Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

Virginia and my delinquency. The world had been primitive—indifferent if not hostile—and I had mirrored it. I again found myself wondering where my father had come from.

Each time I met him for dinner, I asked if he wanted to read what I’d written, but he shook his head and said, “I don’t read novels. I don’t know much about that.” He asked if I’d like to go fishing before the salmon runs ended.

“Maybe later,” I said.

I finished the novel the night before my eighteenth birthday, and the next morning, to celebrate, I printed and read it. Shortly before heading out the door to meet my father, I threw it in the trash.

“I’m going traveling,” I told him as soon as we’d filled our plates from the buffet. I needed to live more. My book felt childish and false, lacking the ring of experience, bloated with big ideas I’d loved only in the moment of their discovery.

“When?” he asked.

“Maybe after Christmas. I’ll go to California. A friend from high school is living there.”

He pushed his rice with his fork and sighed. I’d expected rage or derision, but the fight had gone out of him.

“Why don’t we go fishing one last time?” he asked, the lines in his face deep, as if with grief. “The salmon runs are still on. You used to love to fish. It was your favorite thing. You’d beg me to take you. It was like the world was going to end if I didn’t.”

The memory of myself as a child was startling, and I nodded, sad for no reason I could identify. I no longer thought about our past much, or anything other than my immediate goals.

“Sure,” I told him. “That sounds okay. We can go before I leave.”

He stared off. “You know, I don’t regret working with fish. There’s something special about them. I’ve always felt that.”

The tenderness in his voice surprised me, his sadness, and I recalled how I’d felt about fish as a child—their mystery.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he told me. “I’m not a writer. I just know I’ve always liked the water. When I was a kid, I could tell where the fish were out there.”

“Did you use a line back then?” I asked, uncomfortable with the way he was speaking, wanting to bring our conversation back to something concrete.

“No,” he said. “Mostly a net. When I was older, I’d go fishing with a rod. But that wasn’t for money. It was just to be in nature.”

“No one fished with lines when you were growing up?”

“Of course they did, but we mostly used nets.” His gaze grew distant the way it did before he told a story, and I felt relieved to see his sadness fade.

“We had a small wooden boat,” he said, “and I used to go with my father on the Saint Lawrence. I’ll never forget this one time. We’d just put down anchor when we saw two giant fins coming across the water—the biggest fins I’d ever seen. Both turned at the same time. It was like they belonged to the same fish. They came right at us. It’s hard to believe, but these enormous black and white fish, they started jumping over the boat. I was wearing a red Canadiens sweater, and my father knew that fish often go after the color red. You could even catch some fish with just a red string tied to a hook. He pushed me into the bottom of the boat and started swinging his oar at them. But as soon as I was out of sight, they left. This must have been around 1946. He’d been fishing the Saint Lawrence since he was a boy, but he’d never seen anything like that. There were rumors that a fisherman up the coast had gone missing and his boat had washed up with large, sharp teeth stuck in the wood.”

He stopped to stab his fork at shoots of stir-fried broccoli, but kept speaking.

“A journalist came and saw us afterward, and there was a newspaper article about it. They told us that the fish were épaulards—killer whales. Years later, I saw a picture of the same fish, but when I read about them, the book said they were rarely in the Saint Lawrence. One time at Stanley Park I asked a woman at the aquarium, and she said that killer whales sometimes wander out of their normal territory and become more aggressive because they don’t have enough to eat.”

He took a bite and then pushed his food around slowly.

The whales interested me less than my grandfather. When I was a boy, my father’s few stories about his village always involved fights, drinking, and religion. I’d pictured weathered shacks slanting from a ridged, windy sea, or men in church, each clutching a foaming tankard. He’d described a bar where a local tough, for a drink, would jump and kick the low ceiling with both feet, leaving sets of sooty boot prints on the boards. I’d stared at our own ceiling, trying to imagine how I could do the same.

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“What?”

“Quebec. Why did you never go back?”

“There’s nothing for me there.”

“But you still have family, don’t you?”

He waved his hand. “I’ve been gone too long …”

“Why did you leave in the first place?”

“It was backward. The church ran everything. They kept the people poor.”

“You think it’s still like that?”

“No. It isn’t. It’s changed. But there’s no reason for me to go back.”

I remembered something I’d read when I lived in Virginia. Assigned a history report for school, I had chosen Canada because I thought it would be easy. I studied les coureurs des bois, the hardy trappers who went against fur laws and lived in the wild. The book said that because the early French population of Quebec was largely composed of men, there was a great deal of intermarriage with the Native people.

“Do you think we have Indian blood?” I asked.

“What?” He looked up from the food that he