Cures for Hunger (44 page)

My father's older sister showed me other photographs, the stark cabin on a barren stretch of northern coast where he was born, the shot from the water, past immense stones. And at last there were pictures from when he'd returned home, a dapper young man, his jacket pulled back at the side, hand on his hip, like a land baron posing for a portrait.

Seeing pictures of the family and clapboard house, I struggled to
connect this world to the man I'd known. My grandfather Alphonse had died years before, and my father's brother Bernard as well, but no one said much about him. There were the stories I already knew about how Alphonse had made my father and Bernard box in the living room.

“They were hard men—your grandfather, and Edwin and Bernard,” my uncle's wife told me. She suggested that I ask my uncle about Expo 67, my father's last visit. “It disturbed him,” she said. “He doesn't like to speak of it.”

After dinner I did ask, when my uncle and I were alone. He drank his beer and gave this some thought.

“I saw them start a fight. Edwin and Bernard. Not with each other, but with everyone else in the bar. It really shocked me. They'd taken me to the expo. I was dressed in my best clothes and was wearing a tie. A man accidentally spilled his drink on Edwin's arm. I just sat there. I couldn't move. I've never seen violence like that. Edwin started it, and Bernard joined him. They hit anyone who got in their way. They broke everything. They . . . they destroyed people.”

He appeared to consider this.

“You know, your father used to call me. I was pretty young then. He said he'd been in prison because he accidentally killed a man. He said he punched him and the man fell and hit his head on the edge of the sidewalk. He wasn't old enough to go to prison so he was sent to a detention center in the prairies. He told me it was boring.”

Though I didn't say it, I wondered if this story had been my father's way of justifying his absence, of making his years in prison sound accidental. It may also simply have been one of the many things for which he'd been incarcerated.

We sat quietly at the table, the rest of the family watching TV in the living room.

“How did Bernard die?” I asked.

He looked at me, his eyes impassive behind the steel frames of his glasses, as if to see who I was required not close study but simple patience.

“
Il s'est suicidé aussi,
” he said finally. “That's why we can't tell your
grandmother the truth about your father. For her to know that another of her sons took his own life would be too much. She drove everyone crazy trying to get Bernard's ashes into the cemetery.”

 

 

The next day, I had lunch with my aunt, and she told me about my father's last visit. We sat in the dining room, the afternoon cool and blustery through the open windows.

“He was driving a convertible and had on silk clothes and brought presents for everyone. Each time we talked, he laughed and said nothing was stopping him. He was going straight up. But he and your grandfather got into an argument. They'd gone for a drive in Edwin's new convertible. When they came back, your grandfather got out and spit on the floorboards. Edwin was furious. No one knew what had happened. Edwin had been his favorite. He'd been everyone's favorite. He was the one who decided he hated us. Not us. We loved him. We always wanted him to come back.”

Maybe my father blamed my grandfather for their poverty, their entire way of life. I tried to understand how my grandfather's violence could have shaped his sons. She explained the rivalry between the brothers, Edwin and Bernard, their eagerness to better the other, to win their father's admiration.

“Bernard,” she said, “used to tell us that he was lucky he'd learned to fight.
Ton grandpère
would put gloves on Edwin and Bernard, and the family watched as they fought. Bernard was a lot bigger even though he was two years younger, but Edwin was fast.
Il était malin et orgueilleux
—clever and proud. He always found a way to win.”

“What about Bernard? Tell me about his death.”

She hesitated. “He was a difficult man. He drank too much and was aggressive. He didn't have your father's charm. Edwin was easy to like, and that must have been hard for Bernard.”

She explained how between voyages as a merchant marine Bernard would occasionally show up at her door, drunk and wanting to talk.

“Once,” she said, “he told me he'd seen your father. He said he'd
found him in prison. I didn't believe him. He said Edwin was in a prison in Tacoma . . . Y
était en prison,
he said.
Chus allé aux States et je l'ai trouvé.
”

She'd not have believed anyone else, but Bernard, Edwin, and Alphonse were different. “There were men in the family like that, who could go anywhere, do anything.”

He'd described to her how he found him and told him that everyone would know he was a criminal—that he'd go back and tell
Maman.
She'd asked how long ago this was.
Plus de cinq ans,
he told her. More than five years.

My father had claimed he never had a single visit in prison. Why hadn't he mentioned this meeting with Bernard, one brother having found the other in a world of impossibility? Were there kind words between them, and did old resentments come up later? Or did Bernard arrive wanting to punish my father for his last, splendid visit home, the way he lavished the family with gifts as the others never could have done?

Tout le monde va savoir,
he'd told him. They're all going to know.

What could my father have done behind the wire mesh and Plexiglas? How did they say good-bye? And when he returned to his cell, he must have believed he could never go home.

But Bernard then told my aunt another story, a stranger one, more recent, from that year. He'd docked in Vancouver and gone to a popular market near the downtown, called Granville. He'd seen Edwin behind the counter in a fish store. Edwin had a large beard and pretended not to know Bernard. He claimed he didn't speak French. My aunt described perfectly, as Bernard had described to her, Granville Island Market and my father's shop there, even my father, with his beard, as he'd appeared those years.

But Bernard never told their mother any of what he knew. When he spoke to my aunt, it was with anger but also pity. He hadn't told the family as he'd threatened.

“It made sense,” she said, “why your father called a few times. He must have been trying to find out what we knew. He told me that things were difficult, that he didn't have much money. Normally, the family would have offered to help. He wouldn't have needed to ask. That's how we were. But we'd seen him so rich we couldn't imagine him poor. And he was too proud
to ask . . . Only now that I've seen the photos of your childhood, I understand how poor you were. We would have helped. He should have asked.”

I recalled our years in the valley, how he started businesses and worked constantly to build a life. His effort had hidden the bitterness of loss, the intention that whatever Bernard told the family would no longer matter. Was it possible that he'd gone against his nature and built that life, one so close in so many ways to his own childhood, only to prove his brother wrong?

As for Bernard, he told only my aunt. Shortly after that conversation, he called from Montreal and she answered. He asked to speak to his mother, who was at the table for dinner. He told her that he loved her and shot himself in the heart.

What had my father thought, seeing Bernard across the counter in Granville? The year our father opened the shop would have been the same that Bernard died. Maybe he believed that some things could never be fixed. Or he couldn't undo what he'd resolved through pride and strength: to disappear rather than let his family see his failure. But though Bernard was the one person who knew of his crimes, he no doubt also loved him as the rest of the family did, this his older brother, after all. Perhaps he wanted to say he'd never made true on his threat.

Even now I try to grasp this, the two suicides acted out in each other's absence, in the ignorance of the other's solitude and pain—two brothers walking past each other like strangers.

 

 

Nights, unable to sleep, I rewrote drafts of my father's story. I struggled to give it a shape that made sense, to see other versions of his life, to resolve questions that he'd left unanswered.

Gradually, I realized there were too many fabrications, too much fantasy. I found myself peeling back the fictions. I craved to see the characters clearly and wondered how much of what I was writing was true—not just my embellishments, but his own exaggerations and those of his family. There was so much chronology I could never iron out, so many jumbled facts. He often told his stories slightly differently, depending
on his mood, on whatever truth he sought in his past at that moment. From my family, I learned the word
agrémenteur,
slang for “storyteller,” a play on words:
agrémenter,
“to embellish,” and
menteur,
“liar.” I wasn't as interested in the facts behind his stories, the prisons themselves, or the police records. The memories of fictions and fantasies are as real as memories of any other experience. But still, there was so much I wished I could ask him. I tried to recall his voice through the phone, his silences so intense that I could hear each leaf's rustling fall to the frostbitten ferns outside the window.

 

 

One afternoon, my uncle and I drove along the windy coast to the southwestern edge of Gaspésie. We stopped at the old farmstead where my father had grown up, where my grandfather had been raised. A rutted dirt track rose from the main road, the overgrown land making a steep ascent to higher fields. Far below were what my uncle called
les islets,
a few weathered ridges just out from the shore, where my grandfather and his father before him had fished. My aunt had shown me the place in old photos, nets pulled up from the channel, the scattered fish a bright shade of gray among the rocks.

We walked from the farmstead, where nothing—not a sign of house or foundation or barn—remained, to the stones of an old seawall against which the steady gulf wind broke.

We drove to the nearby village of Les Méchins: ramshackle houses in a few lanes next to the stone church that had been the focus of many stories, where Curé Jean, the priest he'd hated, had preached. He died during my father's last visit, in 1967, a topic of some speculation.

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.