Read Online Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard - Free Book Online Page A

find a new home.
    He shone the light on the eerie shapes of drowned Christmas trees and worried that if the water didn’t go down soon, they would die. We’d had floods before, and afterward, I’d followed him along the rows as he’d pulled up yellow yearling pines, their dead roots slipping from the earth.
    â€œI’m going to lose a lot of money,” he said, peering over the edge, the oars dragging in the rowlocks.

    Then he shut off the light and we just sat, gazing along the gleaming surface to the mountains, the water still, the moon full and blazing all around us.
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    A week later, when the waters went down, my father hired a helper from a nearby farm, a young man with a fuzzy, lopsided mustache and bulging biceps who, as a boy, my mother once confided in me, had jumped from the roadside bushes to make cars swerve until he caused a grisly head-on collision. I’d spent a recess describing crushed vehicles, bodies plunging like divers through windshields and flailing over the road, beheaded and skinless, and just the sight of him now made me shiver so badly that my joints rattled.
    But rather than cause more deaths, he helped my father replace the tractor bridge. They finished at sundown and returned to the back porch and each drank a beer. My father was telling him how quickly floods could begin, that he’d seen rivers triple their size in seconds and had almost been killed like this in a Yukon mining camp.
    â€œI’d just finished my last shift and had a few days off, and there was no way I was going to stay in camp. I wanted to get out and drive into town and have some fun. But a gorge with a river in it separated the camp from the main road where our cars were parked. A wooden footbridge went across, but the snow was melting in the mountains and it was raining so hard the gorge had almost filled. There was a narrow point farther up, not too far upstream, and the water was coming through in surges. I was standing in front of the bridge. I really wanted to leave, but each surge that came through was higher. The water carried uprooted trees that almost hit the bottom of the bridge. I remember watching. I had a bad feeling. I counted the seconds between the surges. One passed, and the water shook the bridge, and then I sprinted. But halfway across I realized I’d waited too long. I heard the roar of the next surge, and I jumped just as the bridge snapped in half. My chest hit the earth, and I dug my fingers in and pulled myself up and ran, because the water was starting to come over the edge.”

    He coughed into his fist and cleared his throat. His helper bobbed his head self-consciously, then took a drink of his beer and licked his lopsided mustache.
    â€œIt was a dangerous thing to do,” my father said, a hint of anger coming into his voice, his gaze unfocused as if he were alone—“but I didn’t regret it. I hated that camp. The men there just talked about women and what they’d do when they got out. It was no different than prison.”
    Though his telling was gripping—the rising river, the shaking bridge, his bold dash across its planks as the water descended—it wasn’t this that haunted me. It was the way he’d spoken about the camp, reminding me of all that I didn’t know about him. I reran that line over and over in my head, how he said it, the intensity and anger in his words: “It was no different than prison.”
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    Beyond my window, a pale splotch in the low clouds showed where the moon hid.
    Shouting had woken me.
    â€œYou can’t go! I won’t let you!”
    My heart knocked at my ribs as he swore, his words banging about the house, thudding against the walls like one of the outside dogs gotten in and running from room to room as quickly as possible, just to see this strange inside world.
    â€œYou can’t stop me!” she shouted. Her footsteps crossed the living