The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  So he tried harder. But he was never able to try hard enough.

  Then in early spring it was revealed that the U.S. assistant secretary of state was to be given an honorary doctorate. Alex had not thought of this as an important thing at all until June Tucker herself, with great style as she butted out her cigarette, said this was an awful capitulation of all Canada’s hard-fought values. She had just read this in the paper that morning, and only repeated it because it sounded wise.

  She was sitting by Alex when she said it, and accidentally blew smoke in his face when she butted out her cigarette. It could have been forgotten.

  He blushed, stood, and left the room. “Wait and you’ll see,” he said to her, believing this was a direct challenge to himself.

  Alex, to win back the approval of those whose approval so mattered to him, started a campaign to try to have this granting of an honorary doctorate reversed and rescinded on the ground of modern Canadian moral principle. He hoped Scone would be forced to join him. But Scone said nothing at all.

  It was at first an argument interdepartmental and contained, which no one paid much attention to. Each day as the students left the buildings, and the dry lights shone on the old hallways and crooked doors of lost offices, he pedaled about his applications and petitions. He asked June Tucker to help him, but she refused, so he recruited two young women with pierced tongues whose names he did not know. They went about each day with this petition.

  Scone suddenly stopped all communication with him. This was the most unusual counteroffensive he had ever seen. Then Scone and June Tucker and others simply did not recognize him as he passed them in the hall. It was very painful, to wonder whether he should stop and nod or engage them in conversation. He did not. June looked hurt, as if he had done something very unpleasant.

  He was stopped one April day on the steps by the vice-president of the university, a square-headed crewcut man with a heavy chest and a limp who took him aside quietly and indicated he was on the bubble for tenure.

  Alex, seeing his position challenged, said he would resign from the department if the conferral happened.

  “Well, that is unfortunate,” the vice-president said, fidgeting in the dry cold spring wind and the smell of ice breaking in the river.

  “Yes, it is,” he countered.

  This statement unfortunately was repeated to his students the next day and found its way to the paper, and he was interviewed on the CBC, which in the way of journalists egged him on. The president finally weighed in, saying he would be sorry to see Chapman leave—no one was a better professor, but he would not change university policy because of someone else’s posture. The assistant secretary of state was a fine human being and would be honored, and any disruption would only make this conference more necessary.

  “Posture, is it?” Alex said.

  All the while, June Tucker was on his mind. All the while, he was furious at Professor Scone’s pilfering of her. All the while, he wanted to prove that he was deserving of her approval.

  For whatever reason, he could not stop now.

  At first, many students backed him, and talked very bravely about it all. He clung to the two young women he had recruited, in hopes of revitalizing his stature.

  But in the end none wanted to stay away from their own graduation. He found out, in fact, once he started this, how many actually disliked him. Some people saw him to be exaggerating and self-important.

  The assistant secretary of state received his diploma on May 11, and spoke of tolerance in the conducting of our lives, the benefit of foreign service. Sincere or not, he was given a standing ovation.

  Alex had stayed away, and was alone. Frightened of having overplayed his hand, and suddenly realizing what was at stake, he wanted to hang on to his job. But he felt forced to carry out what he said he would. So, on the verge of tenure, when all things were his, he resigned on May 12—and no one noticed. A month later, at the end of June, he tried to get reinstated, but his job had been given to a colleague of his. He tried to start a petition on his own behalf and began to show up in the department speaking of a lawsuit; finally, he was put off campus.

  Alex tried other universities to no avail. Finally, he came home, at the urging of his aunt, and once again lived in the same small icehouse on Old Chapman’s property.

  For five months he did nothing at all.

  Then he decided to become a sculptor. This, after all, was his first love. Could he not do it? He used his uncle’s grand old junkyard as his inspiration. An inspiration into the beauty and degradation of human existence. All those pieces set up like proletariats struggling under the winter sun.

  Blowtorches and steel and iron, and his sculpted pieces cried out, lying twisted in the snow, naked men and women convulsed and staggered like Frankenstein’s burnt creatures asking for love.

  One day the priest, Father MacIlvoy, saw him, and engaged him in conversation. Alex was still bitter about what had happened to him at the seminary and at the university, and felt both were conspiratorial. MacIlvoy took his arm and leading him aside said: “Do you remember if the phone rang in the booth along the highway that night?”

  Alex said nothing, stunned into silence.

  “It was me—trying to warn you about old Plante finding out money was missing. I thought you could get it back—I wanted to help you—but I must have been too late. Something must have happened in your soul to want what you wanted.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, nothing happened to my soul. You’re cutting wood near my property,” Alex said, “and I won’t feed my hemlock to a church.”

  Yet the next day his aunt asked him if he could sculpt a grotto of the Virgin for the church—that Father MacIlvoy had seen some of his work and had asked. He was in fact simply too poor not to say yes. It was commissioned for $1700 (his own price) and he did it in four weeks day and night—the flares of the torch seen in the dark wood, against the shale and pitiless dead machines of our age. He was once again happy. Not only this but the idea that he had come back home as a prodigal, also a little enticing to him, alleviated by this idea of the romantic artist. The idea that there had been an enormous falling out between him and his uncle, between him and the priest, helped him in this one regard—to hold on to his self-esteem. People watched him as he worked, and realized he was a man of some talent. And sometimes at night, finishing work, he would look like all artists somehow look: the loneliest man in the world.

  Yet over the last two weeks of his job, the face of the Virgin eluded him. For he hadn’t believed in her since he was twenty. She was a myth out of the offensive mouths of centuries and centuries of opulent, vulgar men.

  He walked and walked in the snow—he did not pray, for there was no one to pray to. He had, as James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus said, forged out of the smithy of his soul some other implantation, and these were in the statues and corroded figures of men and women in twisted and longing agony at his feet. However, he did worry that the whole piece would be lost without the right tempo in her face. Some noticeable characteristic, once elusive and yet forever permanent. And he did not know how to achieve it. Looking in books of pictures did no good. Her divinity had been captured in the pictures of old, but they did nothing for him. Her face always startlingly beautiful and yet humble. Each night under the moon, he walked down to the end of the giant yard and saw his Virgin, arms reaching out toward him in love, yet without a face, the wind blowing cold off the bay. But Alex could not give up. He worked on, as if something that wasn’t in his own hands was prodding him forward.

  Two evenings later, filled with a sense of failure, he went to the store to buy cigarettes. There he saw a young girl buying some milk and bread, and as she turned to him, she smiled. He followed her outside, and she looked back and smiled once more.

  That’s it, he thought.

  Of course, there was no real Virgin—not at Fatima or Guadalupe (he had often written about this hypocrisy, and believed in making great jests toward it)—but still, this w
as the face that people might like for the Virgin. And this is what he was after. So that night he went back with a chisel and blowtorch. There the face, human and sorrowful and wondrous, was formed suddenly and completely out of the alloy of a junkyard under the frozen moon—and it was much like the face of that child.

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER ALEX, AFTER YEARS OF BEING ALONE, SAW Minnie as he was walking down the highway to tell the priest that the statue was finished. It happened during a snowstorm with big flakes falling down between the shadowy evening trees. She was trying to push her car, which had gotten stuck near a culvert by the church lane. Her face looked drawn and pale, her eyes tired.

  Alex looked old now, and sad, his face and coarse beard. It was true that at first she did not recognize him at all. Still, his old feelings for her came back, all the deep love, the anguish, the hurt pride, her day at the churchyard. His hands were blackened and twisted from holding the blowtorches, his throat was marked by small burns. When he smiled, his teeth were gray.

  Suddenly someone came out from the passenger door, saying: “I’ll help you push—you get behind the wheel, Mommy.”

  It was the girl—Amy—the one he had left the seminary for, the one he had tried to be rid of. She was now about twelve or thirteen. He recognized her. She was the very girl he had used as a model for the face of Mary, Mother of God.

  He was so startled he looked away, as if stung—without them seeing, but it left him shaken. He helped push and stood beside this child for the first time, her hands next to his, her various small fingernails painted green and blue and orange and pink.

  Afterwards he turned and walked back through the woods path, the snow falling on his bared wet head.

  He took the statue in a truck the next day, and he was very worried that the priest would not like it—call it unfinished or too modern—that the congregation, many of whom were older, would balk at it as well. That is, he was like so many artists, terrified of being rejected by the people he believed were not important. In fact, a few didn’t like it at all—but most, the priest included, thought it was wonderful. The priest gave him an invitation back to mass. He did not go. Though he thought for a moment that he might, he could not and keep his self-respect.

  The grotto was placed at the front edge of our little church.

  —

  HE ASKED HIS UNCLE FOR A JOB LATER THAT YEAR. HE HAD no real authority, and many of the men took no orders from him. Still, he tried his best to help his uncle. Yet he hated what he perceived to be the happiness of Minnie and Sam. But it was his own unhappiness jutting out.

  And as the weeks passed, he longed for a time of retribution. Every moment he had suffered, every suggestion of inadequacy, every syllable pitched against him from some flagrant mouth was remembered. He brooded, pitied himself, and longed for just one chance to do something. He taught one small course on ethics at the community college. He cherished that! But his heart was no longer in life. Once, when no one knew it, he drove to Arron Falls, stood on the bridge railing, and almost jumped onto the rocks, but could not bring himself to do so. He was lucky enough to climb down just before a truck went by. He went home confused and shattered.

  Then last year it came, suddenly—a way to rid himself of Sam Patch, a way perhaps to get the business for himself once and for all, and to impress Minnie Patch once more. This in fact might be his last chance—a way, if he was brave, like those revolutionaries—to create something for himself. And then once he was rich, he would do things far better than his uncle, he would become a beneficiary to the whole highway, to the Micmac people he loved and to the poor families he had always longed to help. He thought of that Micmac boy who had saved him years ago, and said: “Yes—he will be the first I give a job to!”

  He would live up to the expectations of those who once approved of him, and those whose approval he sought.

  He put his blowtorch down, and listened.

  Old Jim Chapman was in trouble. He had no contract to plow the shopping malls anymore and wanted the government contract to do the plowing down toward Neguac. He had been informed that he would have a chance to bid on tender. This in itself, bidding on a tender like a common business, was a slap in the face to a man of Jim Chapman’s stature. Everyone was silent about it, but everyone knew. From the moment he had lost that black book—that four-poster, as people called it—certain things had happened, occasioned by his suspicion of Sam Patch, and reinforced when bad luck and new companies began to override him.

  This might be the last chance to keep the firm afloat, and he must rely upon his foreman now.

  So the plowing job was meticulously researched by Sam.

  Sam knew the men could do it—and Jim was willing to bid what Sam Patch told him to. Patch worked on the numbers for well over a month, decided he and the men, to save the company, would take only three-quarters pay, and said they should bid $120,000 for the winter. Old Chapman was in a position he had never been in before—that is, he was no longer assured of anything, and must bid like a company in business for a month. That is why he needed Sam to arrive at a dollar figure for this contract.

  “No one will be able to go lower,” Sam said. “It’s a long, tough job—and will be hard on the plows. Think of eighteen definite plow days, working eighteen hours a day. If we get this done, we will have other opportunities—we can do down to the French side, and Fouy can do it back toward us.”

  This was Cid Fouy, the man with the Corvette so long ago, that made all those childish seminarians rush up the lane expectantly into the twilight for a drive.

  What Alex saw (yet he offered no helping hand himself) was that this man Sam working for twenty years had never had a credible salary or any good benefits—no dental plan, and little paid vacation—and yet he worked for the tyrant because it was the only thing he knew. And this tyrant depended on him, and loved him more than he loved Alex. This tyrant was the one obstacle preventing Alex from doing something for the people he cared for. What Alex knew, though he couldn’t imagine it was for the same reasons, is that the paid employees at the university had no dental plan and very little pension plan themselves, and he had neglected to concern himself with it as he was seeking the comfort of being a professor.

  Alex did have legitimate concerns here, however. He needed to know the business would be solvent in five to ten years. If not, his hope of being left a legacy and helping who he wanted to was moot. And he wanted to be left the legacy, if for anything, for his mother’s memory. He wanted to live his middle age in comfort and write a book on all of the things he had suffered, or a historical book on the First Nations. The tyrant would no doubt ruin his plans.

  Except for teaching his little course on ethics, his life had been set in stone.

  So Alex went to Patch and spoke about these concerns in the little office on a quiet night. He could smell new paint in the backroom, and some flies buzzed here and there, and a gold string hung from the lone light bulb. Sam, a year or so older than Alex, was about three inches shorter and thirty pounds heavier. He was hard of hearing, and had huge shoulders that sloped forward, like his forehead did. His hair was curly black and he kept it short. He had the charm of personal comfort, knew who he was, and therefore was never offended by those who did not have comfort with themselves but only showed a kind of perplexity.

  “If there are real storms this year, Uncle Jim will be in trouble—he will lose money—maybe everything he has worked for,” Alex said, looking away as he spoke.

  “I know, but you must then pray,” Sam said, simplistically just like his wife, “for he needs this contract.” He scratched his nose and smiled.

  Sam had learned this piety from his wife, who he tried to emulate because he admired her, although he sensed that she did not love him but someone from her past. (For everyone’s talk and gossip and assertions, he did not know she had loved Alex Chapman. He always believed it was some other boy perhaps.)

  Although Alex had made his own estimation of $155,000 (which
was still low) his uncle did not take him seriously, and said he had long relied upon Sammy Patch, and that almost any advice Alex gave had no meaning at this moment.

  “I don’t think you have the wisdom to offer a bid—you haven’t been here, yous was never on a loader—you wasn’t on the road, not even as my flagger when we had to redo the bridge, so what are you coming up so big feelinged now,” he declared in front of all the men there. Alex, who had worked on his own figures for six days, couldn’t look at them as he walked away, but could feel all of their eyes on his back.

  Alex was coughing now, continually. His body was weak, and his back stooped when he walked. He told his uncle that if it was a bad winter, they would lose money and perhaps the business.

  He went back to his cabin and thought of what to do. And then made his soup of beets and corn.

  Alex believed the tender was far too low, if there was any amount of snow—that was the catch. One must have faith that this winter wouldn’t be too severe when they bid on the job. That is, the less they plowed the more money they made in the end. If they came out on top they were considered shrewd. And that was part of what Alex disliked about this process: they were relying on chance—or what was worse, fate—to be called shrewd and have a good year! This was the way the baffled highway worked.

  The next day he complained about this to Sam, and Patch did something that to him was obscene. Sam Patch, to stop his worry, took him into the woods beyond Arron Brook Falls, to see where the bees had built their hives, and delighted in showing him that they were close to the ground, which was the true sign of temperate weather.

  He then tried to put Alex’s mind at rest: “If God is with us,” Sam Patch said, “then we’ll be okay—why don’t you light a candle to the Virgin you carved?”