Cures for Hunger (37 page)

The sense of mystery that I wrote into this new world was mine. I saw it as if through a child's eyes, each detail lit by my longing to know more. But in his words, I felt deeper emotions: the loyalty to parents, the love and rivalries of siblings, and the desire to make things your own, your own ideas and passions, your own adventures. I wrote to bring myself close to the edge of all that, seeing not just his family but my own, the place from which the road away began, and I knew that we'd been leaving since long before I was born.

My anger surprised me at times, rising suddenly as if released, giving me an animal restlessness, consuming the hours when I tried to sleep so that I finally returned to my desk.

In my notebook, I wrote the Saint Lawrence whose frigid waters I'd never fished. I wrote days at sea without having known the flash of cold when my hand strays too far on a net line, becomes nothing more than knowledge, until pressed inside my jacket as if to melt.

 

 

One of his earliest memories: he stood at the window, watching the pasture as a man crossed it toward the house and climbed the stairs. He recognized him and called to his mother, telling her that Grandpapa was there. She opened the door, but there was no one, just the empty stoop, wind blowing over the pasture. Her father lived across the Saint Lawrence, a day of sailing or a flight away, and she explained this to her son. But an hour later, she received a telegram from the village saying that her father had died.

Though my father had been born on the north shore, in a village run by a Jersey cod company, soon afterward his father had moved them back to Gaspésie, to the family farm. His mother never fully accepted the new village, telling him that he was better. She made clothes for her children and claimed that the garments in the shops were inferior.

While she maintained appearances, his father, a burly, dark-skinned man who loved a fight, had him and his brother, Bernard, put on boxing gloves and square off in the living room. “That's my ace,” my grandfather would say of my father, stoking the rivalry between the boys.

My father had done this with my brother and me as well. I was bigger, but my brother had age on his side, and after he punched me, I went berserk, flailing. When our mother commanded us to stop, my father looked stunned. I understood it now, that he was seeing the past.

Spring through fall, my father worked. He saw himself as a man and hated the winters, when the coast froze and fishing stopped. Men from the village signed on with logging companies and were flown north until spring. But my father stayed behind with the women and children. Winters were chores, feeding the animals, mucking the stalls, bringing in firewood.

On November 12, 1953, he turned fifteen. Sixteen was the legal age to sign on with the logging company, but he lied. His father let him, eager for the extra earnings.

Each hour, my father grew more anxious. Any work would be better than living trapped in the small house with his mother and siblings. He readied his bag, his work clothes, his boots. But at the landing strip, the priest stood with the recruiter. He called my father over and berated him for lying. He'd been the one to record my father's baptism in the church register, and he'd brought his birth certificate as proof.

The plane left, and my father walked along the coast, a wasteland of folded sheets of ice. He'd always hated Curé Félix Jean, who ruled the village like his own kingdom.

Locked in rage, he stared over the Saint Lawrence to the ragged horizon. He couldn't bring himself to go into the house, couldn't think of any motion or action that might satisfy him.

“I wanted so badly to get out, to leave,” he said over the phone. “That's all I could think of. I had no idea what I'd do when I was gone. I just needed to go.”

Where did such longings reside in us, passed on through blood or stories, through a father's distant gaze as he tells his son of far-off places? It seemed to me then, hearing his words, that a father's life is a boy's first story.

 

 

I woke in the dark, sensing my mind at work in my sleep.

It was only 1:00 a.m. I dressed and quietly went out along the wooded driveway to the unmarked asphalt. My breath misted as I walked. Chimney smoke rose against the moonlight, casting fleeting shadows over the road. The glittering stars seemed the source of the penetrating cold, a million points of ice.

How much had I changed since I was a boy? If I wasn't discovering something, restlessness took over. Maybe crime had been his cure for this just as writing was mine, or learning about his past, unlocking his secrets. Was everything we lived just for the thrill of being alive, of pitting all of yourself—intelligence and strength—against something so tangible and challenging that you felt yourself fully real?

The forest opened to the college grounds, silent but for my steps. I went in the campus center, turned on the hall light, and unfolded the metal chair next to the pay phone.

“Hey,” he said and accepted the call. “It's late there.”

“Yeah, I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about the stories you told me.”

“Which ones?”

“Just about your family. I still don't understand why you never went back.”

He didn't answer at first, then, in that way that made each new conversation feel like a beginning, he said, “I wanted my own life. My father was strong. He was a big man, and people respected him. He worked hard and could fight. But that's all he had. When I was sixteen and finally went to the north coast with him, I remember how he warned me. A
frozen tree could split and kill a man, or during
la drave,
the drive, when they ran logs downriver to the Saint Lawrence, men got injured. But I just wanted to work. I wanted out of the house. I didn't care.

“One night, there'd been a hard freeze and then snow, and in the morning we left camp for the river, where we'd tied a boat of supplies to the shore. On our way there, we saw a new camp of loggers. They were English. I was surprised. The English owned businesses or came as tourists, but I'd never seen them like this. There were just four of us, and they invited us to eat with them. The food shocked me. They had beef and sweet sauce and canned peaches and a kind of melon I'd never seen. We ate everything we could and even put some in our pockets. I noticed that they were laughing. I didn't understand at first. I thought they were happy, but then I realized they were making fun of us.”

He hesitated. “I'd been proud to be on the north coast, but I understood something then. I saw that others didn't respect us at all.”

Could this really be why he'd gone so far away? Respect had always been important to him, but I didn't believe he'd needed to leave his family and culture behind to become someone new.

The next morning, I would write what he told me next, the details outlandish. He and his father and the other two men continued to the river, kicking a path through fresh snow. The quiet of the north loomed from the frozen earth, palled between the trees. As if to break the silence, one of the men spat and uttered the racial epithet for the English—“
Maudites tête-carrées!
”—Damned square heads!

The trail curved along the river, the expanse sheathed in fresh ice, cleared of snow by the wind that had followed the storm, scoured blue in places. Here or there, narrow, dunelike drifts rose from the surface, like the unstrung coils of a serpent. The small boat was frozen in place, loaded with bags. They stomped on the ice. It wasn't thick but it would hold them, and they carefully emptied the boat and decided to pull it free and drag it to shore.

My father had still been thinking of change, that it would come through work, each job a step further from home and closer to a new life. He wanted to put his rage into something, to show his strength, and he grabbed hold next to his father and pulled, startled at the ease with
which the boat nearly lifted from his hands. The river rushed at his feet. No matter how he tried in the years that followed, he could never recall slipping, and even his father next to him did not see him disappear. But somehow he sensed the absence. He dropped the boat and sprinted. The shadow of his son fluttered against the blue, darkest where the wind had driven hard against the river.

The first jolt was too sudden for my father to feel. Then the cold clamped down, stars in his eyes, the air forced from his lungs. He refused to gasp and tried to make sense of what had happened. He struck the ice, but the mark was no bigger than his father's heel above him. The effort pushed him deeper, so he stopped moving, let himself skid along the belly of the ice. He wanted to breathe. Hurry up, he thought. The cold cradled him.

He knew from having seen his father drag nets and boats from the sea and wrestle an unbroken Clydesdale to the ground that the feet stamping whorls above him were not a vain attempt for the sake of conscience. His father didn't consider failure as he ran, the shadow of his boy stretched out at his feet as if it were his own. The figure below was of perfect calm, perhaps death, legs loose, palms so close to the ice that in the moment he dropped his body to strike, he could see the perfect outline of the hand, each finger.

The sky roared upward, tilted into sight. Clouds hung hard against the horizon, ink stains against the sun. His father lifted, so great the pull that buttons skittered and froze upended.

“
Réveilles-toi!
” Wake up! his father shouted and shook him to his feet. He struck him on the arms and back, pushing him to run. My father raced to the camp house, swept it, split the firewood, his clothes steaming as if a flame burned inside him. He loaded the iron stove, but when he held his hands above the griddle, his father shoved him back into motion. “
Dépêches-toi!
” he shouted.

That night, eating dinner, my father swallowed his mouthful of potato and asked what had taken his father so long. The men laughed and slapped the table.

“My ace,” his father called him and told the others that his son was charmed. But a rage lingered in my father, that he'd needed to be saved,
that he still saw his father as insufficient—strong, yes, he was known all along the south shore for strength—but this wasn't enough. He was French Canadian, trapped in this little world run by priests and owned by the English. If Anglophone loggers ate such good food, then what did the rich ones eat?

Speaking haltingly over the phone, he told the story of his near death like a tall tale, a myth of ancestral strength, and I listened, sensing his past, an absence larger than his life. The story couldn't be true. He told it like this because he was trying to make it contain the world he'd lost and the feelings he couldn't voice.

At the camp-house table, as he daydreamed, his father bragged to the others about his charmed son, the boy who'd seen the ghost of his grandfather climb the stoop and doff his hat good-bye before vanishing like a moment of bliss.

 

 

When I said good-bye, the horizon had gone pale, washed with a violet light, and in the pearling air, the vivid reds and yellows of the turned maples came into focus, as if they lay just beneath the surface of water. At the roadside, frostbitten mullein leaves clustered around dead stalks. I walked along the road, too much energy in my body—anger, sadness, guilt.

He'd spoken for hours, prompted by my questions. At times, he sounded old and dreamy, and I was unsure of his chronology, the sheer number of places he'd worked, but I rarely interrupted.

In our silences, I knew that we both asked what the point of his wild life was if not the joy of being alive, in motion, moving toward something new. And why did I need to put these pieces together, living what he had, letting myself feel that loss, the rage that makes us search out a new life, the guilt of leaving others behind? I claimed the past from him as if jealous, planning how I would write him, how I'd make him clear. Why had I refused to visit the previous summer? I couldn't go back, but I could listen for hours, finding what we shared in his words. And yet his loneliness was palpable in the way he tried to keep me there with his stories.

Work, as he described it, proved a passage out, but he did not love it. At a uranium mine, to protect his lungs, he had to drink two glasses
of milk before going underground. His first week he gulped them down, but he saw no pleasure on the tin-colored faces of the older men. Miners were paid for how much they brought up, and he ran all day, pushing the barrow along the track. He bragged that he earned twice or three times more than anyone else, but a month later, the occasional cough brought coarse, sooty phlegm into his mouth. The odor of milk was enough to make him gag. He thought back to his uncle who'd wanted to adopt him, and seeing the consequences of that loss, his rage burned, stronger even than on the day his father refused the offer. The desire for a better life ached in his gut.

He sent money home and visited at Christmas, playing floor hockey upstairs in the house with his younger brothers. When Bernard was around, he and my father struggled to speak, both still feeling the wounds of their rivalry. Their mother greeted my father with show, kissing his cheeks and telling everyone how much money he'd sent home. His youngest siblings were getting the education he hadn't.

“What's your problem?” my grandfather asked him.

“What?”

“This attitude.”

“C'est
rien.
” It's nothing, my father said, unable to dispel the distance between them, his fury and desire to leave and never return. How long would he keep working and sending his money back when they'd given him nothing?

His next job was on a skyscraper in Montreal. He liked the high wind and could even drink milk again. He made fun of those afraid of heights and ran the beams.