by Deni Béchard
At the cemetery, we stood before the graves of Alphonse and Bernard. I considered how quickly this part of the world had changed, how a generation gap could make my father’s youngest brother the businessman he’d wanted to be. But I knew it wasn’t that simple. There would be no easy answer for why my father had chosen his life.
My uncle began telling me that I should consider staying, maybe getting a job, but when I said nothing, he let his words trail off, and we just stared at the headstones. I knew that I hadn’t yet satisfied my hunger for experience, and that soon, in his eyes, I’d resemble the brother he’d lost. In my travels, I’d come to recognize the loves I shared with my father—of chance and the pleasure of risk, of loss and solitude, and of our hungers themselves, not the need to cure them, but the joy of living with them, of the way they fill us and carry us forward. I recalled being a teenage boy, entranced by his stories of adventure. I’d sneak out at night and stand by the highway, letting the rigs pass close, their wind against my face. I wanted to find him in my own risks, to feel all that he had, to arrive at the dark edge of another life, so that, when I turned back to my own, it would shine.
My uncle and I stood within sight of the church, both of us silent. The wind from the gulf was strong, so relentless I could imagine a man going mad living and working here. Briefly, I leaned back into it and felt it hold me in place.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wrote the first draft of what would eventually become this memoir in March of 1995, when I was twenty, only three months after my father’s death. Unsure of the story I wanted to tell, I wrote it quickly, during my college’s spring break. I had yet to consider the difference between fiction and memoir, and at the time I called it a novel because I wanted to be a novelist.
During the two weeks when I hammered out the draft, I couldn’t have imagined that seventeen years of rewriting would follow. While working on another novel and numerous smaller projects, I rewrote the memoir dozens of times, convinced it would never be published, that it was a story I had to write for myself. For about ten of those years, I consciously chose to make it a novel, changing numerous details, though keeping the core facts, and when I decided to rewrite it as a memoir, I realized how the repeated telling of any story separates it from the original event and gives it a life of its own. My father, after so many decades of telling his own stories, might have experienced something akin to this, and I spent years digging through the layers, trying to reconstruct the past and find what I wanted to write.
I have often been asked if it’s all true. I describe the scenes that involve me as accurately as possible, but a memory is a work in progress, and it’s hard to know how much the ensuing years have shaped what I recall. During the editing process, the time line has occasionally shifted, and some events have been told closer to each other for the sake of continuity. This seemed favorable to adding irrelevant or repetitive detail. As for my father’s stories, he told so many that the transcripts from any given year might be in the thousands of pages. As I got older, he told them differently, revealing or possibly adding minor details to make them more interesting to me. Through his family, I have confirmed much of what he told me about his youth, though their own versions occasionally vary. Given that I became less interested in the banks he robbed than in the influence of that knowledge and those stories on me when I was young, I have not gone to great lengths to verify the numerous details of his criminal record. Furthermore, he lived and was incarcerated under several different names, not all of which I know. I have tried to obtain his criminal record in Canada, but an individual must be deceased for twenty years before it can be released. One of my late aunts told me that she had read it years before, having convinced a friend of hers in the police force to get it. She refused to say much on the subject, confirming only that my father had committed numerous crimes and been to prison several times. On the subject of his criminal record, she did say, “Il ne faisait rien à moitié.” He didn’t do anything halfway.
I also tried a more direct approach than writing to the government, and went to a police station in Quebec with his death certificate. The officers on duty told me that they most likely had nothing on file, then checked and appeared quite shocked. Though they said that there was definitely a file and that he’d done a lot, they insisted that they couldn’t share the information. Instead, they asked me several questions, as if concerned that I might be like my father. They finally said that I would have to go through the government.
Last, I have occasionally changed some of the characters’ details in order to protect their identities, and, for the sake of my brother’s and sister’s privacy, I have intentionally said little about them except where necessary.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following organizations and people for their support over the years: the Anderson Center at Tower View, the MacDowell Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Ledig House at Omi International Arts Center, the Jentel Artist Residency Program, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec; T. Wilson, Laura Stevenson, J. Birjepatil, Janice Kulyk-Keefer, Judith Thompson, Constance Rooke, Patrick Holland, Harry Lane, Ray Klein, Tracy Motz, James Arthur, Robert Olen Butler, John August Wood, Joanna Cockerline, George Grinnel, Robert Hedin, Heather Faris, Graham Moore, Arthur Moore, Joanne Cipolla, Tristan Malavoy-Racine, Kevin Lin, Leza Lowitz, Greg Foster, Julie Buisson, and Austin Lin. I would also like to thank Mark Anderson for helping translate the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics. I am grateful to my brother and sister, Marc-André and Ré Lise, for their permission to be included in the memoir, to my family in Quebec for their stories and friendship, and to my mother for decades of encouragement. I am deeply indebted to everyone at Milkweed Editions, especially Allison Wigen for so meticulously coordinating many aspects of the production, and, above all, Daniel Slager, for his enthusiasm, his constant support, and his brilliant and rigorous editorial guidance.
DENI Y. BÉCHARD was born in British Columbia to French Canadian and American parents and grew up in both Canada and the United States. He has traveled in over forty countries and done freelance reporting from northern Iraq and Afghanistan. His articles, stories, and translations have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers. His first novel, Vandal Love, won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM MILKWEED EDITIONS
Vandal Love
By Deni Y. Béchard
Winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
“Béchard has reinvented the generational novel with innovative brilliance. The book has all the quirky depth of a great HBO series and a line-to-line literary energy that is very rare. This is an enormously impressive debut by a clearly gifted writer.”
—Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
“The word ‘masterpiece’ is not to be used lightly, but one is tempted in the case of Vandal Love, for the scope of its ambition, its originality, and its muscular use of language conjure a young Faulkner, García Márquez, or Steinbeck.”
—Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World
“Vandal Love is a lyrical, generational story of a family haunted by God who is not above, but is nature—who is in the chromosomes that make for big and small, strong and weak, who is inside exquisitely cruel and hard journeys, who is the squeak of snow under boots in Québec, or a mosquitoes sweat on a bare, muscled boxer in Louisiana. Reminiscent of Proulx and Doctorow in both sweep and grace of prose, it is hard to believe that Vandal Love, so elegant and accomplished, is only Béchard’s first novel.”
—Dagoberto Gilb, Author of Woodcuts of Women: Stories
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© 2012, Text by Deni Y. Béchard
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Epigraph from the Penguin publication, The Subject Tonight is Love:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Béchard, Deni Y. (Deni Yvan), 1974–
Cures for hunger : a memoir / Deni Y. Bechard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-571-31862-6
1. Béchard, Deni Y. (Deni Yvan), 1974—Childhood and youth. 2. Authors, Canadian—21st century—Biography. 3. Fathers and sons. I. Title.
PR9199.4.B443Z46 2012
813’.6—dc23
[B]
2011041003
CIP
This book is printed on acid-free paper.