Cures for Hunger Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Deni Y. Béchard

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  part I

  DAREDEVILS AND INVISIBLE FRIENDS

  LEVITATION CLUB AND THE END OF THE WORLD

  PRAYERS, MANTRAS, AND HOW TO SWEAR

  part II

  GHOSTS OF THE CIVIL WAR

  CROSSING WIDE SPACES

  DISCOVERING FIRE

  part III

  THE BIG JOB

  THE CROSSING

  BORROWING FACES

  part IV

  THE HUNT

  JACK KEROUAC DREAMS ELIZABETH BENNET

  THE FLOOD

  part V

  IMAGINARY FAMILIES

  CURES FOR HUNGER

  THE LONGEST HIGHWAY

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Acknowledgments

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM MILKWEED EDITIONS

  THE EDITOR’S CIRCLE OF MILKWEED EDITIONS

  Copyright Page

  Also by Deni Y. Béchard

  Vandal Love

  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.

  Hafiz (trans. Ladinsky)

  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.

  part I

  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.

  The dense grass came up past my elbows, and I walked ahead, my heart beating faster. Two large dark shapes lay on the earth as if crushed into it, their legs twisted awkwardly, one haggard carcass just before me, its jaws open, eye sockets hollow.

  “You’re not afraid?” he asked as I stood, measuring my breath, studying the second bear, sprawled on its side, a naked leg bone raised stiffly, claws struck into the rank air.

  “No,” I said. The bears were dead, and this wasn’t a big deal, after all. I made myself go closer to look at the fanged, gaping jaws, the rotting fur like torn carpeting over the ribs. The smell made it hard to breathe, but I took another step.

  He turned and said, “Let’s go.”

  “I want to look at them.”

  He chuckled proudly. “Come on. You’ve seen enough.”

  I crouched. Two long curved teeth protruded from the top and bottom jaws. A few weeks earlier, in class, I’d read a story in my fourth-grade primer about the loup-garou, the werewolf. Because my classes were in French, we often read folktales from Quebec, but this one was my favorite. I’d tried to imagine the werewolf’s mouth, its sharp teeth, and how my jaw would feel growing fangs as I stared at the full moon. I’d turned in my chair and made bug eyes and growled at the girl behind me, and she’d called out to the teacher, who’d threatened to send me to the principal’s office as usual.

  My father started walking, and I spun and jogged after him, through the crushed grass. As I followed him back across the rows, I told him the story, feeling a little breathless at the thought that what I’d just seen might not really be bears.

  “There’s this hunter who likes to hunt more than he likes to be in the village. He hunts all day long and he sleeps in his cabin, and he almost never goes home or talks to anyone. Then, one night, when it’s the full moon, his uncles and cousins visit his cabin, but it’s empty. They find clothes covered with animal hair, and there are huge wolf tracks in the snow.”

  Just describing this gave me goose bumps, and I rubbed my arms, picturing myself coming to the door and pushing it open and seeing my clothes on the floor, covered in black hair.

  “I heard that a lot when I was a boy,” he told me, his eyes serious, maybe a little worried.

  I stared up at him, trying to match his pace. What would he look like as a loup-garou? His beard would spread over his entire face and neck and arms, and I pictured him standing at the edge of the forest beneath the mountain, dressed in torn fur, the bear skull on his head as he stared out at the valley through the ragged jaws. I knew I was seeing this wrong, that this wasn’t like a werewolf at all, but my brain always played tricks on me. I’d look at something and minutes later I’d picture strange things, as if from a dream, and then I’d no longer be sure of what I’d really seen. I glanced up again. I’d expected him to say something about the story or the dead bears, but he was silent, eyes narrowed.

  We made our way back toward the farm, past a few sheds that smelled of wet earth, and he stopped to look inside, as if he’d forgotten something.

  “See,” he said quietly. “Each year the sheds are smaller. They rot into the ground. The valley’s moisture eats up the wood.”

  He spoke as if he’d already forgotten the bears, and he sighed, looking back at the rows. I couldn’t remember him ever acting like this. He turned in a circle, as if to do something, glancing slowly here and there. But then he moved on, and I hurried after until we came to the ditch before the road and walked along it and crossed over a large culvert.

  As we followed the asphalt, I heard the low whistle of a bicycle chain against its gears, and Ten Speed shot past with a sound like someone snapping a wet towel. Briefly, shouting voices blared from her headphones. I’d asked Ian about this, and he’d said that she listened to radio shows. We’d once found her sleeping in the hay of the barn, curled up, the voices clamoring from her frizzy hair. Then her eyelids popped open on large, dark, terrified pupils, and she sprinted past us, staying crouched low, and went down the ladder and out the door.

  My father glanced behind us. A white car had appeared in the distance, and he stared, then turned and kept walking, looking straight ahead. He reached out and told me to hold his hand.

  The car pulled next to us, and the darkening sky warped in the window that descended on two clean-shaven men. The driver, with eyes as blue as my mother’s, said, “Excuse me. Can you tell us where André Béchard lives?�
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  My father squeezed my hand. He tilted his head to the side and looked at the man as if he didn’t understand. Then he scrunched up his face.

  “Who?” he said in a loud, ridiculous voice.

  “André Béchard. Do you—”

  “Oh, ’ey, dat guy. Yeah, I see ’im. ’E drive a big blue truck and ’e out drivin’ in de city. Oh yeah, ’e out in de city. Dat’s right.”

  The men stared as he gesticulated, and it was all I could do to stand perfectly still and make no expression.

  “Oh, yeah, ’e come back later,” my father was saying. “Dat’s right, later.”

  The driver gave me a long, searching look, and I barely breathed, certain he could read on my face that my father was lying. But he finally shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said, his eyes like my teacher’s when she was fed up with me. He drove off.

  I gazed up, trying to understand why my father had pretended to be someone else, but he just laughed.

  “I played a good joke on those guys,” he said. “But don’t tell your mother. She doesn’t like jokes—not the way you and me like jokes.”

  I smiled and agreed, though there was a wincing look in his eyes, nothing like the wild joy of escaping the train. As we walked home along the asphalt, he stepped faster, and the hand holding mine felt hot and damp.

  Often, after school, I wandered the fields alone, catching frogs and snakes, putting them in my pockets as I explored the woods along the stream. I couldn’t stop thinking about the two men in the car. I was certain they were police. My father knew everything about police and had told me that they didn’t always dress in uniform or drive cop cars. Whenever he saw them, he made fun of their clothes, especially the yellow stripe on one leg of their pants. He said he’d have joined the RCMP himself if their outfits weren’t so ugly. Then he called them criminals in uniforms and told stories about the stupid pigs he’d fooled.