island lifting nets. But his uncle did have a real affection for the boy, and Alex was jealous of this.

  “If you could be half the man Sammy Patch is, I’d give me right fuckin’ arm,” he said one night at dusk, the summer before.

  “I am better than Sam Patch,” Alex had replied, and to prove this he tried to pick up one of the large pallets near the barn, and couldn’t. When he looked up from this impossible task, the loud old man simply shrugged and walked away.

  One day in late February, Sam Patch asked Alex if Minnie was his girl.

  “Hell,” Alex said, “I hardly know her.” He had no idea why he said his, except he had been hurt that she would have spoken to someone else so easily.

  Up until that time, Alex had liked and felt sorry for Sam, even beyond the envy he had. Now, their positions were not only competitive but completely reversed.

  Two weeks after the incident, Harold was found frozen to death in a snowbank after being drunk for days, Minnie was at a dance with Sam Patch, and Alex was a memory.

  A year passed when he pined over her, and every night after school he would watch her leave the bus but proudly refused to speak when he saw her, even though she looked at him and waved. On the bus, he was always bullied by Leo Bourque, who accused his uncle of being bigoted toward the French. Leo was Poppy’s nephew, though a different breed. He was one of the last of the French boys forced to go to the English school. He was sent by his father.

  Though Alex tried to be polite and understanding, he was confused and frightened. Over the year, he had withdrawn from the world. He kept pens in a pocket protector in his shirt—ballpoint, and fountain, and three of different colors. He carried a briefcase, with his books and notes he liked to make on the shore birds he saw. Yet every night he went back to that dim old house, to work for his uncle.

  He had no friends.

  Over a certain time Bourque became inflexible in his demands. Finally, he demanded money. This came one afternoon about a year after the incident with Minnie’s father.

  “You will not get on the bus again if I don’t have some money—you have lots, everyone knows—”

  The worst of this was, no one knew he was being tormented. Also, Alex had told Leo that he had a lot of money. He had said this when they first got to know each other to impress the boy. Now Bourque was simply asking for some, and he would look hurt if Alex couldn’t bring him some.

  Alex had to ask his uncle for advances on an allowance he himself almost never got.

  “No!” the old man shouted at him. “What’s this money business about!”

  When he couldn’t give this money to Leo, his pens would be taken from him. He would arrive at school with a pen missing from his white holder. Then, Bourque said he would not need any more money if Alex got him a job for the summer. It was the first time Bourque was nice to him. It was as if both of them could be released from their grip upon one another if only this would happen.

  “Get me the job, Alex, and I will be the best friend you ever had,” Leo said. He had grown up with nothing and this job meant everything to him.

  At the table that very night Alex asked his uncle, while Bourque waited near the ferns up along the highway. There was a dark smell of March; winter still lingered and the snowbanks were raw and shrunken.

  “Please hire him, Uncle Jim—I promise I will work twice as hard as he does if you do!”

  “If you work twice as hard as he does, I’ll never need him,” Old Jim laughed. Even Muriel laughed at this quip. Jim could not hire him. They had no need to. And Jim never did anything that wasn’t needed.

  So Alex had to tell Leo that they were full.

  “But I thought you had some pull,” Bourque said. “I believed you had pull.”

  “I do,” Alex said, “I do—but—well, not that much.”

  “Not that much—what in hell do you mean, not that much?” And he slapped Alex, and Alex went reeling.

  “I’ll pay you back,” Alex said instantly.

  “You’ll never be man enough to pay me back.”

  After this, it got harder to ride the bus. Bourque would sometimes be kindly. If he took some money, he would say that he didn’t like to torture people. It wasn’t his way. But that Alex’s uncle had cheated the highway and things had to be done.

  “You think I like this?” Leo would say shaking his head sadly. When he waved his hand there was a good amount of power with that wave, as if he were dismissing you with tolerance.

  But then one day Leo was not on the bus. It rattled down the road without him. Then the next day as well—and then a week and a month. First, he had gone to a foster home; then they said he had gone up north with his uncle Poppy, and would never be back. Alex was free, or he thought he was.

  In a strange turn of fate, the only one Leo sent a postcard to was Alex.

  Leo had had a copy of the local paper sent to him, and in that issue there was an article on Alex, who’d won a contest in naming birds. And so Bourque changed his tack toward him:

  Dear Alex. Hope is all well, and use are on the bus. Well here it is good, I am not so angry at my dad you see they trated me rogh and I didn’t tell noone but things was toug with my dad. Now Mis Samples sent me here with Poppy it is not to bad here. Saw you to in the paper there yesterday, would like to know birds to, and have to find a book on it, so someday get my name in the paper to. Your friend Leo Bourque.

  It was the way he signed his name with a flair, as if he were trying to show a sophistication, that made Alex’s heart go out to him, and see him with new eyes.

  Cold days and dark and winter and such a note as that was forgotten, and in a bright January gust was taken away.

  —

  AT THIS TIME SAMMY WAS WORKING FOR ALEX’S UNCLE FOR $79 a week. It seemed that every cent caused blood, and that the boy didn’t mind spending this blood. Alex’s heart went out to the boy, but he was also wretche
d with jealousy. Especially when he saw Sammy pick up an organ his aunt wanted moved and carry it by himself upstairs.

  “Don’t worry,” he had said to Alex, who had come to help.

  Sometimes, meeting Minnie walking to the corner store with her mother, he would simply put his head down and walk by, or sometimes he would go in the opposite direction because of the humiliation he felt. She tried her best to dress neatly and care for herself, more he thought than the other children on the road. It hurt him to see her in this poverty and with this grace of character. Here was a child with an untold fountain of humanity and kindness. But, as he discovered, she was a young woman already. And she had distanced herself, and part of him resented this.

  One night he saw Minnie come to the yard to wait for Sam. Suddenly, so suddenly she had no time to stop it, her dress blew up over her thighs to her white panties, the dark V visible underneath. She pushed the skirt down and smiled when Sam laughed, looked at Alex a second and looked away. He was overcome with pity and envy, desire and famine. It clung to him like a gray, wet cloak.

  He planned to save money, to have things in his own life, to be happy. But weeks passed, and no one phoned or called. He then tried to take his life. It happened one day after rereading Bourque’s postcard. He was so sad for that boy, and himself.

  It was Muriel who stopped the superficial wound to his wrist. But sooner or later everyone knew. So he stayed at home. Weekends would go by and no one would see him in the yard. Then he began to take walks along the roadway. Some days he would walk as far as town, on others all the way to Burnt Church. His thoughts were wild, and he seemed forlorn, but something in his makeup was yearning to be free.

  It was during this time that he decided to discover who his father was. He went up and down the road inquiring about his mother, who she might have liked and disliked, and was led to a name by those who remembered her as a young girl in the late 1950s, who sang in the glee club and played volleyball. The boy he heard his mother liked was named Eugene Gallant from Barryville, a man half Micmac and half French. So that was why his uncle disliked the French and Indians. This, then, was one way to get back at his great uncle or at least to proclaim freedom from him: by embracing his own people. This, in fact, was the hook on which his psychological health seemed to rest for a long while.