The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Some nights he would take off walking, in the snow or rain, and walk all the way down to the house, which stood back from the road, off the battered highway in a shroud of small barren spruce.

  One late evening in inclement weather, Eugene met him at the gate, smiled and engaged him in conversation, and was moved to tears to find out who he was.

  “Are you really Rosa’s son—you are,” he said hugging him. “Oh my God, how are you?”

  Eugene Gallant was in his mid-forties then. He was the first kind adult to the boy, sometimes offering a stick of gum, sometimes telling him to come along on a partridge hunt. For Alex, this had to be his father. But Alex could not go on a partridge hunt because he was frightened of guns, and could not hide this fact.

  “But that does not matter, for I am not frightened of guns,” he said. That is, Eugene did not mind this, and did not hold it against him.

  As Alex hiked back and forth, to and fro, he felt he belonged for the very first time.

  No one said Eugene wasn’t his father. Gallant also admitted just how much he had cared for Alex’s mother—so much so, he said, that he went to Saint John, to find her grave and lay flowers. To Alex it was love, and Eugene was Alex’s father. It was also fine to assume he had Indian blood, and he used to like to think how his people had to take care of the settlers when they first got here.

  Yes, he would think, my uncle’s ancestors were taken care of by people like me. He would smile.

  There was only one problem with wanting this man to be his father. He had forgotten that the man his mother had loved had abandoned him. He was very young and remembered it in small moments, but nonetheless? This man, this Eugene Gallant, wouldn’t have done so. Still, he clung to the hope, as wild as it might be, that some mistake had occurred and this Eugene Gallant, half Micmac and half French, was indeed his dad. His uncle worried about him now out on the road, and often waited up for him to get home.

  “I worry about ya there, boy, fer I don’t know what it is yer doing! Have ya found some young lady?”

  Finally, one afternoon he mentioned to his uncle that he knew who his father was, and was not ashamed in the least to admit it. His uncle looked at him, perplexed, and asked him with deep gravity to tell him all he knew.

  “Well, his name is Eugene Gallant. He is Micmac and French, and he’s a damn straight guy, and he wants me to go fishing with him out in the bay. And he is kind and nice as anything, so you don’t have to be ashamed, I can go live with him. I will learn how to fish and live my life just like he does.”

  Alex said this very quickly, and very hopefully. He shook somewhat when he spoke. For he was hoping he would have a life that was his own. And the old man nodded and said nothing. For days he said nothing. For days he said neither nay nor yea about this revelation. And Alex carried on.

  And then, on Alex’s birthday, Jim simply came into the room with documents he had collected and handed them to the boy, stiffly as if he were a postman, without a word, except there may have been some unintended mirth in him. Without saying a word, though, he turned and left the room. And Alex’s life was opened up to him.

  His mother had been a child when she got pregnant. His father was named Roach. He was from a family on the road. His grandfather Leopold was buried at the small Protestant graveyard near Hackerook. Leopold had been killed by a Chapman grader on a turn along the highway one late evening in February 1954. He was protesting the plowing job Chapman had been given (up until this time the road had been closed all winter).

  “The man had come out to stop us, and we weren’t able to stop. His family never forgave me for this, but his family were squatters on my land, on my property, and I could have put them off but didn’t—more fool I. I left them their little farmhouse.”

  Though his family had long resented the Chapmans, and young Roach was fed on this resentment as much as any, he was taken in by Muriel, a war bride, and shown books and taught painting.

  “He used her kind nature to gain audience with your mother,” the old man wrote. “It was your mother he wanted.”

  Here, on those bleak winter days, Roach came as a respite from his little fallen farmyard. But he resented what they had and what his family lacked, and secretly blamed Chapman for it, and for the death of his own father.

  Many times the old man would come in and see the young Roach boy there, pitiful and alone, his feet freezing from walking through a winter gale, and give him some money. Their niece Rosa, about fourteen years old, was living with them at the time.

  “But I thought nothing of this then,” Chapman said, “more fool I.”

  As time went on, it seemed only Muriel was alive to Roach’s ambition, and encouraged him; he wanted to have a grand life, to escape the bitter hardship. He would spend late afternoons and evenings reading what she gave him, but dissatisfied with her and resentful of Chapman he would always mention what his father could have had if he had been treated better and not been killed at thirty-eight.

  One day Roach left to work a mine in Quebec for the summer.

  “Better off without him,” Chapman told Muriel, who had been foolish enough to look upon him as a son. But Roach found nothing in those mines, and nothing in the subterranean jazz bars of Montreal where he and others tried to talk like the beatniks of New York. He was gone, and forgotten, and might have never returned, except the bar he worked at went out of business in 1959.

  “You are here because Roach failed at bartending,” Old Chapman cruelly wrote.

  So in the dazzling heat of mid-July 1959 he returned, tall, thin, with bony arms and a serious gaze, a beard modeled after those who he could never be. He walked back up the Chapman lane, asking Chapman for a job.

  “So we put him lifting scrap metal with old Harold Tucker,” Chapman wrote. “He stayed with us, in the room that is now yours. Muriel looked upon him as the son she never had.”

  But it was as a conjugal to Rosa, not the woebegone son of a kind, naive British war bride, whom he secretly belittled, that he was interested in, and Rosa he made pregnant. At the end of November she fled with him, her room emptied only of one suitcase, her childhood toys left behind.

  “Charlie thought he would get my money—because of you—you were his ACT OF REVENGE upon the Chapmans he accused without proof of killing his father, your grandfather. He NEVER would get my money—and so he left her and you, to try his hand in Montreal again. He died in 1971. There is a photo of him during the October Crisis. He is screaming at the soldiers on the street. He was a Quebec nationalist at that time, and gloating over the idea that Canada would be no more. This, I think, was his last great lashing out at us.”

  This was all that was revealed about where Alex came from and who he was. A picture of a man at the back of a crowd of five thousand, some arms raised against a black October sky.

  There was also a long, detailed, and painful document on his father negotiating for money from Jim and Muriel if he allow “the boy to stay with you.” This was written in his father’s own shaking hand; at that time he could not have been much more than thirty-six or so. The arrived-at price for this boy, this Alex Roach to become and remain Alex Chapman was $4541.11. There was a check written out, not to his father but to a woman called Samantha Debelshoult. His last known address was Laval.

  So Alex had not been Micmac after all, and now nothing remained of who he might have been. He knew nothing about this sad, angry man or his family. So was doubly orphaned. He trembled all that night as he sat at the table. Muriel came in and hugged him, and he flinched away from her, his lanky, thin body frigid. She had known and had not said anything.

  He trembled all the next day as he sat in class. Half of his teachers would have remembered his father and mother, and never had said a thing. Even Eugene Gallant, who had been so kind to him, would have known, and had said nothing to correct this love for a French-Micmac father who wasn’t.

  He knew his mother must have been used as a pawn in this act against Jim Chapman—and he too�
�and over the years details would come to the fore and be remembered by him about that long ago time.

  For two months he did not speak to anyone. Then he went once to his real grandfather’s house—near the South Talon Road off Arron Brook, in back of Minnie Patch’s. There a doleful paddock and singed fence. It was autumn and the sky was furious, and one lame horse walked, and snow started, and he was alone. (The house would be left abandoned and then burn five years later in the Lean-to Creek fire—the fire that Alex himself had to beat back with a broom from his own small place.)

  Afterwards, when his uncle looked at him, Alex trembled, and his uncle said nothing, except: “Don’t worry, boy—don’t worry. It ain’t so bad to be a Roach or anything else. And he was a sad man at the end to jump from the Jacques Cartier Bridge.”

  This was something Alex did not know. He sat stunned, and couldn’t respond.

  Then one day the documents were removed from his room, and he never saw them again.

  “Don’t worry about your heritage, boy—you make your own,” the old man said.

  He sat in desolation another few days, and then recovered. And in a way this is what he decided: He would tell people he was whoever he wanted, if he wanted to, and continue on the way he was.

  —

  HE DID NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT MINNIE TUCKER. He was still in love with her, deeply, when a missionary visited his aunt—because she was bound by a wheelchair, and Jim Chapman asked him to go down and cheer the girl up and give her communion. The idea that this priest was a special priest gave Jim a grand feeling of elation, and a look of piety when the priest spoke out in the dooryard to him. Piety of the kind always associated with privately violent men.

  So the priest came in, through the doorway of the house that had seen so much bitterness and despair, with the host in a small locket, and said mass for Muriel, opened the locket, and produced the host. Alex was not going to go down and see him, remaining as he was in his room, but his uncle came up and insisted he go downstairs. He walked into the living room with his head down and his face turned away, trying to hide the blemishes of his acne.

  “Ah, here you are,” Father Hut said. “Sit down here and I will tell my story—and see if you don’t find something about it interesting.”

  The priest, a small man with a dazzling face who used his whole arms to talk, began to tell the three of them about his great work among the natives of South America. He spoke for an hour, and then two, and then three. Alex, who tried to be disinterested, became more and more enthralled.

  It was then, people along the highway said, that Alex turned toward holy orders. It was also in revenge against Minnie that he did so.

  Holy orders was a sanctifying life—a life of great inner struggle—and a warrior’s life, of sainthood. He knew this the first night when he went back to his room to pray. Who would talk about this life as being effeminate and who would not know that this was a life of spectacular grandeur—far surpassing the vow of marriage. This is what the priest had told him. He spoke of bravery in the face of death.

  “I have faced death,” he said truthfully, “and I will again. Many have contempt for life—they will do anything, it seems, and you think, ah, how brave they are—but the really brave have a contempt for death, and strive to enable life no matter how much death is around.”

  What truth in that line. Alex went and wrote it down.

  Father Hut was as exuberant a person as Alex had ever seen. Grace seemed to glow about him—the blackness of his slacks and jacket did nothing to dampen the aura. And so Alex, thinking of his misadventures so far, turned away from temporal life.

  But he found he was not like this priest—not exuberant and happy. He was rigidly fastidious. Perhaps like his Protestant grandfather, he was unmoved by spectacle. He became silent and pious. Still, for the very first time, the meanness of the world no longer mattered to him. Everything was less than a gnat’s bite once he decided to live for God.

  He went to church every morning at seven, and longed for the quiet of the pew and the stained glass. He had to be pure, for he took communion. He realized for the first time how much the world existed on lies. His uncle had for years insisted that Alex was not telling the truth when he was, and often students at school made fun of him for saying things which were true. And for the first time he realized this was his great sin, among those people. He had told the truth, about what made him happy, about what he longed for, for himself as well as others; how he had loved the grasses in the fields and the dour-looking shore birds. Many times he would pass Sam Patch coming to work as he was leaving for church, in the still silent hour of early morning, with the snow lying across the long yard like a cloth sheet.

  It seemed that Alex becoming a priest was something the old man was proud of. He talked proudly about the boy, and even said: “He came up a hard road—rougher than most of us—rougher even than young Sam Patch; abandoned by his father and the death of his mom. I should have been much more considerate of him than I was. I should have let his mom get married to that boy long ago, but I didn’t and can’t change it now!”

  The idea that he, Old Jim, had instilled piety and studious prayer in the boy made Jim gush when he spoke to the nuns.

  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, ho
wever, 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.