The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards Page B

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