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

me as well. I was bigger, but my brother had age on his side, and after he punched me, I went berserk, flailing. When our mother commanded us to stop, my father looked stunned. I understood it now—that he was seeing the past.

Spring through fall, my father worked. He saw himself as a man and hated the winters, when the coast froze and fishing stopped. Men from the village signed on with logging companies and were flown north until spring. But my father stayed behind with the women and children. Winters were chores, feeding the animals, mucking the stalls, bringing in firewood.

On November 12, 1953, he turned fifteen. Sixteen was the legal age to sign on with the logging company, but he lied. His father let him, eager for the extra earnings.

Each hour, my father grew more anxious. Any work would be better than living trapped in the small house with his mother and siblings. He readied his bag, his work clothes, his boots. But at the landing strip, the priest, Cure Félix Jean, stood with the recruiter. He called my father over and berated him for lying. He’d been the one to record my father’s baptism in the church register, and he’d brought his birth certificate as proof.

The plane left, and my father walked along the coast, a wasteland of folded sheets of ice. He’d always hated that priest who ruled the village like his own kingdom.

Locked in rage, my father stared over the Saint Lawrence to the ragged horizon. He couldn’t bring himself to go into the house, couldn’t think of any motion or action that might satisfy him.

“I wanted so badly to get out, to leave,” he said over the phone. “That’s all I could think of. I had no idea what I’d do when I was gone. I just needed to go.”

Where did such longings reside in us, passed on through blood or stories, through a father’s distant look as he tells his son of far-off places? It seemed to me then, hearing his words, that a father’s life is a boy’s first story.

✴

SENSING MY MIND at work in my sleep, I woke. It was only 1:00 a.m. I dressed and quietly went out along the wooded driveway to the unmarked asphalt. My breath misted as I walked. Chimney smoke rose against the moonlight, casting fleeting shadows over the road. The glittering stars seemed the source of the penetrating cold, a million points of ice.

Since I was a boy, if I wasn’t discovering something, restlessness took over. Maybe crime had been my father’s cure for this just as writing was mine, or learning about his past, unlocking his secrets. We felt complete only when focusing all of ourselves on a goal.

The forest opened to the college grounds, silent but for my steps. I went into the campus center, turned on the hall light, and unfolded the metal chair next to the pay phone.

“Hey,” he said and accepted the call. “It’s late there.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about the stories you told me.”

“Which ones?”

“Just about your family. I still don’t understand why you never went back.”

He didn’t answer at first and then, in that way that made each new conversation feel like a beginning, he said, “I wanted my own life. My father was strong. He was a big man, and people respected him. He worked hard and could fight. But that’s all he had. When I was sixteen and finally went to the north coast with him, I remember how he warned me. A frozen tree could split and kill a man, or during la drave, the drive, when they ran logs downriver to the Saint Lawrence, men got injured. But I just wanted to work. I wanted out of the house. I didn’t care.

“One night, there’d been a hard freeze and then snow, and in the morning we left camp for the river, where we’d tied a boat of supplies to the shore. On our way there, we saw a new camp of loggers. They were English. I was surprised. The English owned businesses or came as tourists, but I’d never seen them like this. There were just four of us, and they invited us to eat with them. The food shocked me. They had beef and sweet sauce and canned peaches and a kind of melon I’d never seen. We ate everything we could and even put some in our pockets. I noticed that they were laughing. I didn’t understand at first. I thought they were happy, but then I realized they were making fun of us.

“I’d been proud to be on the north coast, but I understood something then. I saw that others didn’t respect us at all.”

The next morning, I would write what he told me next, the details outlandish. He and his father and the other two men continued to the river, kicking a path through fresh snow. The quiet of the north loomed from the frozen earth, palled between the trees. One of the men spat and uttered the racial epithet for the English—“Maudites têtes carrées!”—Damned square heads!

The trail curved along the river, the expanse sheathed in fresh ice, cleared of snow by the wind that had followed the storm—scoured blue in places. Here or there, narrow, dunelike drifts rose from the surface, like the unstrung coils of a serpent. The small boat was frozen in place, loaded with bags. They stomped on the ice. It wasn’t thick but it would support them, and they carefully emptied the boat and decided to pull it free and drag it to shore.

My father had still been thinking of change, that it would come through work, each job a step farther from home and closer to a new life. He wanted to put his rage into something, to show his strength, and he grabbed hold next to his father and pulled, startled at the ease with which the boat nearly lifted from his hands. The river rushed at his feet.