Cures for Hunger

by Deni Béchard

  part V

  IMAGINARY FAMILIES

  My father and I spoke little over the next year. I traveled to California and stayed with a friend and four other young men in a two-bedroom apartment, writing when I could and working for a temp agency renovating a Sears. We slept on couches around the TV and climbed chain-link fences at night to swim in pools. But the friend started a fight over a girl and I left, though I would have regardless because the next day we were evicted.

  When I told my father on the phone, he asked me to come back and help at his store. Instead, I headed east, looking for jobs in Utah and Colorado. I wended my way across the continent, and by April ended up in Virginia, where I worked construction until the first semester of college began.

  By then I was grateful for it, having struggled to write another novel and realizing how little I knew, how much I wanted the time to study. I loved the readings and discussions. With each novel, I felt myself filled with language, erasing the old patterns words could take, creating possibility. I reread Absalom, Absalom!, searching through threads of identity, the ambition that grew into a man, hiding the initial wounded impulse of a boy.

  When I thought about what I might write, I envisioned a great novel just as my father might have imagined the big job. The novels I loved most grew from awareness of family: talk between generations, the shared, conflicting wisdom, parents and grandparents rooting forward-gazing children. Novels seemed the product of that tension, between parents and children, between those they loved and struggled against. As I embraced these novels, it occurred to me increasingly that I knew next to nothing about my father’s past. That absence, the dim history that had shaped him, refused to let him become whole.

  During our rare phone conversations, I asked again about his family and why he’d lost contact with them. As usual, he evaded the questions, saying that too long had passed, that he had nothing in common with them anymore. When I asked about Quebec, he told me how backward it was, how poor they were. And then he changed the subject to his business. It was struggling, and he asked if I’d come back and help. But I was happy, and the desperation in his voice made me wary.

  Talking to him, I was unsure of what to feel, as if he were a stranger. My life and ambitions were now so different that I no longer knew where he fit. Only when I wrote did emotions surface, did I feel his absence and worry about him.

  The summer after my freshman year, I again worked construction in Virginia. He and I spoke, and he asked if I wanted to visit him, but I said it was too far. I feared I wouldn’t make it back to college. My life had an equilibrium, a shape, at last, and I was afraid to disturb it.

  Silence settled in the rooms. Through the window, autumn air seemed vaguely sweet, flavored with the decay of leaves. The only sound was the dull tap of the few remaining moths against the screens.

  A week earlier, I’d moved into an attic apartment on the mountain road leading to school. Two professors rented it to me, and since the house phone didn’t reach my door, I waited for them to leave so I could call my father. I watched their car’s taillights disappear down the curve of the driveway. It was strange to think that at fourteen I’d broken into a house, but now I was so desperate for this life that I was cautious in every way. I didn’t want the professors to overhear my conversations, the casual talk around crime.

  I called collect. I’d tried twice that week, but the line had been busy. Now it rang repeatedly. I was about to hang up when he answered, his voice so hoarse I hardly understood it.

  The operator gave my name, and he accepted, then asked, “Who’s this?”

  I repeated it loudly.

  “Hey, Deni. Is that you?” He coughed and cleared his throat.

  “Are you sick?”

  “A little.”

  “It’s nothing serious?”

  He coughed again. “Just a minute. I need to clear my throat.”

  The phone clunked down. From a distance, there was the reedy sound of a faucet, and then his cough, thick and wet. Sick was a word my father never said. Once, when I was four or five, my mother had told me to leave him alone because he was sick. He’d been sitting in his chair, looking focused and furious, as if refusing this weakness.

  “Are you okay?” I asked when he picked up the receiver again.

  “Yeah . . . I’m fine. I was expecting you to call.”

  “I’ve tried, but your line was busy.”

  “I’ve been taking it off the hook.”

  “What kind of cold do you have?”

  He fumbled with the receiver and said only, “I’ve been a little sick lately.”

  “Should I let you go?”

  “I just woke up. It takes a minute to get going.”

  He coughed a few times, then breathed loudly, saying nothing as I talked randomly about the classes I’d enrolled in.

  “Do you think you’d want to come back,” he interrupted, “just this once? You could take a few months off.”

  “I can’t. I’m already enrolled.”

  Absentmindedly, I turned the lamp off, the house dark but for the porch light, the furniture faintly silhouetted.

  “How’s the market doing?” I asked.

  “Not good. There’s new management running the building.”

  “Shouldn’t that help?”

  “No, the manager’s a fucker. He raised the rent.” He drew a slow breath, then went on in a faint voice, describing store owners leaving, just walking away, and how the manager used to work for “that dictator in the Philippines.” “Marcos,” he added uncertainly.

  He paused and swallowed a few times, sounding a bit like a person rearranging dentures. “I’m not intimidated. They’re overcharging and bullying people, but I can handle it.”

  “You can keep the store going?”

  He started to cough again. His receiver rasped against his shirt.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. He sounded drunk, slurring his words.

  “You were telling me about the new manager.”

  “Yeah. He’s a big guy and people are afraid of him, but that doesn’t work with me. He tries to play games, and I put him in his place.” He hesitated, panting softly into the receiver. “I’m getting fed up with that damned store. I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about success.”

  “Success?” I made a noise in my throat to let him know I was listening.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said—“I’ve been thinking I haven’t accomplished much. I don’t like failure.” He suppressed a cough, then talked about not being able to cross the border to do business, and how that affected him. “But it’s good to see you going in the right direction. I know you’ll get somewhere. We both like to accomplish things.”

  His breath remained short and labored. Abruptly, he said, “I guess I’m thinking of letting the store go. I might have to declare bankruptcy again. I’m thinking of doing something else.”

  “What would you do?” I asked, surprised by my own vague sense of irritation—the possibility that his problems might affect me. No other emotion came to me, and I realized how wary I still was.

  “I’m thinking about it,” he said.

  “Traveling might help,” I suggested, searching for a solution. “You could hide some money for after the bankruptcy.”

  “That would be dishonest,” he told me in this new voice.

  I didn’t reply, and after a few more breaths he said, “I’ve had my good years. Vancouver is my home . . . I could have gone back to Quebec twenty, even ten years ago, but there’s nothing there for me now.”

  Neither of us spoke. I didn’t know this voice.

  “Besides,” he said, “money’s not good to have when you die.”

  “Are you dying?” I asked and was almost relieved by his anger.

  “It’s just a way of saying things. I’m talking about when it happens. There’s no point trying to do anything else. It’s too late. I don’t have the experience.”

  When I didn’t respond, he said he should let m
e get to bed since it was three hours later on my coast. Then he hesitated. “Do you think you could call me more often?”

  “Sure,” I said, but then he quickly changed the subject.

  “I was driving by your school the other day. You know, the one in Abbotsford. I sell to some people down there, and I was thinking about when we used to go fishing. Then I started thinking about how you came back. Things were hard, I know, but you came back.”

  I didn’t say a word. He coughed briefly and continued.

  “I should let you go so you can get rested for school. I just want you to know that what you’re doing is best. If I could have, I’d have had more education. I got a high school diploma once . . . when I was in prison. I guess I wanted one. But it was with the name I used when I was arrested, so it doesn’t really count.”

  Again we were silent.

  “It must be late,” he said. “You should call on the weekend so we can talk longer.”

  I frowned and closed my eyes. “It is the weekend.”

  Between breaths, he asked for my number in case he needed to call. I told him, and he repeated each digit, two correct before he had me repeat the next two.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “I’m planning on moving, so I’ll call you after I do.”

  “When will you move?”

  “I haven’t found a place yet, but something will turn up.”

  “Why don’t you just stay where you are a bit longer?”

  “It costs too much.”

  I asked where he would keep his shepherds.

  He hesitated. “They’re at a friend’s house. Anyway, I should let you go.”

  I couldn’t imagine him without his dogs. Was there something he hadn’t told me? I made myself speak to keep him there. “You know,” I said, “I want to write your stories. I’ve thought about that a lot.”

  He cleared his throat again. “That would be all right. Listen, I should let you go. It’s good to hear from you. Don’t worry about me. Just give me a call if you want to talk, okay?”

  “All right,” I said. “Okay.”

  “It’s been good talking to you,” he told me, his voice superficial, as if we’d done business. He hung up before I could say good-bye, this a habit of his, to hang up quickly.

  I held the receiver until it began to beep, then put it down and just sat, emptying my mind, refusing to worry about him. I got up and went outside, and stood in the dark beneath the cooling September trees.

  For me, Quebec was no more than a list of facts: Jacques Cartier’s voyage to the Saint Lawrence in 1534, Samuel de Champlain’s trading post on the site of Quebec City in 1608, the declaration of New France as a royal colony in 1663. Gaspésie, the peninsula where my father grew up, was thought to be named for the Micmac word gespeg, “the end of the earth.”

  He’d told occasional stories of his village: on election day, men in suits arrived and gave each fisherman five dollars to let them cast a ballot in his name; or, when he was a boy, his uncle and aunt in Montreal asked to raise and educate him since they couldn’t have children. He dreamed of playing hockey in Montreal, but his father refused: “T’es un homme, pis on a besoin de toé.” You’re a man, and we need you.

  My grandfather had ten children, but he’d called my father his ace, proud of his strength and diligence. My father always knew he’d refuse to let him go. They’d stood on the shore, the sea, as I pictured it, gray as lead, the far coast hardly darker than the low cavernous sky, as if the sun were weaker in 1947, or in that part of the world.

  On the uncle’s visit, he gave my father a thin metal chain, like a necklace. My father, who was eight, tied it to a wood chip and pulled it through the sawdust on the barn floor, imagining it was a train. When it fell off, he searched, raking his fingers through the dirty sawdust even where he hadn’t been. He described how he’d looked again the next morning, the barn dark, bands of light between the boards. The hogs had begun to grunt, thinking he’d come to feed them.

  “That’s how pathetic that life was,” he explained. “That something like that could matter.”

  As I wrote these notes, I felt a vague sense of anger, a tension behind my eyes like the onset of exhaustion. Since these stories weren’t of crime, I’d given them no importance. In a restaurant, he’d offhandedly mentioned his uncle, and I’d thought little of it. But this was among the few childhood experiences he’d shared, and I let myself wonder briefly how my life might have been had he not hidden his past, had I known his family and the place he’d grown up in. As I tried to write his stories, I felt his inchoate longing as if it were my own, the regret of a missed opportunity, and I was certain that this boy’s rage was in him still. It had been his first chance to escape, though I still didn’t know what he’d left behind.

  I sat next to the window screen, the telephone on my knees.

  His breathing was barely audible. I’d told him about my plan to turn his life into a novel, but he talked about the market. He wasn’t in the mood for stories.

  “I’m pretty tired of this business. Sometimes you just get sick of things. I’m sick of working every day. It shouldn’t have to be like this.”

  “What are you thinking about doing?”

  “There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t told you. A while back I hurt myself. I took a pretty good fall off a freezer. I was trying to fix a light, and I fell on the concrete. Since then there hasn’t been much I can do. I can hardly pick anything up. I think I’ve ruined my back for good. I forget I’m not young anymore. I feel that way, but I guess I’m not.”

  I waited, but he didn’t continue.

  “You sounded pretty bad last time we talked,” I said, trying to find words for the feeling I had. “I was worried. You sounded like . . . like you didn’t want to live.”

  He was silent, and I listened for the soft motion of his breath.

  “Don’t say anything to anyone—not even to your brother or sister. I didn’t want you to know. I thought maybe you couldn’t handle it. If I tell you this, will you not tell anyone?”

  I had to swallow, lifting my chin, before I could speak.

  “All right. I won’t say anything.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you, but near the end of the summer, I decided to kill myself. I think I’d known I would for a while. I sold a few shepherds as police dogs and gave the rest away. It was the first time since the pen that I haven’t had shepherds. I don’t think I realized until then that I would do it.”

  I held my eyes closed, then blinked and stared beneath the tilted-back shade of the lamp, letting the light wash in. How had he come to this so quickly?

  “I bought heroin,” he went on. “I read in the paper that people were overdosing on China White, so I went and got some. I bought enough to fix ten people, and I took it all. It put me in a coma for more than two days. When I woke up, I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. I was blistered all over. I went to the doctor, and he told me that our bodies move when we sleep, that way the blood doesn’t settle. I guess I didn’t move. I had blisters all over my thighs. One of them covered the entire heel of my foot. I could hardly stand.”

  “Was that when I called?” I kept my voice steady, surprised at how empty my mind was, how still everything felt around me.

  “I was pretty sick,” he said. “I spent two days in complete darkness. It wasn’t like sleeping. It was like I was gone. I think I was afraid afterward. I don’t remember. I went to the doctor and told him. He put me on medication.”

  “You’re still on medication?”

  “It seems to make things a little better.”

  My throat felt dry, my chest constricted as if I wanted to cough. I asked if he was going to try again, my voice calm. I didn’t want him to think I was too weak to hear this, but I was surprised at my steadiness, that I didn’t feel more sadness, just empty, unmoored, vaguely disoriented.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice sounding far away. “I don’t know if it’s worth risking that there really is
a God.”

  “You haven’t given up on God?” I asked, hearing how I sounded more startled by this than by his talk of suicide.

  “I gave up on the Catholic Church. I don’t think God’s part of the church. Sometimes I think he has nothing to do with it.”

  “Have you been going?”

  “No. I went a couple times, but there wasn’t anything there for me.”

  “Do you think,” I said, searching for the words to make him reconsider, “do you think you can get through all this?”

  “Not without wanting to. People in my family live a long time. I don’t want to live that long, but I’m afraid to kill myself. I should have died.”

  “Isn’t there something else you can do if the store doesn’t work out? You could go on a trip or something.” Saying these words, I felt pathetic.

  “The store is 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.”

  Not a word was spoken for what felt like a minute. Against my ear, the conscious silence felt too intimate. I didn’t know how to speak to him about this.

  “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 kind of people don’t appreciate hard work.”

  “Still, you did some pretty amazing things.”

  “I don’t think you can understand. You’ve had chances I never did. If I could, I’d switch with you in a second. But I missed my chance. 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.”