Béchard - Cures for hunger a memoir

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Table of Contents

Also by Deni Y. Bchard

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, hed stopped answering his phone. I was on the East Coast, so when I didnt hear from him by New Years, I called the only one of his friends whose number I had. She didnt know where he was staying but offered to track him down. We agreed that the police shouldnt be notified; hed had too many run-ins with them. A day later, she found his house.

Id 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 coroners report and told me that my father had taken his own life around December 16, a date that couldnt be confirmed since it was winter and the power had been cut off. His car had been repossessed with what little hed 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 Gaspsie, 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. Id 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 didnt 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 hadnt 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 theyd known him.

In our last telephone conversation, hed told me these three names. Id grown up calling him Andr, and as for his family, they didnt know I existed.

I considered the names like keys to his past: the landscape of his youth, the face hed worn as a boy. Id 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.

Ill 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! Its not starting! He was twisting the key but didnt 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 didnt move. The train engine was sounding its horn, filling up the tracks, its two dark, narrow windows glaring down at us.

The trucks 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 brothers face. He turned to me, his eyes round as if to make me see just how close wed 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 couldnt 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 sistersurely 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 sisters 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, hed 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 hadnt worn off, and I couldnt 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 Id someday grow facial hair, and Id 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 hed lived with before my mother. She sat on him so he couldnt leave, and he wiggled from beneath her butt and ran away because he didnt want children with beards.

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