Free The Lost Highway by David Adams Richards Page B

concerned about—however, he was still human. (He said this as if to anoint himself with the common ground without believing that it really applied to him.)
    But there were two incidents back to back that came after he had been in seminary a year and a half.
    The first was this: He had to go down to the reserve with a box of communion envelopes. There, the strangest thing happened to him. It was not reported about, no one found out, and in the annals of history it was perhaps never recorded. Coming out of the small church in the late afternoon, with drizzle in the air, he came face to face with a black bear suffering mange. Worse, her cub came toward him. The mother, famished from winter, gangly and cross, rushed toward him also. As he backed up he screamed, and tried to run. But just then a native boy about ten years of age, at the church preparing for his confirmation, jumped between the bear and him, and grabbing rocks from the dirt began throwing them. Two hit the mother in the head, stopping her up. She grunted and snorted but the youngster kept throwing. He kept throwing and throwing and would not give up. Each time the bear pressed forward the little boy, his hands bleeding, found more rocks in the frozen earth to dig up and throw. All this time Alex stood frozen to the wall of the church.
    Finally, the bear turned sideways, collected her cub with a swat, and headed back into the woods.
    “There you go, Fadder,” the boy said cheerfully and breathing heavily, his black hair flat against his head. “That old bear’s gone back home, there you go—no need to worry anymore.”
    The boy moved off and Alex stood in the wet with his cross, his legs still trembling. This moment would stick with him for years. The child would have given his life for him, and yet—what could he have done?
    He went into the reserve and found the boy’s house, saw where he lived and especially how he lived. But though he was going to help this child, and promised himself he would, he never got around to it. After a while he deliberately avoided the small lane where the boy lived. Yet without that little boy, Alex might never have lived to later teach his course on ethics.
    The second incident might have been worse. A few weeks later, when he was sent out by Monsignor Plante to the store, he met a crowd of young men and women piled into one car going off to a party. There had been a thaw, the car was covered in streaks of dirt and salt, and now it was snowing mildly, with the gray sky almost meeting the ground, so he blinked incessantly as he made his way toward the village. As always when the weather turns warm, the young here dress like those in movies from the California south, wearing things unfit for our weather in order to belong to somewhere they never were and perhaps would never be.
    The car revved its engine as Alex approached. It backfired, and then the driver revved it again, put it in gear, and squealed forward, so that mud came up against Alex’s face.
    He had already walked three miles and he was sweating and tired, and now mud spotted his cheeks and chin. He had always feared these boys in their cars, for they were the kind who had little or no use for him. And this might be a reason he had gone to the seminary—so he would not have to face them until he wore a collar. That would make it easier, and safer. He knew this secretly. And he knew why. Still, if he could not overcome this aversion to their swearing and nonsense, how could he later on preach to them?
    So he approached the car with this in mind. He was going to knock on the window and reprimand them—in a calm and kindly way—about the mud on his cheek.
    As he came toward the car, he could hear a boy saying, “Do it—do it,” and people giggling and whispering. The window rolled down just as he came up to it.
    He put his face into the window as a girl lifted her thin undershirt, and her breasts were an inch from his face. He could see snow falling down on those