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

as he scrutinized it, frowning, before we continued on. The embankment was soon gone, replaced by stretches of scattered stone along the river that shone violet in the sunset.

He took the road slowly. All around us naked branches reached against the luminous sky. I’d come here with him once when I was a boy, just he, my brother, and I, and we’d camped in the same dome tent I later burned. We got up at dawn to fish, and as the sun rose, he told us that we should do this every fall. I agreed. None of us could have imagined how much our lives would change.

It was getting dark. We’d driven for nearly an hour along gravel roads, pausing at washed-out flats where the water had risen in the past and uprooted trees.

He pulled the truck onto the shoulder.

“I don’t recognize anything,” he told me. “There was a big flood some years back. Everything’s different now. Even the roads.”

✴

THAT NIGHT, WE found a restaurant just off the highway and pulled into its gravel lot. He ordered a beer, and as soon as the waitress brought it, he took a long drink and sighed. He said he should have spent his life in nature.

“That’s all I ever really cared about. Everything else was bullshit.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “Come on. You’ve lived. You’ve really lived.”

“And what the fuck do I have now?”

I hesitated. “Have you ever thought about getting in touch with your parents?”

“My parents?” he repeated, as if he’d never had such things.

“What were their names?”

He cleared his throat. “I left Quebec to give myself a new life. Too much time has passed now.”

He finished his beer, drinking more quickly than was normal for him.

“What would I go back to?” he asked. “I quit school when I was in fifth grade. Every morning, I used to ride along the coast for wood that fell off barges. I fished or I worked in the fields, planting potatoes or digging them up. When I was sixteen, I started logging on the north coast. I was younger than you are now, and I spent all winter in a camp with grown men. At your age, I was working in uranium mines and on high-rises—whatever I could find.”

He called for another beer and told me that if his body hurt it was because he’d worked too hard as a child. “It stunted my growth. My shoulders hurt. Everything fucking hurts. We used to read by candlelight and now my fucking eyes are ruined. Why in the hell would I go back? I worked and sent my money to them, and they didn’t even give me an education.”

“Maybe I could write your stories,” I said, feeling that this was the only thing I had to offer.

He took a drink and put the bottle down.

“Sure. I’d like that. My stories deserve to be told.”

“They do. But I don’t know anything about your childhood.”

“There was work. There was some fighting. There was a lot of church. I hated the church. I remember my first confession. I was a little kid, and when I told the priest I hadn’t sinned, he said that everyone sins and it’s a sin to say otherwise. So I had a choice between telling my sins or saying Hail Marys for lying. I made up little sins, being jealous of my brother or angry at a friend. But it was bullshit. We worked. We did nothing but work on the farm, and that fucking priest made us invent sins. We didn’t have toys. All we did were chores. We got up and fed the animals and picked up wood or worked in the fields. When was there time to sin? If it weren’t for him, maybe I’d never have started breaking rules.”

He swallowed, his gaze becoming distracted.

“My older sister used to walk with me to church in the morning. It was about a mile. The road was just above the gulf, and it was cold. We weren’t allowed to have breakfast until after confession, so we’d walk to church and then home, and then back to the village for school. My sister wanted to say her Hail Marys quickly so we wouldn’t be late, but the priest caught us leaving. He yelled at us and made us stay. The nuns at school would hit us on the hand with the strap if we were late. So we both got punished that day …

“But you know, that fucking priest, he lived in a big house behind the church, and he had a live-in maid. That’s what people called her. His maid. Everyone knew he was screwing her. But if a girl went to confession and said she was having sex, he’d yell at her so everyone could hear. That happened to … to some girls I knew. I wanted to kill that son-of-a-bitch priest …”

He rubbed his face. “These kinds of stories—you want to hear them?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“There’s one I’ll never forget. One Sunday that priest preached against adultery. A man and woman in the village had left the people they’d married and were living together, and the priest told us to pray and call down the fire of heaven on them. I snuck out of church and ran to their house. I went right to their window. I’ll never forget it. They looked happy. There was no fire. I kept waiting for it to come down and burn them, and I was worried I was too close to the house and might get burned up too. But when the fire didn’t come, I knew that fucking priest was a fake. After that I never believed another word he said.”

The waitress was bringing our plates. He finished his beer and asked for another.

“Remember how we used to talk about just living in a motor home and fishing? That’s what we should’ve done. This business, everything, crime, all of it, it’s bullshit.”

He ate slowly, searching out bits of chicken with his fork.

“Our best