Cures for Hunger

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Also by Deni Y. Béchard

Because of our wisdom,
we will travel far
for love.

All movement is a sign
of thirst.

Most speaking really says,
“I am hungry to know you.”

Every desire of your body is holy;

every desire of your body is
holy.

But he who is outside of society, whether unsociable
or self-sufficient, is either a god or a beast.

Aristotle,
Politics

PROLOGUE

My father died in a house empty but for a single chair. I never saw the property. I was told that it was heavily wooded, on the outskirts of Vancouver, and that a blanket of pine needles covered his car.

Two weeks before Christmas 1994, he'd stopped answering his phone. I was on the East Coast, so when I didn't hear from him by New Year's, I called the only one of his friends whose number I had. She didn't know where he was staying but offered to track him down. We agreed that the police shouldn't be notified; he'd had too many run-ins with them. A day later, she found his house.

I'd just turned twenty and was attending college in Vermont. A week before the second semester of my sophomore year, a police officer called with the coroner's report and told me that my father had taken his own life around December 16, a date that couldn't be confirmed since it was winter and the power had been cut off. His car had been repossessed with what little he'd owned inside, and the public accountant had put his remaining cash toward thousands in back taxes.

But for a few phone calls, the death passed uneventfully, a quiet ending to a life that had spanned so much of North America, a childhood on the Saint Lawrence, in Gaspésie, and a poetry of names in his twenties: Montreal, the Yukon, Alaska; Montana, Las Vegas, Tijuana; Miami, Los Angeles.

Though I considered crossing the continent for his cremation, I was too broke. I might have gone in the spirit of his travels, bused or hitchhiked in a penniless homage, but I was unwilling to leave college. I'd fought for so long to be away from him that not even his death could bring me back.

And yet I hardly seemed to inhabit my rented room. I spoke to no one. I didn't see the forested road along which I walked to class, or the words scattered over the pages.

Often that winter I sat and stared at a paper on which I had printed three names.

Yvonne: the mother he hadn't seen since 1967; the grandmother I had never met.

Matane: the town in Quebec where he believed she and his siblings still lived.

Edwin: the name by which they'd known him.

In our last telephone conversation, he'd told me these three names. I'd grown up calling him André, and as for his family, they didn't know I existed.

I considered the names like keys to his past: the landscape of his youth, the face he'd worn as a boy. I'd never seen a photo of him from before he met my mother. Through his family, would I be able to make sense of the man whose reckless passions had shaped my life?

When finally I made the trip north to the village where he grew up, I found myself repeating the name they knew him by, as if preparing to tell them about a different father. His story belonged to me now, and in its telling he would return to those who had lost him.

DAREDEVILS AND INVISIBLE FRIENDS

Racing trains was one of my favorite adventures. This was what we were doing on the day I first considered that my father might have problems with the law.

“Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine!”

My brother and I practiced counting as my father kept up with the train.

“I'll push harder,” he shouted. He thrust his bearded chin forward and bugged out his eyes and jammed the accelerator to the floor. His green truck heaved along the road, outstripping the train whose tracks, just below the line of trees, skirted the incline.

Almost instantly we left the red engine behind. He swerved past the few cars we came up on with shouts of “Old goat!” The road straightened and leveled with the tracks, and he shifted gears and kept accelerating, though the train was far behind. Then he braked, holding my brother and me in place with his right arm, the air forced from my lungs as he spun the wheel with his free hand. We pulled onto the crossing, though the warning lights on both posts flashed and bells rang.

With the truck straddling the tracks, he switched the motor off. He relaxed in his seat, looking out the passenger window, straight along the railroad.

As if on a TV screen, the train appeared in the distance, plummeting toward us. The engine broke from the shadow of the trees. Sunlight struck its red paint, and my brother and I began to scream.

My father turned the ignition.

“Oh no! It's not starting!” He was twisting the key but didn't give the engine gas. We knew the ritual and shouted, “Give it gas!”

He gave it gas and the motor fired. The truck shook but didn't move. The train engine was sounding its horn, filling up the tracks, its two dark, narrow windows glaring down at us.

The truck's wheels screeched, and we lurched and shot onto the road.

The train rushed past behind us, its iron wheels thudding over the crossing.

“That was a close call!” my father shouted and laughed like a pirate. But the color had drained from my brother's face. He turned to me, his eyes round as if to make me see just how close we'd come to being crushed. “We almost died,” he said and swallowed hard.

I looked from his pale expression to my father, whose wild bellowing filled the cab. My fear had passed, and the air I drew into my lungs felt more alive, charged as if with a sudden, mysterious joy. I couldn't help but laugh with him.

 

 

Our yellow farmhouse faced the narrow road that ran the center of the valley. An apple tree and a row of blueberry bushes separated our back porch from damp fields, and the only neighbor my age was Ian, a dirty-faced farm boy with a mentally handicapped older sister—surely the victim of malnutrition, I imagined, given that my mother had explained how junk food destroyed the brain. Though I spent many afternoons with Ian, I never learned his sister's name. I simply thought of her as Ten Speed, because she raced up and down the road all day on what he referred to as “the ten speed.” She had wide-set eyes and was always listening to a bulky black tape player clipped to her belt, its headphones holding her mess of brown curls in place.

Pine forest topped the mountains, large trees distinct like spurs against the sky in the hour before sunset. Many of the fields around our house grew Christmas trees, hundreds of neat rows of the pine, fir, and spruce that my father sold each December.

By the time we arrived home, he'd convinced my brother and me to
keep our adventure between the three of us. His joyful mood had ended as soon as we pulled into the driveway, and he said he had to check the trees, something to do with an order for spruce. We were to go inside, but the thrill of train racing hadn't worn off, and I couldn't bear the thought of staying in the house. I begged to tag along, and he hesitated, then said, “Okay. Come on.”

As the two of us walked the rows, I asked him to tell a story. He stared ahead, taking slow, deep breaths between his parted lips, and he stepped evenly, lightly over the wet, tufted earth that kept my attention. I had a specific story in mind. When I was younger, my mother had told me I'd someday grow facial hair, and I'd pictured myself, my face hidden in a dark, stinky beard as I showed up to class and sat in the back, terrifying the other kids. I cried, and my father laughed at me. I was so embarrassed and angry that he told a story about a fat bearded woman he'd lived with before my mother. She sat on him so he couldn't leave, and he wiggled from beneath her butt and ran away because he didn't want children with beards.

He stayed silent now, narrowing his eyes the way his dogs did when they wanted to run after something. He kept six German shepherds in a pen, and whenever he let them out, they sniffed the air and gazed into the distance, the wind ruffling their fur, and then they raced away so suddenly that I felt they were the happiest animals on earth.

But he just walked, and I followed him over the road to the Christmas tree fields on the other side. We stepped over sagging barbed wire and crossed a stream on a plank nailed with asphalt shingles for grip. I lingered to watch for trout in the dark pools beneath overhanging trees, but he kept on, and I ran to catch up.

“Tell me the story again,” I said and reached for his hand. His fingers closed slightly, and he glanced down.

“Which one?” He'd been like this more and more—at first normal, making jokes, doing something fun and crazy, laughing wildly; then, a little later, silent, staring off.

“About the bearded woman,” I said. I loved replaying the stories he told and didn't feel satisfied until I could see each detail, so I asked why he'd lived with her and what kind of woman she was. He nodded but
didn't tell it at all. He just said, “You're lucky. If she'd been your mother, you'd have been born with a beard.”

We came to where the fields gave way to tall tangled grass and huge weeds and forest. The mountain rose steeply above us, and we turned and walked along its base, the rows of Christmas trees running on at our sides. With each few steps another long, thin corridor appeared, descending out of sight.

Where the trees ended, there was a shallow, overgrown ditch separating the neighbor's blueberry farm from our land. The air smelled bad, like an alley trash can in the city, behind one of my father's stores.

“He got some bears. Let's have a look,” he said and told me that our neighbor had set up bear traps. He waded into the yellow grass, crushing a path I followed. I pushed weeds aside and stretched my neck to see ahead. He'd often warned me to stay away from bears and their cubs, and he'd made me promise that if any came along when I went fishing alone, I'd get on my bike and hurry home. I'd seen them once, four dark spots near some distant trees, and I'd pedaled as fast as I could over the rutted dirt road, my fishing rod pinned to my handlebars. I felt a little nervous now, the stench of rotten meat stronger, but he was there, between me and the bears, and I wanted to show him that this was no big deal.

“Look.” He stepped to the side and motioned me forward.