Cures for Hunger (43 page)

“I just liked the stories,” I told him, suddenly exhausted, unsure of what to say.

“I want you to do things better than I did. I don't want you to ruin your life. If it weren't for you, I never would have talked about that stuff again. You could have been like me, but it's not worth it.”

“I wouldn't have,” I said, trying to bring reassurance into my voice.

“You don't remember how you were. You would have.”

“But I won't,” I told him, my frustration back, tired now, a feeling like surrender.

“Okay. Well, don't worry about me. I'll deal with the store. I'll deal with all that.”

“You're not going to let it go?” I asked, knowing he would, my body beginning to ache, ribs and throat sore, the pressure of sadness against my chest, the way even the premonition of grief bruised, so that the injury would seem to have always been there, just beneath the skin.

“I don't know,” he replied, his voice hoarse. “I'll deal with it.”

The connection crackled as lightning jarred the sky.

“Is there a storm out there?” he asked.

“It's the first lightning I've seen in months. I doubt we'll get much more.”

“You shouldn't be on the phone. You might get shocked.”

“I'll be fine.”

The rain began to fall harder.

“Do you want to call me back in a couple of days?”

“These next two weeks are going to be crazy. I have finals. We can talk for a while now.”

Raindrops pattered over the booth's windows as headlights passed on the road.

He was silent, then offered, “We could get a cabin up in Squamish. I meant it, what I said before. We could do a little fishing, and I could tell stories.”

“You know I can't. I don't even like to fish anymore.”

He spoke softly. “It was never about the fishing. It was about being in the mountains. It's just nice to be on the rivers. Sometimes you don't catch anything.”

“I know.”

“But you can't take a little time off?”

“Not right now,” I said, my own anger rising, as if all that couldn't be said, held within me, had turned into rage.

The rain had become loud, sleet and the occasional hail rattling the panels of the booth. The line hissed and cut out, and when his voice returned, it echoed.

“Is the storm bad?”

“Yeah,” I told him.

“You know, if you're ever going to write this stuff, you'd have to write it the way it was. I'd like that. It's not that I'm proud of having been a criminal. I'm not. I'd have given it all up to watch you guys grow up.”

The line crackled again, and I said nothing. I couldn't tell him that in his heart he'd never stopped being a criminal, never given up that destruction and let himself just be a father or an ordinary man. He spoke, and I tried to silence my thoughts and listen.

“But crime,” he said, “crime wasn't always good. I didn't rob because it excited me. It wasn't something I even wanted to do at first. I knew if I did it, I'd survive. What's strange is I never thought about what happened to people when I wasn't there, other than maybe my family. But you know, later, I felt bad for that guy in the jewelry store. I wished I hadn't gone in there. In the paper he said I was over six feet tall and had black hair and eyes. He said I was the coldest-looking bastard he'd ever seen. I had to think about that. It's one thing to rob a place, but it's another to hear the person you robbed telling how one time the place was held up when his little girl was in there, and how he didn't want to give up on his business because of criminals. I can't remember everything he said about us, but we laughed when we read it. Later, I wondered what he felt like, if he would shoot the next person who tried to rob him or die over a bag of rings.”

Thunder banged through the earth. He sighed, speaking softly, and I had to focus to hear him.

“When I gave up crime, fish was the only other thing I knew. I wanted to have a family.”

The wind slammed down, hail rattling off the top of the booth and drowning his voice. Cars pulled off the road, hazard lights flashing. The line was breaking up, and he repeated something I couldn't understand. Water streamed through the corners of the panels. I yelled that I'd call him back later, but suddenly the hail and wind subsided into the crackle of static. I stared through the wet glass into darkness and passing headlights, and for some reason I recalled the working of his hands, the night at the reservoir, as we stood above the shore and he rethreaded the line on the fishing rod. He reached into the truck window, and the headlights came on, and he went to stand before them. His hands moved in the beam, scars across their knuckles, the blunt fingertips pinching and pulling.

I closed my eyes. We were silent, as if waiting through that lull, no rain or wind, as if gravity had lapsed.

“I wanted to see you grow up,” he said. “Your mother was good with you guys. She treated you really well. I'm sorry things didn't work out the way they were supposed to.”

His voice was different, softer, and he spoke quickly now. “You know, I was there to deliver you. I'll never forget. You were born at home, but you had the umbilical cord around your neck. I had to blow into your mouth and press your chest until you started breathing. When I held you, you lay across my hands. I knew we'd be the closest. I always felt there was something special because of how I held you when you started breathing.”

The storm was building and fading, striking at the windows. The line gasped with static. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the slow, strange working of his hands again, the fishing line invisible in the dark and against the light.

“You're not going to come see me, are you?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I told him too quickly, instantly wishing I'd taken the time to consider. “Not right now.”

“I know. What you're doing is right. I'm glad you're strong. I've ruined my life, and you should . . . you should focus on yours. But you'll be okay?”

“Okay?” I repeated.

“Are you sure you can deal with it?”

I didn't speak, and as we listened to the breaking static, I thought of what I could tell him, what emotion I could give voice to that wasn't strength.

“Will you be okay?” he asked.

“It's . . . it's your choice. I can't ask you not to.”

“You can deal with it?”

“Yeah, I'll be okay.”

“It's what's best,” he said.

Sleet pattered across the panels, making his voice distant. I shivered, realizing how cold I was.

“When I'm dead,” he told me, “you can contact my family. My mother's name is Yvonne. I'm sure she's still alive. I'd know if she was dead.” He was quiet a long time. “She lives in a place called Matane, in Quebec.”

“Matane,” I repeated.

“Promise me you won't try to find her while I'm still alive.”

“I promise.”

“If you contact her, tell her you're Edwin's son.”

“Edwin?”

“That's what they called me. She's the one I miss. I wish I could see her one more time. I lied to her a lot, and then I stopped writing. I used to send her postcards saying I was in Mexico or on my way to Alaska. One time, when I was logging, I saw a guy get crushed under a tree. He cried and called for his mother. I didn't understand.”

Neither of us spoke, and I tried to think of what I could say, how I could talk to him differently, in a way that would change all this.

“There was a time,” he said, “when I could've gone back, when you guys were little. But it's too late now. How would I explain everything? I have nothing to show.”

I stared through the dirty glass of the phone booth, at the smear of headlights above the road. Something fell in the static behind his voice.

“Listen, I should go. I should go,” he said. “It's late. You should get some sleep.”

He said good-bye and hung up before I could speak.

I got in my truck and pulled onto the road, taking my time going up the mountain, rain gusting past the headlights. My mind was silent. I turned into my driveway and parked and went inside to my apartment.

I sat and touched my face to my hands, my elbows to my knees, and breathed.

EPILOGUE

That spring a public accountant in Vancouver called to explain that my father had owed tens of thousands in back taxes and the government would confiscate and auction what they could, which wasn't much—two wristwatches. A month later I received the rest, a small box of photographs with
Air Mail, Par Avion
stickers on it, the customs slip stating
No Value.
Inside were pictures held by blue rubber bands: photographs of our family and of himself. These were all he had while he sat in the single chair in his house, telling me his stories.

My favorites were those of him, the flash of superiority in his dark eyes, his bold stance before the camera. One showed him young, leaning on the tailgate of an old pickup, heel cocked against the hitch, his lean brown body taut as he laughed. Another had him holding a baby. His arms bulged and the baby cried. Behind him, a German shepherd looked out the window, its dark nose invisible against the black glass. And then, years later, he posed before a decorated Christmas tree, his beard shaved to a mustache, his face lined. He wore a gray sports jacket and a white shirt. His jaw was lifted, with an expression of Old World pride, a look that said to the photographer, This is the shot you want.

That year and the next, silence hummed within me. I burned my old writing, all except the notes from our conversations. I wanted stillness, lightness—as if by losing everything, I could, if only briefly, feel complete. I wrote and studied, trying to compose him in a novel. In my need to write, I recognized his longing to speak—the urgency of his telling, to make us understand each other and bring us to a place of forgiveness. I wanted to know what in him had been capable of leading his life, just as he'd been
trying to understand the life he'd lived, and the simpler one he'd wanted but been incapable of. The more I wrote, the more I became clear, my words, my way of telling a story, the further he receded. He eluded me—the landscape of his youth, the people who'd helped create him.

Gradually, after two and a half years, the silence subsided. I began to read in French often and dreamed in it as I had years before. Memories returned, forgotten emotions in the sounds, the language and culture I'd taken for granted. I'd say
foulard
and within the word was a flash of cold and the bliss of a parent who knelt to tie my scarf and fit it into my jacket. It didn't seem like him, but as I read, the sound of words remembered for me: my grammar book with the ducks on the cover, the exercises we repeated:
je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes.

I wrote the letter, saying that I was the son of Edwin, the name a stranger to my pen:

 

Je sais que vous ne me connaissez pas et que le contenu de cette lettre va être surprenant et même parfois difficile à
lire . . .

 

 

A week later, a man called, his gravelly voice so familiar that I had a moment of confusion, the impression of dreaming, of a night conversation from two years before. He told me that he was my uncle, and we spoke about my father and the family, their happiness that I'd written, the questions they had. When I explained how my father died, he asked that I not share this with my grandmother. She was past ninety and, though strong, deeply religious; the news would be devastating. I agreed to say he'd died of cancer.

I set out for Quebec, driving through Maine and into New Brunswick, then north toward the Saint Lawrence, into a rolling landscape of weathered stone. Late August showers blew through, dark patches in an otherwise clear sky. The landscape revealed little about its inhabitants: scant villages, Lac-des-Aigles or Saint-Esprit, hardly more than a gas station, convenience store, and a few houses lining the road. The land climbed
until the horizon dropped and far below, the Saint Lawrence extended like a plain of stone.

The fear I'd been harboring—that I'd discover a family of thugs—was quickly dispelled. I met my uncle first, the youngest sibling. He'd been a boy when my father left. He was my height, well dressed, wearing glasses, his eyes and hair dark, hints of my father in his jaw, though otherwise a very different man, as I would learn—gentler, kinder. He was a successful businessman and introduced me to the family. From time to time, he paused to say how happy he was, that they'd never known what happened to my father.

“
On est bien content que tu nous as écrit. On n'avait pas de nouvelles d'Edwin.
”

My grandmother was ninety and lived in her own apartment. When I entered the room, her gaze didn't leave me, searching my face even as she stepped quickly past the others. Her green eyes focused through her glasses. She gripped my arm and studied me.

“
Mon dieu, mon dieu,
” she uttered and said I looked like my father—“
comme il a l'air d'Edwin.
”

The next four days were visit upon visit, conversations that lasted into the morning, tears and questions. The family hadn't seen him since 1967, exactly thirty years, and the last time he'd called was around 1973. They remembered him saying that my brother had been born. A large framed photo of my father had stood on my grandmother's television for decades.

I asked her what he was like as a child, and she gave this some thought.

“He didn't cry,” she said, “and he was the only one who didn't sing when he worked.”