Cures for Hunger, page 1
Praise for Deni Ellis Béchard’s
CURES FOR HUNGER
“You haven’t read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Béchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story. Just because the end is clear doesn’t mean the bets are off.”
—MARLON JAMES, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Béchard writes that prison taught his father ‘the nature of the self, the way it can be shaped and hardened.’ As in a great novel, this darkly comic and lyrical memoir demonstrates the shaping of its author, who suffers the wreckage of his father’s life, yet manages to salvage all the beauty of its desperate freedoms. Béchard’s poetic gifts give voice to the outsiders of society, and make them glow with humanity and love.”
—ELIZABETH MCKENZIE, author of The Portable Veblen
“Béchard has created a moving story of rootlessness, rebellion, lost love, criminal daring, regret, and restless searching. Driven above all by the need to grasp his father’s secrets, he has written his narrative in skillful, resonant prose graced with a subtle tone of obsession and longing.”
—LEONARD GARDNER, author of Fat City
“This powerful and haunting memoir is a must-read for anyone who has ever struggled to uncover their identity within the shadow of a parent. Written in exquisitely sharp prose, Béchard combs through his attempt to understand his father’s mysterious existence with inspiring precision. This book is huge and achingly true.”
—CLAIRE BIDWELL SMITH, author of The Rules of Inheritance
“A coming of age story with rare and loving insights into the vulnerable hearts of men and boys—and the women that help shape them.”
—Huffington Post
“Cures for Hunger is a poignant adventure story with a mystery…. But it is also, perhaps even more so, the story of an artist coming of age. Readers will be reminded of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Béchard’s sad and moving memoir is all about secrets and regret and, ultimately, finding peace.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Cures for Hunger is flush with tenderness…. Much more than a memoir of youthful misadventure, though it contains plenty of that. It’s also an exploration of the oppression of lineage, of familial duty, wanderlust, and perennial dissatisfaction, and the most American theme of them all: personal reinvention.”
—Iowa Review
“A poignant but rigorously unsentimental account of hard-won maturity.”
—Kirkus
“A coming-of-age story of lost innocence, violence, and tenderness by a writer obsessed with the man who influenced him the most but was there the least.”
—Booklist
“Béchard’s story is one of personal discovery, and a teasing out of the function of memory: what it keeps, what it loses, and what it saves.”
—Publishers Weekly
CURES FOR HUNGER
ALSO BY DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD
Vandal Love
Of Bonobos and Men: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo
Into the Sun
CURES FOR HUNGER
a memoir
DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD
MILKWEED EDITIONS
© 2017 and 2012, Text by Deni Ellis Béchard
Originally published in hardcover, in slightly different form.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
milkweed.org
First paperback edition, published 2017 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover photo by Oskar Forsberg
17 18 19 20 21 5 4 3 2 1
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from Wells Fargo. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Béchard, Deni Ellis, 1974- author.
Title: Cures for hunger : a memoir / Deni Ellis Béchard.
Description: Minneapolis : Milkweed Editions, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017019907 (print) | LCCN 2017021648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571319807 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571313423 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Béchard, Deni Y. (Deni Yvan), 1974--Childhood and youth. | Authors, Canadian--21st century--Biography. | Fathers and sons. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Fatherhood. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Criminals & Outlaws. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.B443 (ebook) | LCC PR9199.4.B443 Z46 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019907
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Cures for Hunger was printed on acid-free 30% postconsumer-waste paper by Versa Press.
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
Contents
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
Note for the Revised Edition
Acknowledgments
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, bugging out his eyes as he 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. As the road straightened, he came up on a few cars and swerved past them with shouts of “Old goat!” 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 were flashing and bells were ringing.
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 narrow windows glaring down at us.
The truck’s tires 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 my brother had gone pale and he turned to me, his eyes so wide that I saw just how close we’d come to being crushed. “We almost died,” he said.
I glanced from him to my father, whose wild bellowing fil
✴
OUR YELLOW FARMHOUSE was on 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 intellectually disabled older sister. 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 were planted with 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 with my mother and sister. When I begged to tag along, he hesitated. “Okay. Come on,” he said.
As the two of us walked the rows, I asked him to tell me a story. He stared ahead, taking slow, deep breaths between his parted lips, as he stepped evenly, lightly over the wet, tufted earth. 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 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 me about a fat bearded woman he’d lived with before my mother. She sat on him so he couldn’t leave, but 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 before they ran 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 to the Christmas tree fields on the other side of the road. 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 pools beneath overhanging trees. He kept on and I ran to catch up.
When I took his hand, his fingers closed slightly.
“Which story?” he asked.
“About the bearded woman.”
He nodded and said, “If she’d been your mother, you’d have a beard.”
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.
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 at our side. With each few steps, another long, thin corridor appeared, descending out of sight.
Where the trees ended, a shallow, overgrown ditch separated the neighbor’s blueberry farm from our land. There was a bad smell, like an alley trash can in the city, behind one of my father’s seafood stores.
“He got some bears,” he said, and told me that our neighbor had set up bear traps. He waded into the yellow grass, crushing a path that I followed.
I stretched my neck. He’d often warned me to stay away from black 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 stink of rotten meat stronger, but he was there, between me and the bears.
“Look.” He motioned me forward.
The dense grass came up past my elbows, and I walked ahead, my heart beating faster. Two large shapes lay on the earth. One haggard carcass was just before me, its jaws open and its eye sockets hollow.
“You’re not afraid?” he asked as I measured 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 moved closer to the fanged, gaping jaws, the rotting fur like torn carpeting over the ribs. The stench made it hard to breathe.
He turned and said, “Let’s go.”
“I want to look at them.”
He chuckled. “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, and I’d imagined myself growing fangs as I stared at the full moon.
My father started walking, and I jogged after him, through the battered 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 the moon is full, 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.”
“I heard that a lot when I was a boy,” he told me, his eyes serious, maybe a little worried, as I tried to match his pace.
If he were a loup-garou, his beard would spread over his face and neck and arms. 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 expected him to say more about the loup-garou, but he just glanced over the spruces as we silently made our way back, pausing at a few old tool and fertilizer sheds that smelled of wet earth.
“See,” he said and touched one of their wooden corner posts. “Each year they’re smaller. They rot into the ground. The valley’s moisture eats up the wood.”
He turned in a circle, and then he kept on while I hurried after. I couldn’t remember him ever acting like this. We came to the ditch separating us from the road, walked along it and crossed over a large culvert.
As we followed the asphalt, I heard the low whine 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, terrified pupils, and she ran 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. He kept walking, reaching out and telling me to take 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?”
My father squeezed my hand. He then tilted his head, scrunching up his face.
“Who?” he said in a loud, ridiculous voice.
“André Béchard. Do you—”
“Oh, ’ey, dat guy. Oh yeah, I see ’im. ’E drive a big truck and ’e out drivin’ in de city.”
The men watched as he gesticulated, and it was all I could do to stand perfectly still.
“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. “Okay,” he said. He drove off.
I gazed up at my father, but he just laughed.
