Free The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards

what would become of them. The old man also flirted with one of the young girls who had come, who responded to him out of politeness he misunderstood, and this made Alex embarrassed.
    He took out his photos and showed his medals and spoke of his doings, and Alex himself sat alone. His aunt came to him and said, “I’ve had many dreams lately about Minnie—”
    “Oh, I haven’t,” he said, lying, to bolster his virtue, though he had masturbated that week thinking of her.
    Muriel knew he liked to sculpt and asked him if he wouldn’t like to go to the School of Fine Arts in Halifax, she was sure she could make his uncle see the virtue of it. That he would someday be a fine sculptor. But he thought of the clay pieces he had done of those birds he once sketched, now lying in torment about the junkyard behind him, and said with perhaps as much naïveté as his uncle, “Well, we are all clay.”
    —
    W HEN HE HAD BEEN IN THE SEMINARY A YEAR AND A HALF , and wore a silver cross on his chest, and had passed through his first series of exams, went to mass every day, and said prayers from seven until nine at night, was silent in certain parts of the seminary, he believed that he was better for it, and that he himself one day, as his older brothers in Christ had, would lay prostrate on the altar in the hope of attaining the pleasure of Christ while snow fell on the dark ground. He wanted to be a young priest on the Bartibog and say his first mass where he had once served on the altar. He thought of pleasant afternoons in snow-laden February walking to small country houses to see the children—just as priests had done in the long ago. So many people his age wanted the same thing and sought so many ways to find it. But not he. He had already found it. He would return to it—to the idea of caring for the children’s souls by loving them as human beings. He would do this for the memory of his mother. He tried not to think of his father, that failed musician who had died some time ago.
    Great men had come from the Bartibog and great healers as well, and in truth great priests, who were known and written about. Priests who gave their lives for others, and served in the wars—walking into battle unarmed, like Father Morrissey and Father Hickey and Father Murdock. He knew this, and loved the idea of that kind of pure understanding, especially when the world understood so little now. And it did understand so little. He could tell Minnie understood so little, about true love and happiness, that he was as always awash in sympathy for her. And it was only this spiritual sympathy that allowed him to love and not want her, he believed.
    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