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

only part of it. I’m sick of working on things that don’t give anything back. It’s too hard. It might not have been so bad if everything had turned out differently. If I’d seen you guys grow up. That’s the one thing I’d change. It wasn’t right for your mother to take you like that. She used my past to do it. I still remember when I called her in Virginia. She threatened to call the po-lice. She said it like that, like someone from there. She’d been gone two weeks. But I’m not mad at her, not anymore. I got over that. I just would have liked to see you grow up.”

Neither of us spoke for what felt like a minute. Against my ear, the silence was too intimate.

“I’m not proud of the things I’ve done,” he said. “The other day I read about some guys who robbed a bank, and it made me angry. Those kinds of people don’t appreciate hard work. I don’t think you can understand. You’ve had chances I never did. The things I did in my life went against the world. But you’re on the right path. I just want you to know that.”

He paused, maybe trying to make sense of his own words.

“I always saw so much of me in you. But I’m not proud of the years I spent inside, and I’m not proud of the things I did. I’ve damaged a lot of lives. I see the world around me, and I’m not part of it.”

I’d been interjecting affirmative sounds, but now I stopped, angry. I needed to say something to change his mind, but we’d never talked like this. I wanted to get off the phone. I wanted to put it down—to hang it up so slowly and neatly that he wouldn’t know until the line went dead.

“You shouldn’t be ashamed,” I forced myself to say, my throat dry. “Most people couldn’t have lived your life.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I want to write your stories. Will you tell them to me?”

“There’s at least one book in my life,” he said. “That’s something, I guess.”

The silence stretched on. Squirrels scraped in the leaves outside and bickered near the bird feeder. I rubbed my eyes and pressed my fingers into them, phosphenes pulsing—the lacy glitter of capillaries and the white glow I’d once believed was the light of the soul.

“What would you need to know for a book?” he asked. “Where would I begin?”

“With your childhood.”

✴

THE NOVEL I imagined would contain the world he revealed: a gray stone church, wind-beaten houses, fishing nets strung between eaves, the families, children filing behind parents on Sundays, snowdrifts against walls, footpaths shoulder deep; later, wagons mired to their axles in the spring thaw—or the day when the power company came and installed glass globes that burned without heat or smoke.

He and I spoke regularly after that night. I called him from campus or when my landlords were away. Sometimes he paused from storytelling to ask me to drop out and come back, saying he’d never needed an education, as if he hadn’t told me I was on the right path days before. But each time I refused, he grudgingly went back to describing his past.

As a child, he’d been aware of words, he said—those in English that they used in French or learned from labels at the store. He got his favorite, Eagle Brand condensed milk, as a treat. “C’est du Eagle Brand, ça!” one of his siblings had said of the car an American tourist drove past on the dusty coast road. They all nodded in agreement, laughing.

The sense of mystery that I wrote into this new world was mine. I saw it through a child’s eyes, each detail lit by my longing to know more. But in his words, I felt deeper emotions: the loyalty to parents, the love and rivalries of siblings, and the desire to make things his own—his own ideas and passions, his own adventures. I wrote to bring myself close to the edge of all that, seeing not just his family but my own, the place from which the road away began, and I knew that we’d been leaving since long before I was born.

My anger surprised me at times, rising suddenly, giving me an animal restlessness, consuming the hours when I tried to sleep, until I finally returned to my desk.

In my notebook, I wrote the Saint Lawrence whose frigid waters I’d never fished. I wrote days at sea without having known the flash of cold when my hand strays too far on a net line, becomes nothing more than knowledge, until pressed inside my jacket as if to melt.

✴

ONE OF HIS earliest memories: he stood at the window, watching the pasture as a man crossed it toward the house and climbed the stairs. He recognized him and called to his mother, telling her that Grandpapa was there. She opened the door, but there was no one, just the empty stoop, the wind blowing over the pasture. Her father lived across the Saint Lawrence, a day of sailing or a flight away, and she explained this to her son. But an hour later, she received a telegram from the village saying that her father had died.

Though my father had been born on the north shore, in a village run by a Jersey cod company, soon afterward his father had moved them back to Gaspésie, to the family farm. His mother never fully accepted the new village, telling him that he was better than the people there. She made clothes for her children and claimed that the garments in the shops were inferior.

While she maintained appearances, my grandfather, a burly, dark-skinned man who loved a fight, had my father and his brother, Bernard, put on boxing gloves and square off in the living room. “That’s my ace,” my grandfather would say of my father, stoking the rivalry between the boys.

My father had done this with my brother and